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  • If This is a Lament

    Bir ağıtsa bu

    Olmayan bir ülkeden söz ediyorlar
    Olmayan dilden, kardeşlikten.
    Konuşma yok
    Yok kelimeler.

    Anlaşılmak içinse yeryüzü
    Kim ölümü anlatacak
    Dağların aldığı nefesi
    Çöken karanlığı
    Kim anlatacak,
    Bir çocuğun rüyasında büyüyenleri
    Kim?

    Kuşların kanatları
    Eski bir masaldan bana doğru çırpınıyor
    Eski kadınların anlattığı
    Tenin taşa yakınlığı.

    Belli ki bir ağıtçıyım ben,
    Karanlık çöktüğünde
    Dağların ötesinde
    Kimi ansam bakıyor bana acıyla.

    Bu bir ağıtsa
    Ağlamak henüz başlamadı.

     

    If this is a lament

    They speak of a land that never was,
    a non-existent tongue.
    There is no utterance,
    no words.

    If we’re put on earth
    to understand each other –
    who can make sense of death?

    Explain how the mountains stole breath,
    or translate the darkness
    that has fallen?

    Who can say what burgeons
    in a child’s dream?

    Flapping out of an ancient tale,
    birds’ wings bear down
    on me – and skin’s

    akin to stone
    as the old women used to say.
    When darkness falls

    beyond the mountains,
    the people I remember look to me
    in pain. My words are elegy.

    If this is a lament,
    we haven’t even
    begun to cry.

    Jen Hadfield was born in Cheshire and lives in Shetland, whose landscape and natural life persistently informs her work. Her second poetry book Nigh-No-Place (2008, Bloodaxe Books) won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2008. Her third poetry collection, Byssus, was published by Picador in early 2014. She is currently Writer in Residence at Glasgow University and Glasgow School of Art, supported by Creative Scotland.

    Canan Marasligil is a freelance writer, literary translator, editor and curator based in Amsterdam. She specialises in contemporary Turkish literature as well as in comics. She has worked with cultural organisations across wider Europe and has participated in a range of residencies at the Free Word Centre in London (2013), at WAAW in Senegal (2015), at Copenhagen University (2015) and at La Contre Allée in Lille (2017). She is the creator of ‘City in Translation’, a project exploring languages and translation in urban spaces. www.cityintranslation.com

  • A conversation with Dorthe Nors

    A term that has often been mentioned in connection to your work is ‘women’s fiction’. What do you think of the term? 

    I don’t like it at all. At all! I mean, they’re writers, and writers are writers, it’s not gender-based. Sometimes when you’re a female writer you get the impression that you’re not considered to be a true writer. A real writer is, of course, a man who is a bit older than fifty. That’s a real writer. This is of course something that women struggle with and we should continue to fight against. Because I’m not a female writer, I’m not a women’s writer, I write about their existence and women have an existence on an equal basis to men. Therefore, we should not be labelled by gender.

    Your protagonist is often described as ‘an older woman’, but she’s just over forty – not actually that old!

    She’s not even halfway into her life, because maybe she will be 90 or 100. We get older and older, so she’s just in the first half of her life. She’s a middle-aged woman. But in a man’s world, she is of course past her prime.

    How has your writing books about a middle-aged woman been received?

    I mean, I’m nominated for the Man Booker, which is pretty good, but apart from that I try not to read too many reviews. Most of the ones I’ve seen are extremely positive and they get the voice, they get the theme. They understand that it is about being paralysed in an existential way, and also that the book is trying to investigate the relationship between urbanism and rural life, and between the landscape and urban, modern life.

    It’s interesting that it’s been perceived through a women’s lens. I guess it’s another example of how women writers are always seen as women, and men are seen as writing about the human existence in general.

    Exactly. And I do think that I write about existential structures that are completely equal to those of a woman, but I choose to write with a female protagonist. I once discussed this with another writer, who is also a woman, who said that there is a tendency for women to have male protagonists in order to escape that, being labelled. And that’s just too sad. We’re full blown existences. We’re real human beings. I kind of insist on writing with a woman in front.

    This is very much a novel about town versus countryside. It seems to me that there’s a lot of guilt wrapped up in your character’s approach to this issue.

    Sonja is one of a generation in Denmark, and probably all over Europe and the US, that has been very urbanised, almost self-deported from the rural areas that we grew up in. In order to have status we had to urbanise ourselves. When you do that, it means that you let go of some values and some rooting and some essence of yourself that you can’t return to. It’s the whole problem of loving a place, feeling connected to a place, and then being disconnected from and unable to return to that place. And that goes for the family members that you leave behind – for the friends, the landscape – you become an estranged human being, which leads to a certain kind of solitude and loneliness.

    So that loneliness exists because we’re all uprooted?

    We’re disconnected and uprooted. And Sonja lives in a city where she has no family; cousins, sister, parents, all those people who make us feel grounded and connected live somewhere else. This is pretty normal for urbanites – that they’ve left family behind.

    After reading your novel, I read several articles about touch deprivation, because Sonja’s only way to have a human connection that includes touch is to get a massage. That is such a striking way to encapsulate what modern loneliness is all about: that you can’t even get anyone else to touch you apart from by paying for it.

    This is also a very urban thing; you’re supposed to use the relationships you have for something. You’re not just in a relationship because you like somebody, you’re in a relationship because you need something from the other person. Another aspect of the urban relationship is that you know you can be ditched. You can be fired from any kind of relationship that you’re in, and then drift on to the next one. Which makes it very frail all the time; you always have to deliver something for the relationship. In comparison, if you look at the relationships people have in traditionalist societies, I mean in villages or small communities, they don’t necessarily have to deliver anything because people are stuck with each other anyway in that environment, and that makes it less lonely. You’re less on trial every day.

