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Titaua Peu is a Tahitian author known for her politically charged, realistic portrayal of the effects of colonialism on contemporary Polynesia. Peu’s first novel, Mutismes, was published in 2003, making her the youngest-ever published Tahitian author at age twenty-eight. Pina was awarded the 2017 Eugène Dabit Prize, a first for Polynesian literature. She currently lives in Tahiti where she serves as the general manager of the municipality of Paea. Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French, including books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and he was awarded the French Voices Grand Prize for his translation of Pina. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His essays can be found in places like Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
Praise for Pina: This evocative and layered story is a treat. -Publishers Weekly A scalding corrective to the romantic Western view of French Polynesia written with authority, urgency, and compassion -Kirkus Reviews Peu evokes Tahiti with rough, unsentimental grace; Jeffrey Zuckerman, who has translated writing by French speakers from across the globe, translates chatty prose with force and fluidity. Pina itself is a fluid, sprawling novel, telling the freewheeling story of a Tahitian family whose 'fates go any which way, barely any detail in common.' -Lily Meyer, NPR, Books in Translation [A] dark family saga about the effects of colonialism on one family and the nation they live in. -Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews [T]he worst horrors, award-winning author Peu exposes in her English debut, belong to colonialism .... 'Forging a voice in English that feels true to Titaua Peu's rough-hewn, oral, humane prose,' writes translator Zuckerman, was certainly a multilayered accomplishment of careful understanding and empathic respect. Bearing witness seems a minimal obligation for global readers. -Terry Hong, Booklist Titaua Peu's Pina translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, out recently from Restless Books, is an extraordinary novel that brings to mind the fiction of Emile Zola, depicting dehumanization in a highly nuanced social setting, and with a lush naturalist eye. And although the book is written in French, it is infused at the same time with a syntax and vocabulary and style that derives from the Polynesian dialect spoken in Tahiti. And it will almost certainly be the first work of Tahitian literature you've ever read. -Dan Simon, Publisher of Seven Stories Press There are novels which crack like gunshots. Those of Titaua Peu mark a revolution in the literature of the Pacific. With Pina, it is the other face of Tahiti that appears; that of a society ravaged by cultural uprooting, worn down by misery and colonialism. -Mediapart Titaua Peu reappropriates words long monopolized by Europeans and returns them to their place in the natural part of Polynesian heritage. -Christine Chemeau, Le Monde Diplomatique The novelist seizes the reader with her fiery prose, serving her whirlwind story about the crossing paths of many different characters. -Telerama
