kitakule wrote:Auroni, could you post the breakdown of the African literature in this set? I can't remember any content other than the South African lit bonus. I know there usually isn't that much African lit in quizbowl tournaments, but this one seemed to have even less than usual.
These were the "pure" world literature (ie, not including the bonus on extremely short stories that had Kawabata as its easy part) questions in the set (African literature bolded):
The speaker of a poem in this language asks that, only when you reclaim your soul, “which was left entangled / In all the bedrooms,” should you ask her to be chaste. The speaker snips colorless blossoms out of the wind to appease a fussy woman in a meadow in a poem written in this language titled “Airflower,” which appears in a 1938 volume alongside a poem that includes its subject in a “vast and holy symphony / Of old mothers” stretching back to “Ana, Isabel, Leah and Rachel.” The same year, a poet who wrote “You Want Me White” in this language (*) waded into the ocean until she drowned. Twentieth century female poets writing in this language include Alfonsina Storni and an author who declared: “From the icy niche where men placed you / I lower your body to the sunny, poor earth,” in a poem about her lover’s suicide, the first of her three “Sonnets of Death.” For 10 points, name this language used by Gabriela Mistral, a poet from Chile.
ANSWER: Spanish [or Español]
<AG, Poetry>
The narrator of a novel by this author covers the nose and mouth of a screaming woman during a fraught river crossing, but ends up drowning her. A woman is inspired to paint a cockfight-watching drunkard after numerous sessions sitting as a nude model for the artist Catherine, at the end of a story by this author. In another story by her, a boy reads lines from a play about revolutionaries over the corpse of his father, who had leapt to his death from a hot air balloon. Sebastien Onius is separated from his lover (*) Annabelle Desir in a novel by this author of “A Wall of Fire Rising.” The protagonist of her best-known novel impales herself on a spice-pestle to thwart her mother Martine’s repeated testing of her virginity. At the end of that novel by this author, Sophie Caco attacks stalks in the cane field where her mother had been raped by a Tonton Macoute. For 10 points, name this author whose books The Farming of Bones, Krik? Krak!, and Breath, Eyes, Memory contend with the violent history of her native Haiti.
ANSWER: Edwidge Danticat
<AG, Long Fiction>
This novel's first sequel opens with a story in which a "brown ant" avoids the web of a spider it "had known for eons." That sequel to this novel describes the formation of a "mosquito fleet" and follows four men chosen to participate in the "Wallbreaker Project." This novel itself describes a raid on a ship called Judgment Day, which kills the eccentric Mike Evans. After describing how Norbert Weiner dies while fighting pirates, John von Neumann makes a “human computer” for an emperor; that happens ‘cause it’s a game, and Neumann is an avatar who teaches the protagonist about a civilization that "dehydrates" itself so it can survive (*) "chaotic eras." The Dark Forest is the first sequel to this novel, which opens its author's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The Trisolarans begin their invasion of Earth in this novel, whose setting shifts from the Cultural Revolution to modern Beijing. For 10 points, name this novel by Cixin Liu, the first Chinese winner of the Hugo Award.
ANSWER: The Three Body Problem [or Three Body; or San ti]
<IJ, Long Fiction>
In 2016, Maureen Freeley published her translation of a novel written in this language, about the friendship between a man studying soap manufacturing and a feminist artist, with the title Madonna in a Fur Coat. It’s not Russian, but the best known of the mid-twentieth century “village novels” written in this language ends with the title outlaw audaciously riding up to the house of his tyrannical goat-bearded landlord and shooting him dead. In a novel written in this language, the protagonist collects thousands of cigarette butts discarded by his lover, whom he had met when she (*) sold him a counterfeit handbag, as objects to be exhibited in the title location. That author who wrote in this language described a massacre at a theater that erupts into a coup d’etat in the town of Kars, where the poet Ka investigates a spate of suicides among headscarf-wearing girls. For 10 points, name this language used to write the novels Memed, My Hawk and Snow, by the authors Yasar Kemal and Orhan Pamuk.