    It sounds like the urban relationship is like a marketplace.

    It is. It is cost benefit: what can I get from this? And if you don’t get what you want from this relationship, you can just choose another relationship. You can cast out that friendship. I remember having a conversation with a woman in Copenhagen once where I actually complained about that side of urban life, that relationships weren’t that deep and they would often end at a certain point. She said, that’s the beauty of it because nothing’s fixed. If you don’t like to be caught up in something and rooted down, that is the place you’re supposed to live.

    But you left Copenhagen!

    I did. I lived there for several years, but then I had this international breakthrough and spent a lot of time abroad. And I thought, I’m going to get the hell out of here. When I lived in Copenhagen, I missed the landscape so incredibly; I missed being somewhere open, so I took myself out of there.

    I was very amused to read that Sonja, your protagonist, is a translator, and your book is, in a sense, a send-up of the literary establishment. Does it mirror experiences that you’ve had?

    Definitely. Some publishers are so commercial that they treat books like bricks. Others are very thorough, very good. I’ve been very lucky, but if you go to very big commercial houses, they treat some books as if they were… milk.

    Interview by Theodora Danek

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Mohsin Hamid

    ‘Even if you’re 75 years old and haven’t left the city you’ve grown up in, you have migrated through time. To me, it feels like the theme of being human is being a migrant.’

    Mohsin Hamid talked to PEN Atlas from his home in Lahore about some of the major themes in his new novel Exit West: migration, technology, politically engaged writing, and how we are all migrants.

    Interview by Theodora Danek

    Exit West is a book about migration. What do you think the response to the refugee crisis should be?

    It’s very hard to talk about the issue of refugees without looking at the bigger picture. I think that over the next century we should expect billions of people to move. Many of them will cross national borders. Some of them will be forced to do so by war or by climate change. If we are not prepared to imagine that those people are equal, it’s very difficult for us to sustain democracy and rule of law anywhere. We can see already that a very strong anti-liberal, anti-rule of law impulse tends to accompany the anti-migrant impulse. But it’s worth considering that migrants offer something as well. They offer the potential for a different kind of future.

    If we are going to treat refugees as people we choose to reject, at the very least we should accept that we’re doing so out of power and not out of righteousness, and that the issue of morality and right is on their side. We need to begin to accept that the moral argument is very much on the side of the refugees.

    I wonder what role you think fiction plays in this, especially when tackling the insider-outsider perspectives.

    I don’t think that fiction is like a bill in parliament that has been passed by legislators. It doesn’t have the same function. But novels help change the context in which a problem is considered. One of the things that I’m trying to do in Exit West is to remind us that everyone is a migrant. Even if you’re 75 years old and you haven’t left the city you’ve grown up in you have migrated through time. It feels like the theme of being human is being a migrant. I hope in this novel to make the tragedy of migration, which is basically human life, something that we can all take as a starting point. I think we really are all refugees from our childhood. If we can connect with that, with our refugee and migrant status, perhaps we can see each other a little bit differently in terms of who’s a migrant and what that means.

    You say in Exit West, ‘When we migrate we murder from ourselves those we leave behind.’

    We don’t literally murder the people we leave behind, but we do murder them from our lives. We murder them from the particular emotional context we find ourselves in. I live in Lahore now, having lived in London and the US and so on. My parents live next door, and they are getting older. Should my wife and my kids and I move abroad again? One of the biggest reasons why I don’t move, and haven’t moved, is because of the emotional reality of leaving my parents at this stage in their lives. If you love someone and choose to live your life far away from them, there’s an emotional violence to it that you experience as much as they do.

    It’s interesting that technology doesn’t change that. Technology plays a strong part in Exit West. There’s a sense of unreality in it, it feels like your protagonists are watching events unfold on screens even as they experience them.

    Realism is kind of a myth in any case. The novel is open to playing with that. There are the doors, for example, which are obviously an element of the novel that doesn’t correspond to our understanding of the laws of physics. You could argue that the doors feel very real. When I travel, I literally step through an aircraft door and a few hours later I walk out into Britain. Thirty minutes ago I clicked on an app on my computer, saw someone in London and talked to them. My computer basically became a window. So these doors already exist in a way, and the feeling of living in a world with these doors is already there. When we try to approximate what it feels like to be a human being we needn’t be bound by restrictions of what reality is and is not.

    Do you feel that there’s a difference between how writers in different countries have responded to the refugee crisis?

    Writers in different countries of course respond differently to all sorts of things, including migration and refugees. Writers who say that their writing is not political are simply writers who are attempting to distance themselves from the politics suggested by the fiction that they create. Whatever we do and however we act has political connotations. You either accept those connotations or you don’t. Your choosing not to accept them does not mean that they don’t exist. If you are going to write a novel in which you attempt to avoid political questions, there’s something deeply concerning about that. It’s a novel about the status quo. When we see writing that appears to shy away from these sorts of questions, that suggests that there isn’t much at stake in society.

    But that can change quickly. Look at America for example. What we’ve seen in America is this dominant new form of writing that is a sort of memoir, writers writing about being writers, et cetera. The question must be asked if as a writer that is what you feel most comfortable with in the current political climate. A sense of political crisis can change what writers choose to write about. Certainly in places like Pakistan the sense of political crisis is always there.

    Do you feel like you’re being seen as a spokesperson for an entire country, Pakistan?

