TUMBY BAY, SA – This anthology by Eastern Highlands author Baka Bina is partly experimental in that it presents a range of short stories in English with an accompanying Tok Pisin translation - a schema that Baka calls tukopi (two copy.

The experiment is to find a practical bridge between the two languages, the creole and its progenitor, that enhances the appeal of the story.

With each story, Baka invites the reader to consider how successful or otherwise the schema works.

Modern literature in PNG is decidedly youthful and is rife with experimentation as authors seek to establish a unique foundation sitting somewhere between old oral traditions and modern western traditions.

If you bear this in mind when reading the stories, they make for a fascinating collection.

To get into the right frame of mind you might like to begin with the seventh story in the collection, ‘Africa and the Masalais at Nonohuloto’.

This story is a fine allegory of what can happen when attempts are made to blend two cultural concepts that don’t really fit neatly together.

In the story, Baka is thinking about submitting to the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize but his entry still needs a bit of work on the grammar of the English version.

As Baka and many others, me included, will attest, this is not as simple a task as it may sound.

I should point out my affiliation with the Commonwealth Foundation which conducts the competition from which Baka’s stories are derived.

In November 2021 the Commonwealth Foundation contacted Keith Jackson to thank him for spreading the word about their short story prize through PNG Attitude and to seek assistance in an assessment of three stories that were written in Tok Pisin.

Although the contest had been receiving 20 or so stories from PNG each year, 2021 was the first year it had received entries in Tok Pisin.

The Foundation wanted someone to read these stories, to write a brief report on their worth and the quality of the writing and to recommend whether or not the stories should be translated into English.

Keith asked me if I wanted to do this and, recognising an opportunity to promote Papua New Guinean writing, I agreed to do the assessment.

I think I recommended two of the stories and provided their English translations.

And each following year I carried out similar assessments and translations for the competition’s Tok Pisin entries.

When the Tok Pisin stories arrived for assessment, the writers were not identified, and nor was their gender.

To be candid, however, I recognised some of the writers by their style having earlier read their work as part of my judging of entries in PNG’s annual Crocodile Prize for Literature.

Some of the entries arrived in both Tok Pisin and English. While I understood the wonderful dynamism of Tok Pisin, and its regional and even tribal variations, I wasn’t prepared for the way the language adapts so animatedly in translation.

The practical effect of this was the time it took to adjust the way I read it.

As Baka writes in a note to the collection, sometimes you have to slow down and think hard about what you are reading, there being (so far as I know) no standard orthography for Tok Pisin into English.

Often, dazzling stories in Tok Pisin lost meaning, nuance, concept, humour and flavour when rendered into English in a literal translation.

This is understandable when it’s considered the translations were made by authors whose first language was Tok Pisin or Ples Tok (PNG has about 850 regional languages) and whose command of English was subordinate.

Another consideration is the way Papua New Guineans speak and write English, which can be quite different to the way it is spoken and written in Australia or England.

On several occasions the writers’ English translations confused the people at the Commonwealth Foundation.

The experience made me wonder about the utility of submitting stories in two languages because, ultimately, it was only the English version that would be judged.

A brilliant story in Tok Pisin translated into poor English was not going to make it to judgement and probably never make it into print.

This hazard underlines the value of Baka Bina’s ‘Resis long KSSP’, where stories have undergone careful translation to capture not just their narrative but also their spirit, mood and abstractions.

The collection implicitly offers guidelines for Papua New Guinean authors and should be a source of delight for readers.

Much of Baka’s writing is about social and personal issues peculiar to his own Highlands culture and society.

There are eight stories in the anthology and the first, ‘Hanging Balls’, is about a man afflicted with lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis, affecting his testicles.

Elephantiasis, a condition common in tropical climates, is caused by parasitic worms spread by mosquitos.

In this story, the afflicted man believes he is a victim of sorcery and he’s been consulting village shamans (sorcerers) rather than go to an aid post for medicine. His wife believes the man caught the condition from women on the coast.

The story is related through conversations between the man, his wife and a friend. When the friend brings out a knife he’s intending to use to castrate a young pig, the man hides in his house.

Another story, ‘What Happened to Ma?’, is about the secrecy surrounding menstruation. Male children are kept completely in the dark about this natural cycle of life and the story is narrated by Ma’s son.

Ma has isolated herself in her garden away from the village. When the children go to the garden to collect some vegetables they come across bloodied leaves. Her son concludes that something wicked has happened to her.

The people at the Commonwealth Foundation had difficulty understanding the story and sent it to me for clarification. The story was perfectly plain in the Tok Pisin version but not so clear in the English translation they were reading. A similar problem occurred with the story, ‘Marretta with Kaukau – Heaven’s New Manna’.

In both cases, working on the basis that the Tok Pisin versions were what was ultimately being judged, I created a detailed synopsis in English for each one as part of my report so the judges could better understand them. I also did with other stories from other entrants in the competition.

One of the things I noticed reading Tok Pisin stories and their English translations was that a number of writers included material in one version that did not occur in the other.

In Baka’s story, ‘Re-living Man of Calibre’, for instance, there is a paragraph in the Tok Pisin version explaining the number of stories in the present anthology which does not occur in the English version.

‘Man of Calibre’ is an excellent novel and something of a classic of Papua New Guinean writing. This short story related to it is also very good.

It seems that Baka is toying with submitting it as an entry for the 2025 prize. I hope he does.

‘Re-living Man of Calibre’ is shorter and more succinct than other stories in the anthology and there are no rambling dialogues and few narrative twists and turns, interesting as they are, that characterise much of Baka’s other work.

As writers, I think we all secretly know our shortcomings and we work hard to overcome them.

Nevertheless, as Baka observes, when we publish anything, including novels and short stories, we pitch them at readers with no reliable understanding of whether they will be successful or not.

There are eight stories in ‘Resis long KSSP’, and it’s potluck which will strike a chord with readers and which won’t. So much depends on the reader.

I’m no expert on what Papua New Guinean readers think but for me there are a couple of gems in this collection, especially in Tok Pisin.

This is a pretty good strike record and justifies the entire collection. That is, after all, how collections like this are supposed to work.

And it is, as Baka observes, a good way for Papua New Guinean writers, who are culturally attuned to short stories, to publish their work in a form with which they are most comfortable.

‘Africa and the Masalais at Nonohuloto’ impressed me and I think might appeal to the judges because it doesn’t involve a cultural context they might have trouble understanding.

The last story in the collection, ‘Flutterings of the Heart – As it Was Then’, also has a cultural context that will be understandable to the judges.

The story is about pan pipes and their significance in courting rituals tied together in a feel-good narrative about two would-be lovers from opposing clans who use the pipes well into old age.

Unfortunately this story suffers from a poorer English translation. Baka is thinking about submitting it to the 2027 competition, so there is still plenty of time to fix that problem.

I’m not quite sure how anyone should set out to win the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

I guess the starting point would be to read the winning entries from past competitions to get an idea of what appeals to the judges.

Beyond that, it probably comes down to practice and persistence, which is essentially what Baka is doing with this anthology.

Fashioning the English translations so they are accurate and readable is an important element because that’s what the judges will read and on which they will base their assessments.

Avoiding complex local contexts might also be a good idea. However, at the end of the day, I suspect that winning writing competitions is similar to getting something published.

In that respect, an internet search for how many famous authors had to deal with hundreds of rejections before they were published might be a way to lift one’s spirits.

That said, please read the stories in the anthology, preferably in both Tok Pisin and English. They are all challenging and enjoyable. What more could a reader ask for?