ANSWER: Turkish [or Türkçe]
<AG, Long Fiction>
In a play written in this language, a minister gets his king to focus on a military campaign by spreading a false rumor that his queen had died in a fire. Near the end of a play in this language, the swords of two executioners miraculously fail to harm the protagonist. Traditional plays in this language were performed in either oblong, square, or triangular-shaped playhouses. An eight to twelve line benediction is recited before the stage-manager sets the scene in archetypal plays written in this language, such as one which begins with the king’s hunting (*) chariot trespassing on a holy grove. A play written in this language is titled for a minor episode in which a courtesan hands a boy some jewels to purchase a golden replacement for a little clay cart. In the best-known play written in this language, the belly of a fish is found to contain a signet ring through which a king remembers his wife, who had been cursed by a sage. For 10 points, Kalidasa wrote The Recognition of Shakuntala in what Classical Indian language?
ANSWER: Sanskrit
<AG, Drama>
A boy climbs up a walnut tree and shakes the branches to feed seven of these people while eating nothing himself. One of these people arrives at a diabetic merchant’s house just in time to stop him from beating his slave girl. A cautionary tale about a weaver who dies trying to imitate a mountebank by jumping off a high wall, is told to a man victimized by one of these people and his monkey. After a group of these people murder a man and quarter his body, a tailor is hired to stitch the pieces back together. Two of these people (*) mark a house’s front door and chip out a chunk from its front steps, but are foiled when all other houses are defaced similarly. After pouring boiling oil on several of these people hiding in jars, Morgiana performs a sword dance at a dinner so that she can plunge a dagger into the heart of their leader. These people store their treasure in a cave that opens when the words “Open Sesame” are said. For 10 points, name these criminals, forty of whom harass Ali Baba in a tale from the Arabian Nights.
ANSWER: thieves [accept word forms; accept synonyms]
<AG, Short Fiction/Miscellaneous>
Many poems from this present-day country interweave earlier poems without attribution in the “allusive variation” technique. Poets from this country collected lists of place names that they could instantly invoke to create a web of emotions and associations. Two- or three- measure punning or metaphorical introductions known as “preface phrases” open several poems from this country. Participants were divided into left and right groups, and submitted lyrics on pre-announced themes, in poetry contests from this country. An anthology whose name means Collection of (*) Ten Thousand Leaves, dating to the mid-eighth century, is this country’s oldest book of poetry. In a popular format from this country, two or more poets alternated writing up to a hundred verses. A form of poetry from this country contains a seasonal reference, a transitional “cutting word,” and seventeen morae, arranged 5-7-5. For 10 points, name this country of origin of the renga and haiku.
ANSWER: Japan [or Nippon-koku; or Nihon-koku]
<AG, Poetry>
A character in a novel by this author declines to write his proposed modern-day Don Quixote, in which a mystery novel junkie sets out to solve real crimes, because “I am not Cervantes… and I am very lazy.” In another novel by this author, a woman spends the final eighty years of her life locked in an attic with her father’s severed head. In that novel by this author, a woman ends her incestuous relationship with her father by killing him and burning down their mansion to commit suicide. The protagonist of a novel by him insults a post office worker for refusing to give him back the letter he had mailed to the estancia of (*) Hunter. In a novel by this author, a madman records his delusion that the visually impaired control the world in his “Report on the Blind.” After noticing the detail of a solitary woman at a window in a painting, Maria Iribarne is stalked and killed by the artist, Juan Pablo Castel, in this author’s short first novel. For 10 points, name this Argentine writer of the novels On Heroes and Tombs and The Tunnel.
ANSWER: Ernesto Sabato
<AG, Long Fiction>
A character in this novel warns against confusing businessmen, who buy at ten and sell at twelve, with mathematicians, who are paralyzed by the “beauty of numbers.” Patrick French’s biography of the author takes its title from this novel’s first line, which reads: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” A character in this novel honors his mother, who had been a hotel maid, by forming a Madonna cult around her. For sacrilegiously collecting religious masks, the Belgian priest Father (*) Huismans is murdered in this novel’s first section. The protagonist of this novel beats his mistress Yvette, the wife of the European professor Raymond. In this novel, the commissioner Ferdinand repays the protagonist for helping him get an education by securing his release from prison and directing him aboard a steamer leaving the country. For 10 points, name this novel about Salim, a shopkeeper in an African country run by the “Big Man,” written by V.S. Naipaul.