    Well, my last few novels haven’t mentioned Pakistan. There are many reasons for that, but one reason was to avoid self-exoticisation. To not say: this is what Lahore is, this is what Pakistan is. But to say: this is what the universal city is. I’m going to pretend that the place around me actually is the archetypal city. It was a gesture to get out of this trap of being representative of a particular subcategory. And to say: I’m not representative at all. If I am representative it’s of being human.

    In the new novel, too, I have not located the city as Lahore, or in Pakistan. I don’t think I’m a particularly good spokesperson for Pakistan, I don’t think I understand Pakistan. But I do speak as somebody who lives there. Where you stand, or sit and write, does shape certain things.

    Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations.  Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

    Theodora Danek  manages English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme, which aims to support the best literature from around the world through publisher grants, public events,  collaborative projects, and the PEN Atlas blog.  Born in Vienna, she previously worked as a museum educator at Austria’s major science museum, a programme manager at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, and editorial consultant for  New Books in German.

    Find out more about Exit West and read  an excerpt  here.

    Author photograph © Ed Kashi

  • A conversation with Mohsin Hamid

    ‘Even if you’re 75 years old and haven’t left the city you’ve grown up in, you have migrated through time. To me, it feels like the theme of being human is being a migrant.’

    Mohsin Hamid talked to PEN Atlas from his home in Lahore about some of the major themes in his new novel Exit West: migration, technology, politically engaged writing, and how we are all migrants.

    Interview by Theodora Danek

    Exit West is a book about migration. What do you think the response to the refugee crisis should be?

    It’s very hard to talk about the issue of refugees without looking at the bigger picture. I think that over the next century we should expect billions of people to move. Many of them will cross national borders. Some of them will be forced to do so by war or by climate change. If we are not prepared to imagine that those people are equal, it’s very difficult for us to sustain democracy and rule of law anywhere. We can see already that a very strong anti-liberal, anti-rule of law impulse tends to accompany the anti-migrant impulse. But it’s worth considering that migrants offer something as well. They offer the potential for a different kind of future.

    If we are going to treat refugees as people we choose to reject, at the very least we should accept that we’re doing so out of power and not out of righteousness, and that the issue of morality and right is on their side. We need to begin to accept that the moral argument is very much on the side of the refugees.

    I wonder what role you think fiction plays in this, especially when tackling the insider-outsider perspectives.

    I don’t think that fiction is like a bill in parliament that has been passed by legislators. It doesn’t have the same function. But novels help change the context in which a problem is considered. One of the things that I’m trying to do in Exit West is to remind us that everyone is a migrant. Even if you’re 75 years old and you haven’t left the city you’ve grown up in you have migrated through time. It feels like the theme of being human is being a migrant. I hope in this novel to make the tragedy of migration, which is basically human life, something that we can all take as a starting point. I think we really are all refugees from our childhood. If we can connect with that, with our refugee and migrant status, perhaps we can see each other a little bit differently in terms of who’s a migrant and what that means.

    You say in Exit West, ‘When we migrate we murder from ourselves those we leave behind.’

    We don’t literally murder the people we leave behind, but we do murder them from our lives. We murder them from the particular emotional context we find ourselves in. I live in Lahore now, having lived in London and the US and so on. My parents live next door, and they are getting older. Should my wife and my kids and I move abroad again? One of the biggest reasons why I don’t move, and haven’t moved, is because of the emotional reality of leaving my parents at this stage in their lives. If you love someone and choose to live your life far away from them, there’s an emotional violence to it that you experience as much as they do.

    It’s interesting that technology doesn’t change that. Technology plays a strong part in Exit West. There’s a sense of unreality in it, it feels like your protagonists are watching events unfold on screens even as they experience them.

    Realism is kind of a myth in any case. The novel is open to playing with that. There are the doors, for example, which are obviously an element of the novel that doesn’t correspond to our understanding of the laws of physics. You could argue that the doors feel very real. When I travel, I literally step through an aircraft door and a few hours later I walk out into Britain. Thirty minutes ago I clicked on an app on my computer, saw someone in London and talked to them. My computer basically became a window. So these doors already exist in a way, and the feeling of living in a world with these doors is already there. When we try to approximate what it feels like to be a human being we needn’t be bound by restrictions of what reality is and is not.

    Do you feel that there’s a difference between how writers in different countries have responded to the refugee crisis?

    Writers in different countries of course respond differently to all sorts of things, including migration and refugees. Writers who say that their writing is not political are simply writers who are attempting to distance themselves from the politics suggested by the fiction that they create. Whatever we do and however we act has political connotations. You either accept those connotations or you don’t. Your choosing not to accept them does not mean that they don’t exist. If you are going to write a novel in which you attempt to avoid political questions, there’s something deeply concerning about that. It’s a novel about the status quo. When we see writing that appears to shy away from these sorts of questions, that suggests that there isn’t much at stake in society.

    But that can change quickly. Look at America for example. What we’ve seen in America is this dominant new form of writing that is a sort of memoir, writers writing about being writers, et cetera. The question must be asked if as a writer that is what you feel most comfortable with in the current political climate. A sense of political crisis can change what writers choose to write about. Certainly in places like Pakistan the sense of political crisis is always there.

    Do you feel like you’re being seen as a spokesperson for an entire country, Pakistan?

    Well, my last few novels haven’t mentioned Pakistan. There are many reasons for that, but one reason was to avoid self-exoticisation. To not say: this is what Lahore is, this is what Pakistan is. But to say: this is what the universal city is. I’m going to pretend that the place around me actually is the archetypal city. It was a gesture to get out of this trap of being representative of a particular subcategory. And to say: I’m not representative at all. If I am representative it’s of being human.

