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.

Last month, Song gave a lecture on the book at the International School of Tongji University in Shanghai, presenting an overview of the 16 chapters, each of which covered five books associated with a specific location.

"Professor Damrosch tried to avoid books that are either famous or popular with contemporary readers to present a collection of stories from all over the world."

Starting with Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Damrosch took readers to London, listing books such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Arnold Bennett's Riceyman Steps, then to destinations like Krakow in Poland and Kolkata in India, as well as Beijing and Shanghai, where he covered novels old and new, from Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West to Nobel laureate Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.

At the launch of the Chinese edition of Around the World in 80 Books on April 23, which was World Book Day, Professor Yan Feng of Fudan University said that Damrosch had drawn a nautical map for readers voyaging across the ocean of literature. "It encourages everyone to embark on their own literary adventure. Today, in a world full of strife, isolation and barriers, literature, which seems virtual and intangible, offers an initiative to rebuild connections between people."

According to Song, the Chinese edition has sold more than 20,000 copies since it came out in April. Next month, it will be a highlight of the 20th Shanghai Book Fair. The Shanghai Translation Publishing House plans to host a pavilion featuring a selection of 80 new titles from all over the world.