ANSWER: A Bend in the River
<AG, Long Fiction>
At the end of a poem of this type, the poet acknowledges that the universe has rewarded him for his craft with a “marriage to the Pleiades.” Poems of this type about “of the terrible presence,” “of the unforeseen love,” “of the dark death,” and “of the dead child” were penned by Garcia Lorca. In his collections Ravishing Disunities and Call Me Ishmael Tonight, Kashmiri-born poet Agha Shahid Ali popularized this form among English-speaking poets. Traditionally, these poems range from five to fifteen strictly rhyming couplets, the last of which obliquely mentions the author. This form evolved from the panegyric qasida in (*) eighth century Arabia. The preeminent author of these poems is buried in an oft-visited tomb in Shiraz, and adopted a pen name referring to his ability to recite Quran by heart. Hafez predominantly wrote in, for 10 points, what omnipresent form in Indian, Arabic, and Persian poetry and music?
ANSWER: ghazals [or gacelas; accept answers that have the same consonants, but drop the vowels]
<AG, Poetry>
This author wrote that “the land wreathes in rhythm / with your soul, caressed by history / and cruel geography,” in his poem “Had Death Not Had Me in Tears.” For 10 points each:
[10] Name this Ghanaian author of the collection The Promise of Hope and the poetic novel This Earth My Brother, who was killed in the 2013 Westgate shopping mall attack while attending a literary festival in Nairobi.
ANSWER: Kofi Awoonor [or George Awoonor-Williams; or Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor]
[10] Awoonor was among the writers whose career was kickstarted by the pan-African literary magazine Black Orpheus, which was edited by this Nigerian playwright of Death and the King’s Horseman.
ANSWER: Wole Soyinka [or Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka]
[10] Awoonor’s collection The House by the Sea draws from this kind of experience, which also informed Soyinka’s memoir The Man Died. Ngugi wa Thiongo underwent this experience as a direct result of his play I Will Marry When I Want.
ANSWER: imprisonment [or being in jail; or detention; or incarceration; accept other synonyms]
<AG, Poetry>
In a story by this author, a craftsman designs a sofa with space for a person to crawl inside, and creepily delights in the comfort of the women who sit on him. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this author of disturbing mystery stories such as “The Human Chair” and “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill.” He rendered the name of an American author into his native language for his nom de plume.
ANSWER: Edogawa Ranpo [or Edogawa Rampo; or Taro Hirai]
[10] Many of Ranpo’s stories star the private detective Kogoro Akechi, who uses kids from the “Boy Detectives Club” to solve crimes, in an obvious nod to the Baker Street Irregulars that assist this private eye, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet.
ANSWER: Sherlock Holmes
[10] Ranpo wrote a story in which a boy inventor traps himself in a figurative one of these places consisting of a ball lined with illuminated mirrors. In another fucked up Japanese story, Yoshihide can only finish his painting of this place after watching his daughter burn to death.
ANSWER: hell [or jigoku; accept “The Hell of Mirrors”; accept “Hell Screen”]
<AG, Short Fiction/Miscellaneous>
Bonaparte Blenkins abuses his position at one of these places until he is caught having sex with the owner’s niece, whereupon a barrel of salt meat is dropped on his head. For 10 points each:
[10] Identify this sort of location, where a corpse of a black man turns up at the start of Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist. A pioneering feminist, postcolonial novel by Olive Schreiner is set at one of these places.
ANSWER: a South African farm
[10] James Jarvis, the owner of a massive farm overlooking the village of Ndotsheni, forgives Absalom Kumalo for killing his son Arthur, in this South African author’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country.
ANSWER: Alan Paton
[10] Circumstances such as the return of his shell-shocked son Louis from the Border War in Angola compel Martin Mynhardt to sell their family’s drought-stricken farm, in this Booker-shortlisted English-language novel by Andre Brink.