    In the new novel, too, I have not located the city as Lahore, or in Pakistan. I don’t think I’m a particularly good spokesperson for Pakistan, I don’t think I understand Pakistan. But I do speak as somebody who lives there. Where you stand, or sit and write, does shape certain things.

    Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations.  Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.Theodora Danek  manages English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme, which aims to support the best literature from around the world through publisher grants, public events,  collaborative projects, and the PEN Atlas blog.  Born in Vienna, she previously worked as a museum educator at Austria’s major science museum, a programme manager at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, and editorial consultant for  New Books in German.

    Find out more about Exit West and read  an excerpt  here.Author photograph © Ed Kashi

  • Is there a crisis in storytelling?

    When I was a child, during the Cold War, we all lived in three spaces: NATO countries, the Warsaw Pact, and the so-called non-aligned states. The world was black and white, and the very few who could see that essentially the two sides harboured the same aims ‒ more power and more resources ‒  such as the indigenous Bolivian intellectual Fausto Reinaga, had very little influence. For decades, the dualism of the two superpowers suffocated alternative thinking.

    The end of the Cold War has not liberated us from dualism. Nowadays, the situation may be much more confusing, but the principle remains unchanged: many cultural pressure groups (as we might call them) try to impose their view by any means possible. And in the end they all want the same thing: more power and more resources. The novelty lies in the fact that we cannot maintain the illusion of an anyway contradictory, protected open space, where artists would enjoy greater freedom, like in the old West. Today, everything is everywhere: nationalists, Islamists, sexists, underprivileged minorities, poverty, refugees, war. We live in an epoch of extreme interconnectivity. Again, we have to choose sides. So: are we to regard this panorama as a range of possibilities or do we live in the midst of innumerable threats?

    As a writer I see the possibilities, because times of change offer a wealth of inspiration, especially the worst aspects of this change. But I am a family man with children, and like many other people I am afraid. As everything has potential repercussions for my personal life, I need to be careful, even when writing. Since the fatwa was issued on Salman Rushdie, and more recently, since the assassination of the Charlie Hebdo caricaturists in Paris, the gap has virtually closed between two very important concepts, which ought to remain distinct if artistic freedom is to be preserved: on one hand there is the artist and their work of art, and on the other there is the perpetrator and their crime. While the narrator was part of the fiction, the author could make them say whatever they wanted, without risking consequences to themselves. But today the position of the narrator has all but collapsed; their voice is in the process of becoming identical with that of the author.

    This shift is not new, indeed it started way back in the sixties and seventies when thinkers and writers such as Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco reflected upon apocalyptic speech to show how the author deliberately vanishes in the name of an absolute truth. An author can only have an interest in vanishing, however, if otherwise they are likely to be found guilty. The proud or even decadently boastful author is the one who knows that the rules of the game still apply, which protect them in real life. In the past, when violence was the monopoly of governments, fame could even be a means of protection.

    This is no longer the case. The rules of the game have changed and we do not know which ones will be applied next time, nor who is going to apply them, nor when or where this might take place. The decentralisation and privatisation of politically or religiously motivated violence has led to arbitrary, anonymous and merciless censorship. Hence the general concern, especially for people who need the public, such as artists.

    Art itself is changing as a result of this evolution. Two reactions may be observed, whether in literature, in film or on stage: either the authors attempt to claim a factual truth for their story, or they renounce any form of commitment and simply entertain. There is nothing wrong with either, but the flood of true stories we experience these days, together with the other flood of ‒ to express it in binary terms ‒ ‘untrue’ stories (such as fantasy, mystery, horror, action thrillers, filmed comics, etc.), make me suspect that many authors are imposing some kind of self-censorship. We are seeking shelter, and the factual truth is as much a shelter as is any kind of parallel universe, if only the universe of complete privacy.

    The problem with the factual truth is that it is binary: verifiable or falsifiable. This truth does not belong to art itself, it belongs to public discourse. It seems that, in order to produce meaningful art, many authors feel their story should be based on something ‘real’, on facts. At the same time this connection protects them, because nobody can be blamed for reality – it simply exists. Ergo, I’m not guilty. Don’t kill the messenger! The author disappears as a source; their story becomes apocalyptic in the sense that it reveals truth.

    The importance of the factual truth has increased dramatically in storytelling. It dominates many stories, whereas their own truth as a work of art diminishes: a factual truth can best be told in the most conventional way, that is the safest method. It is dangerous to be creative; creativity may trigger dangerous misunderstandings.

    When what is being said assumes more importance than how it is being said, i.e. when these two aspects fall apart instead of forming an artistic whole ‒ be it in the production, or in the reception, or both ‒ then we have a crisis of storytelling. And a crisis of storytelling is symptomatic of a profound cultural crisis.

    We’re talking about taboos. Taboos in speech want to impose blind spots on the perception of reality and vice versa. Perhaps this is a normal reaction to an overwhelmingly chaotic era: the attempt to reduce perception in order to preserve stability. Maybe the global emergence of fundamentalist movements is a logical, albeit paradoxical, consequence of a disorienting complexity. And maybe an author who dares to increase disorientation with their storytelling risks being punished as a perpetrator in an almost epistemological sense. But how should we react to this reaction?

    steven-uhly-c-matthias-bothorSteven Uhly was born in 1964 in Cologne and is of German-Bengali descent, and partially rooted in Spanish culture. He has studied literature, served as the head of an institute in Brazil, and translated poetry and prose from Spanish, Portuguese, and English. His book Adams Fuge was granted the Tukan-Preis of the city of Munich in 2011. His novel Glückskind (2012) was filmed as a primetime production by director Michael Verhoeven for German television. He lives in Munich with his family.

