First Takes and New Horizons: The Oklahoma Debut of A Compass on the Navigable Sea

On February 20, the University of Oklahoma’s Department of English, the Gibbs College of Architecture, the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies, and WLT co-sponsored the Oklahoma launch of Daniel Simon’s World Literature Today centennial anthology, A Compass on the Navigable Sea. In his introductory remarks, English professor Amit R. Baishya offered a preliminary assessment of the project’s achievement.

Welcome to the first session of the spring semester of our newly started faculty-graduate student showcase series organized by the Department of English. This special session is also co-sponsored by World Literature Today. My name is Amit Baishya, and I am an associate professor and also the associate chair of the department. This is the third session of the showcase series (two were held last semester), and today I have the pleasure of introducing our distinguished colleague, Daniel Simon, the editor in chief of the internationally renowned journal, World Literature Today. Daniel and I have worked closely together on several occasions, most notably during the Puterbaugh seminar on Mohsin Hamid that I taught in spring 2020 and while editing a special section on “Delhi in the Anthropocene” for WLT’s May 2024 issue. We are working closely again as we plan for the upcoming Neustadt seminar on Palestinian writer and 2026 Neustadt Prize laureate Ibrahim Nasrallah in the fall.

We are gathered here today to celebrate the publication of A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature published by Restless Books and edited by Daniel. Compass is a compendium of works in world literature collected first in Books Abroad—founded at OU in 1927—and in its successor, WLT, over the last century. The glittering galaxy of authors who are included in this anthology includes (among others) Octavio Paz, Mia Couto, Joy Harjo, Gabriel García Márquez, Clarice Lispector, Ama Ata Aidoo, Arundhati Roy, Mahmoud Darwish, and Maryse Condé.

A double imperative organizes this luminous anthology: movement and rootedness.

A double imperative organizes this luminous anthology: movement and rootedness. The title of the anthology is drawn from Octavio Paz’s 1982 Neustadt Prize address where he uses the compass metaphor to “imagine the Great Plains as a ‘navigable sea’ for those who may dismiss the landlocked prairies as devoid of culture.” The relation of every society with its surrounding physical environment, Paz continues, is “one of contradiction: men who inhabit a valley climb mountains that separate them from their world, and men of the plains move across its expanse as if it were a navigable sea.” WLT, and the vision of world literature it champions, enables us, located here in landlocked Oklahoma, to traverse imaginatively over the mountains and across the navigable seas. WLT brings the world to Oklahoma; it brings Oklahoma to the world. Here, for instance, is Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer in his 1965 poem “Oklahoma” included in the anthology: “The train stalled far to the south. Snow in New York / but here we could go out in shirtsleeves all night / Yet no one was out. Only the cars / sped by in flashes of light like flying saucers.”

Paz continues that the metaphor of the compass is both “a challenge and an invitation: the horizon remains a call and an obstacle.” In his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” philosopher Martin Heidegger broaches the etymology of horizon, from the Greek horismos: “that from which something begins its presencing.” (As an example, think of how the lone stranger emerges as a presence from a hazy, shimmering point on the horizon where earth and sky meet in classic deep-focus shots in cinema.) A place with its attendant horizons, simultaneously advantage and limitation, to channel Edward S. Casey from The Fate of Place, emerges as an active source of presencing: “in the embrace of a particular place, things get located and begin to happen.” No wonder then that Daniel dovetails Paz’s nautical metaphor to WLT’s “vision of literature,” which is based, as he writes, on an “Indigenous ethos of rootedness in the land emblematized by the oral traditions of the world’s ancient civilizations.”

The vision of world literature that WLT champions enables us, located here in landlocked Oklahoma, to traverse imaginatively over the mountains and across the navigable seas.

Oklahoma and the vision of world literature championed by WLT emerges as a “transnational crossroads” where the primacy of Native languages extends throughout the Americas. This imperative is reflected in the works of N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo, and in the words of Mapuzungun writer Liliana Ancalao who writes that the “land speaks in its own tongues.” If Tranströmer registers the “alienness”—car lights speeding by like flying saucers—of Oklahoma looking from the outside in, Ancalao, in dialogue with Momaday and Harjo, enables us to consider how expansive outsides can be engaged with while remaining rooted in place—this is the inside-out view the anthology also showcases. 

Such is the nature of the horismos that WLT actively engages with and extends ceaselessly, a call to imagine and reimagine the many worlds that literary works bring into presence. A Compass on the Navigable Sea is an illuminating guide and road map for this continuing endeavor.

University of Oklahoma