ANSWER: Rumours of Rain
<AG, Long Fiction>
Blank verse was introduced to poetry in this language by the author of The Saga of Meghnad’s Killing, a poet who changed his name to “Michael” after marrying an Englishwoman. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this Asian language which underwent a literary renaissance during nineteenth and early twentieth century. A poet who wrote in this language, named Nazrul [nuz-“RULE”], declared that “I am a burning volcano in the bosom of the earth” in his fiery political poem “The Rebel.”
ANSWER: Bengali [or Bangla]
[10] The dean of Bengali letters is this polymath and author of Gitanjali, who renounced his knighthood in protest of the Amritsar massacre.
ANSWER: Rabindranath Tagore [or Rabindranath Thakur; or Gurudev]
[10] This ethnically Bengali poet, nicknamed the “nightingale of India” for her politically-conscious poetry, collected her exclusively-English language verse in volumes such as The Golden Threshold. She also served as the first female Indian governor and second female president of the Congress party.
ANSWER: Sarojini Naidu [or Sarojini Chattopadhyay]
<AG, Poetry>
In this play, a physician tries to smuggle the title character out of the imperial palace in his medicine chest, but is discovered by General Han Jue, who compassionately allows him to pass. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this play by Yuan dynasty dramatist Ji Junxiang, whose title character avenges the mass slaughter of his family at the hands of General Tu’an Gu. This was the first Chinese play to be translated into a European language.
ANSWER: The Orphan of Zhao [or Zhaoshi gu’er]
[10] The Orphan of Zhao belongs to the zaju genre of variety theater, which today is mainly performed as this art form. Performers of the “Peking” type of this art form wear colorful costumes, are trained in dance, combat, and pantomime, and don’t always sing, unlike their western counterparts.
ANSWER: Chinese opera [or xiqu]
[10] In a Yuan-era zaju play by Li Qianfu, Hai-tang proves her parentage of Shoulang by refusing to pull him out of one of these constructs. In a modern adaptation of that play, Azdak determines Grusha to be the true mother of Michael by having him be placed inside one of these things on a courtroom floor.
ANSWER: a chalk circle [or huilan ji; or kreidekreis; prompt on circle by asking: “made of what?”]
<AG, Drama>
The narrator frequents a pet shop filled with animals terrified of the sniper fire and street battles going on outside, in Ghada Samman’s novel titled for this city’s Nightmares. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this war-torn city where the shut-in septuagenarian Aaliya Saleh translates novels such as Austerlitz, in Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman. Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter, the first Arabic-language novel to feature a homosexual protagonist, is set in this city.
ANSWER: Beirut
[10] Lamia Ziade depicted the violence in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War in her autobiographical novel Bye Bye Babylon, which has this format. A fourteen-year old girl is sent to a boarding school in Austria to escape a similarly ruinous conflict at the end of part one of an autobiography of this type.
ANSWER: graphic novel [or comic book; the other book is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis]
[10] This Lebanese author set his novel The Broken Wings during turn of the century Beirut, well before the civil war. He is better known for his new-agey book The Prophet.
ANSWER: Khalil Gibran [or Khalil Jubran]
<AG, Long Fiction>
A man who hallucinates being followed by these “constant, infallible” objects spreads his delusion to a young woman who goes insane and covers all of these items in her home, in a story from the collection The Maker. For 10 points each:
[10] Name these objects, a “shifting” example of which appears in the subtitle of the book being reviewed in the story “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.” Another story by the same author begins with its narrator crediting a discovery “to the conjunction” of one of these objects “and an encyclopedia.”
ANSWER: a mirror [or un espejo]
[10] The saying “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind” propels the plot of this story, in which a secret society is revealed to have fabricated the existence of a planet where people create objects through sheer force of imagination.
ANSWER: “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
[10] Mirrors are a recurring symbol of existential horror in the corpus of this blind Argentine author, who printed the story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in his collection Ficciones.
ANSWER: Jorge Luis Borges [or Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo]
<AG, Short Fiction/Miscellaneous>
I believe this to be the correct amount of sustainable world lit material for a tournament of this difficulty. I probably should have written an additional African literature tossup, and I'm sorry for not having done so. I think what happened is that I placed additional emphasis on Arabic literature (a thoroughly neglected tradition in quizbowl) while not realizing that I was sapping away from the neighboring continent.