    Steven Uhly (c) Matthias Bothor

    Kingdom of Twilight (Maclehose Press, 2017): a ground-breaking, thrilling historical saga that follows the quest for identity and home in a traumatised post-war world. Find out more about this PEN award-winning novel and pre-order it.

    Banner photo (c) Demietrich Baker

  • The immortal bird

    The Arabic language has been destined to assume a role in the Arab — and indeed Islamic — world much larger than that of any other language. Arabic is an extraordinary site of historic importance. The 7th
    century saw Arabia revolutionised by language when Arabic became the medium through which the Qur’an, the principal scripture of Islam, was introduced to the scene. From the 5th
    century until then, metric poetry had reigned supreme and, by the advent of Islam, the highly developed and intricate Arabic poetic form Qasidah (‘ode’) had reached remarkable technical and metaphorical heights. This early poetic tradition heralded an extraordinary linguistic culture of orality and unique composition.

    The Qur’an, endowed with a medley of prosaic and poetic qualities, established a consciousness centred on monotheism and religious unity. It signalled the first grand spiritual and sociopolitical change in Arabia. Soon enough, the change echoed resoundingly across far-flung corners of the globe. Communicated and reiterated in Arabic at least five times a day through prayers and invocations, Islamic practices confirmed Arabic as the language of religion and spiritual contexts for the majority in the Middle East, and in particular the Arab world. Christian Arabs and Arabs of other denominations also use Arabic for liturgical and spiritual purposes.

    As well as the religious, there are many practical, educational and worldly uses of Arabic that have shaped its odyssey. It has developed from a minority language used by small populations in the Arabian Peninsula to being the language of diverse communities with longstanding native cultures and civilizations, such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq, which all in turn came to be known as part of the Arab world. These communities enriched Arabic through philological and literary practices as well as artistic and philosophical advancements of global importance.

    Arabic is a linguistic medium, a mark of identity and a field of artistic creations and explorations through its exquisite script. It is a spirit permeating the consciousness of the Arab peoples; an emblem of unity for nearly 300 million Arabs inhabiting the Arab world. But Arabic also embodies diversity and difference. This is manifested in a plethora of dialects and accents that distinguish each region or country in the Arab world from one another. So varied are these dialects and accents that for the uninformed, they seem to make independent languages in their own right. Yet Arabic is one: a diglossic language, as it has come to be described in linguistic circles.

    It is a language that comes in several shapes, including Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Colloquial Arabic, each associated with particular functions and contexts. Ideas invested in religion tend towards classical Arabic, some creatively and others jadedly. Secular ideas, on the other hand, belong to the realm of modern standard Arabic, with smatterings of classical expressions to enhance authenticity and roots in Arab cultures. All calls to formally acknowledge colloquial Arabic have not succeeded at the popular level. Nevertheless, colloquial Arabic remains the preserve of intimate conversations, daily exchanges, cinematic and televised creativity. It is used sparingly in novels, widely in songs and evokes particular cultural memories and codes for the community that shares it.

    Meanwhile, the 20th century has seen an outburst of great writing in Arabic, informed by Arabic tradition, western innovations in literature, and the explosion of global communications. This new wave of literature has seen the expansion of possibilities for the Arabic novel, the flourishing of free and prose movements in poetry, the evolution of Arabic drama and an extraordinary array of calligraphic innovations that can be experienced in several Arab cities and in western museums.

    In the hands of great literary masters such as the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1919-2006), the visionary Syrian poet Adonis (b.1930), the inventive Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) and many others, Arabic is a wellspring of revelation, universal warmth, dialectical reasoning and harmony. Alas, from the mouths of dictators or messianic Islamic fundamentalists and their followers, Arabic is shot through with bigotry and deception, whose dark venom has already devastated many once-magnificent Arab cities and communities. The language suffers doubly when western media repeatedly and narrowly associates it only with these hostile Islamic movements.

    Today, I celebrate Arabic, in all its remarkable diversity, for its powerful rationality, warmth, intimacy and beauty. At every turn in life, the Arab peoples have found their deepest values and aspirations reflected in their language. In a time of dictatorships, destructive ideologies and twisted narratives that sustain domination at the expense of freedom, it is more important than ever for the inventiveness and poetry of this ancient language to shine through and provide hope.

    Discover great books translated from Arabic on the World Bookshelf.

    Read poems translated from Arabic by Atef Alshaer at Poetry Translation Centre.

     

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    ‘I entered Makerere University College in July 1959, subject of a British Crown Colony, and left in March 1964, citizen of an independent African state. Between subject and citizen, a writer was born.’

    Birth of a Dream Weaver is the latest in a series of chronological memoirs by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The first, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2010, describes Ngũgĩ’s childhood in rural Kenya in a traditional family consisting of his father, four mothers and twenty four children. The House of the Interpreter follows Ngũgĩ’s time at a segregated elite boy school, Alliance High, run by British missionaries. In this latest volume, Ngũgĩ remembers his time at Makerere University College in Uganda. The series offers a fascinating insight into the cultural and political shifts that created modern Africa, while also following the path of discovering one’s voice as a writer.

    Interview by Tasja Dorkofikis.

    Whilst a student at Makerere University, you were also a playwright, journalist and a budding novelist. Did these multiple writing forms complement one another for you?

    Ngũgĩ: I saw them as complementary. My first love is fiction, the novel in particular. But it was drama and theatre that first launched me into the public eye; and the two have had more impact on my life including my writing of fiction, than the fiction. Theatre would later lead me to prison without trial, and then into Exile. My writing in Gĩkũyũ began in prison and flowered in exile.

    Makerere University was a point when all your influences converged: English and European literature, your political awareness, local pre-colonial and oral cultural tradition – did you think at the time that these cultures were conflicting?

    Ngũgĩ: No, not really. I have always enjoyed English and European literature, and many other literatures. I still do. But what I would later question is the priority given to European literatures and cultures, English mostly, over African ones. I reject the conception of relations among languages, cultures and literatures in terms of hierarchy.  Literatures and cultures should relate on an equal give and take basis of a network. Network Not Hierarchy. That is my take.

    The time at Makerere University allowed you to meet many thinkers and writers from all over the world and became a moment where you started expressing your political opinions publicly. Was it dangerous to do this?

    Ngũgĩ: The anti-colonial nationalism, the mass movement, the energy that this generated was bound to impact young lives. Poorly armed soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, (Mau Mau) had taken on the might of the British Empire, after all. It never occurred to me that writing could be dangerous, contrary to feelings I used to express earlier in my arguments with my friend Kenneth, about the license to write. See Dreams in Time of War. Then, I used to argue that one could be imprisoned if they wrote books without a license to do so.

    Your writing has always been strongly engaged politically with your country and with the development of postcolonial East Africa. What do you think the role of a writer is today? Do writers have wider political responsibilities?

    Ngũgĩ: A writer’s primary responsibility is to the dictates of their imagination. But no writer does so in a social vacuum. Their work is impacted by their own belief systems, their world outlook. But in the end, art has a magic all its own. At its best and most potent, it embodies and celebrates change and allies with the liberation and enhancement of the human spirit.

    There is a moment in your book when you decide on writing a daily journal. Have you been keeping journals all your life?

    Ngũgĩ: No, but I wish I had. I would urge all young writers to keep a journal, of some kind.

    In 1977 you renounced writing in English at the Nairobi opening of your play, Petals of Blood, saying that you wished to express yourself in a language that your mother and ordinary people could understand. Now you write in Gĩkũyũ and auto-translate into English. How has this shift influenced your writing style?

    Ngũgĩ: I would say that a sense of orality has become more prominent in my writings, especially in my three novels: Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ/Devil on the Cross; Matigari ma Njirũngi/Matigari; and Mũrogi wa Kagogo/Wizard of the Crow. It is not surprising that my Gĩkũyũ language fable, ‘Ituĩka rĩa mũrũngarũ/the Upright Revolution’, has been translated into more than fifty languages in the world.

    What advice would you give to young writers from Africa confronted with the dilemma of having to choose the language they write in? And to what extent can one talk, realistically, of ‘choosing’ the language in this context when colonial languages remain culturally dominant?

    Ngũgĩ: I advocate writing in African languages. It is African languages that need African writers, not European languages. But I recognise that there is a whole generation of African youth brought up as European language speakers. These have no choice but to write in the language they have. Writing in African languages faces formidable difficulties of unhelpful government policies, zero publishing houses in African languages; and an international order that takes European languages as the norm for the world.

    You translated two Molière plays, Tartuffe, and Doctor in Spite of Himself, into Gĩkũyũ through the English translations. Is translation a political act of mediation?

    Ngũgĩ: I describe translation as the common language of languages. I also tell African writers: use English to enable but not to disable. Translation has always been a fact of literary life in Africa. The Bible and the Koran are well known all over the continent, but mostly through translations. And currently, the Jalada translation project has resulted in my fable being available in over fifty world languages (40 African; 6 European; 6 Asian; and 2 Middle eastern). Translation is the way of the future.

    Do you have any thoughts on how the growth of African publishing industry can be encouraged?

    Ngũgĩ: We need a fundamental change in governments’ language policies. A positive government policy will mean changes in education policies and these will impact publishing.

    Can we expect the next in the series of your memoirs and if so, when?

    Ngũgĩ: Detained is being reissued next year, with a new introduction, and a few additions.

    Find out more about Birth of a Dream Weaver and read an excerpt here.

    Read more about the PEN award-winning Dreams in a Time of War on the World Bookshelf.

    Read Jalada Africa editor Moses Kilolo for PEN Atlas on the Jalada TRANSLATION issue, which featured Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s short story The Upright Revolution translated into over 50 African languages.

  • The story of The Book of Dhaka

    What better occasion could one have imagined for the launch of The Book of Dhaka – all the stories in which are set in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, each bringing out a unique aspect of the bustling city with high-rise buildings and sleek cars on one hand, and slums and the ubiquitous presence of rickshaws on the other? The perspectives in them differ, to the point of clashing at times, but they complement each other too. This is a Dhaka seen through the fictional lens of writers who have lived through the city’s ugliness as well as its sheer beauties.

    It was 19 November, the closing day of the Dhaka Literary Festival 2016 at Bangla Academy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. As anticipated, the crowd was bigger and thicker around the KK Tea Stage a little before a quarter past four when the programme was scheduled to begin.

    The last panel on the same stage, ‘Words under Seige’, saw Hamid Ismailov, an Uzbek writer in exile, and Kanak Mani Dixit, editor of Himal, among others, speaking about the overt state mechanisms and the covert ideological pressures through which voices of dissidence are silenced. Enthused students, readers and journalists were streaming out of the room where the stage was set, while new batches, mostly young, were going in.

    As I walked towards the entrance of the room, I came across Arunava Sinha, one of the editors of The Book of Dhaka and a prolific translator of Bengali fiction and poetry. Before I could congratulate him properly, he took the stage with Kaiser Haq, a Bangladeshi-English language poet; Syed Manzoorul Islam, a famous bilingual fiction writer; Pushpita Alam, the other editor of the book; and Daniel Hahn, a British author and translator who moderated the session marking the launch.

    Right from the beginning, Hahn brought a vibrant touch to the session and his witty quips created an ambience for a lively discussion. After a quick introduction of the speakers on stage and a short description of the book, he passed the mantle on to Kaiser Haq. An illustrious translator himself, Kaiser traced the somewhat sinuous route of what appeared as a remarkable instance of creative collaboration between writers’ organisations, publishers and quite a good number of creative individuals from Bangladesh, India and the UK.

    Kazi Anis Ahmed, a fiction writer and co-director of the DLF, formed Bengal Lights Books and Dhaka Translation Centre (DTC) with the aim of giving a boost to English translation of Bengali fiction in Bangladesh. Haq became the director of DTC and the first translated book of the centre was launched at the 2013 Hay Festival Dhaka (now known as DLF), which was attended by Emma D’Costa of Commonwealth Writers. Emma then approached Haq and Khademul Islam, director of Bengal Lights Books, with the idea that they should collaborate on a workshop where the participants would dissect a story in the presence of the author.

    Soon English PEN and the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) came on board. The first workshop was conducted in 2014 by Arunava Sinha and the author selected for it was Shaheen Akhtar. Most importantly, the participants each were assigned to a story and the workshop the next year took the translators up with their assignments, working diligently to improve their craft. The much-needed funding and organisational support to hold the workshops in Dhaka were provided by English PEN and Commonwealth Writers, a cultural initiative of Commonwealth Foundation. That’s how, according to Haq, The Book of Dhaka was born.

    Hahn soon moved on to Pushpita. Pushpita shared the pleasure and sheer excitement of the editing process, of how meticulously she and Arunava went over every line and how they debated over matters of style. In answer to Hahn’s question about annotating every story, some of them copiously so, Pushpita said, ‘If you translate certain expressions and phrases, you risk putting the cultural references out of context. So, it’s better to keep them unchanged and explain them in end notes.’

    When it was emphasised by Hahn that this book was a translation project to train up translators from Bengali into English, Arunava chipped in with a comment that garnered much applause from the audience: ‘That certainly makes it one of the most unique books of translation in the world, I imagine … I think it’s fantastic for workshop participants to know that this work is actually going to be a part of a printed book so early in their career. It’s really a great incentive to carry on working, as you know, without money or real fame and glory, other than only for the love of it.’

    Syed Manzoorul Islam reflected on his storytelling and self-reflexive narrator. A professor of English, he always borrows his stories from newspaper reports, or from his students. He then digs them out, he explained. His story, ‘Weapon’, selected in this collection, was borrowed from a student. His narrators, he went on to say, never claim to have represented reality as it is. The narrator in them rather makes it clear, by incessantly talking to readers, that he is no omniscient narrator and knows as much as is revealed to him.

    Towards the end of the hour-long programme, the story writers were invited on stage. Only Shaheen Akhtar joined the panel and shared her excitement about the book. The other writers whose stories have been selected include Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Anwara Syed Haq, Parvez Hossain, Rashida Sultana and Wasi Ahmed.

    The programme ended with a note of high hopes that such collaborative projects should continue to train up more of local translators and bring out the best of Bengali literature in English translation.

    As someone closely involved in the ongoing campaign for promoting Bengali literature in the international arena, I found the launch a pure literary delight. This, I believe, is the first time a translated collection with such a wide range of literary collaboration came through, presenting us not only with a collection of wonderfully translated stories but also with an apt opportunity to reach readers in the west. Publishers bringing out English translations of Bengali literature have often failed to make their books available to readers of other languages, whether in the east or in the west. But this book stands to reason that collaborative efforts can actually make a difference and bridge the gap between cultures and languages, between the east and the west.

    Watch the full The Book of Dhaka panel at Dhaka Literary Festival here.

    Find out more about The Book of Dhaka, published by Comma Press in the UK and by Bengal Lights Books in Bangladesh, on the World Bookshelf.

    Read about PEN’s work with emerging translators around the world, including the 2014/15 Bangla translation project and the 2016/17 Swahili translation project both in partnership with Commonwealth Writers.

    Catch up on the first English PEN/Commonwealth Writers translation workshop with emerging translators in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania – ‘Something lost, something gained’.

     

  • On Babel, hospitalities and waves

    Babel, a literary festival focused on translation, was created in 2006 in Bellinzona, the tiny capital of the Italian side of Switzerland. Cultural debate had largely been exiled from the media at the time, and was seeking refuge in public space. For us, this meant large, lively crowds gathered, determined to listen to authors discussing their work. We chose to expose this invigorated audience to one of the most neglected yet fundamental aspects of literary creation: translation. Back then, a translated book would still often be published without mention of the translator’s name.

    Things have changed considerably, and I’m proud that we played a part in this process in our own way, offering workshops for literary translators, writing articles, organising conferences, publishing books and collaborating with likeminded institutions. From the very beginning, we understood translation as something deep and urgent. Ricoeur discusses translation as ‘linguistic hospitality’: a practice that prompts you to meet the other in their land in order to be able to invite them into your own home. A translator must master the structure of a foreign language, but also the particular ways it is used in different contexts and its cultural significance. In a wider sense, this is a model for other kinds of hospitality, which is particularly pressing and necessary in a multicultural and migrating world, a world in transformation and transit.

    Throughout the years, Babel explored regions with translation at their very heart. The Balkans, that tangle of linguistic and historical similarities and clashes. The ‘United English of America’: writers who migrated to the US from all over the world and adopted English as their writing language. Palestine, with myriad diasporic languages and the seeming impossibility of return. Francophone Africa, and the struggle for artistic liberation from relentless cultural colonisation. The Caribbean, with its unique appropriation and reinvention of what colonial powers left behind: the French, English, Dutch and Spanish languages and literary traditions.

    In 2016, after Babel’s 10th
    edition, we decided to shake things up. In June, we organised a one-day Babel in London, inviting authors from the world over who had adopted English for their writing language. I wrote London as a Second Language, a small book that will now be published in an expanded version, asking a dozen foreign authors living in London to write about their city and second language. And in September, we invited London-based foreign writers to Bellinzona, for a ‘Greater London’ edition.

    This allows me to shift this text from the ‘Atlas’ element of our experience to the ‘English PEN’ one. The major discovery of this year-long work on London is that the diversity of people on any one of its buses is far from represented in what I must now call the establishment (a word I’ve never used before because I’ve never trusted it). The variety of languages and cultures in the city seems to be seen as an issue to be somehow tolerated, rather than as richness, potential or exhilaration. Working with young people from around the world, we witnessed the forbidding of mother tongues at school and a general lack of interest in any experience prior to their arrival to the UK. Working with writers from around the world, we heard resentment for the demands of editors and agents: ‘explain more for the English reader’, ‘fit in more with the English tradition’.

    Conserving traditions is definitely important. But at what cost? Is immovable denial of the vitality of what’s happening outside the canon really worth it?

    To be confronted with such issues at the core of London’s literary scene came as a surprise: London is multicultural, yet its culture, and especially the literary one, remains monolingual, both in the strict and the metaphorical sense.

    This experience helped us appreciate something about where we come from: how Swiss multilingualism is not simply a reality, but a mental attitude that considers the variety of languages a positive asset. Far from being a nationalistic outburst, this is a vital effect of linguistic hospitality in action. So, it makes a lot of sense that Babel was created in Switzerland; at the same time, we now believe that Babel itself can approach others, bringing with it the gift of openness to the multiple, complex and fertile effects of translation in all forms.

    I am writing this in Ramallah, where I discover that in Arabic the word adab means both ‘literature’ and ‘good manners’. We have just launched a new project: Specimen – The Babel Review of Translations, a multilingual and typographical web magazine. The launch took place at art biennale Qalandiya International, where the theme was ‘This sea is mine’. Specimen was created in a region of lakes: along the coast of most lakes the sentence ‘This lake is mine’ would be uttered in the same language. Along the shore of a sea, the sentence ‘This sea is mine’ is pronounced in many different languages. Just like the seashore, Specimen aims to host a variety of languages, publishing texts in any language, translated into any language, in a non-systematic way that contrasts, in its streamlet way, an oceanic claim of the English language: that it rules the waves.

    ‘The pages of the sea are a book left open by an absent master,’ writes Derek Walcott and, after a week of immersion in the Arabic language, I hear the sea’s unwritten pages now turning from left to right.

    Read Specimen – The Babel Review of Translations online.

    Find out more about Babel: Festival of Literature and Translation at www.babelfestival.com.

    Banner photo: installarchive.com

  • Fragments

    *

    A man stops me in the street. It’s late, he’s trying to get into his friend’s flat, but he hasn’t got the right code. He could call his friend but his battery’s flat. He asks if I can lend him my phone: he’s written his friend’s number on a piece of paper. He reads the numbers out and, as I’m typing them in, the name of the man I thought I’d finally managed to forget pops up on my screen. I’ve kept his number all these years, not daring to call him, not knowing where he’d moved to after he left me.

    *

    I met her in a hall of mirrors that had been put there for a festival. It was the last evening and everyone was on the circular parquet dancefloor. The look was art deco, 1920s, the sound was pop, 21st
    -century. Inside the recess draped in red velvet where she’d retreated in a little moment of sadness, mirrors built into the carved wood multiplied the reflection of her face. She thought no one could see her, so far from the crystal chandeliers and the packed bodies, a long way from the bar. But she was the only one in there: she was all you could see.

    *

    The day before we split up it was as though I had a premonition. I wanted to get photos taken with him in the booth at the station. We adjusted the stool to the right height for him and I sat on his knee. For once, he didn’t make fun of my sentimental side, and we tried out different poses, even one where he was kissing me. I waited several long minutes, which turned into hours, but the photos never came out of the little slot.

    *

    On the shelf above the worktop sits his file of recipes, which he hardly uses any more. It’s a battered thing, all blistered and warped, and stained, of course. It’s full of articles cut out of women’s magazines, some no longer even in circulation, photocopies of pages from cookbooks too glossy to be consulted at the critical moment, home-made recipes, hand-written, improved-on plagiarisms of his mother’s and grandmother’s recipes, recipes scribbled down while listening to cookery programmes on the radio. All the recipes are filed in some kind of order in see-through slips or glued onto cardboard pages, holes done with a pastry-cutter. Every one of them is annotated, corrected, amended, commented on, even coloured in, some made practically illegible by stage directions as highly flavoured as the dishes he used to create. He’d even include comments from our guests and – pointless these days – prices for the ingredients. Intending to tidy up the kitchen, I took the file down from the shelf this morning. I wasn’t sure whether it would be right to put it back there or somewhere less accessible, perhaps in a cardboard box, that is to store it right away as it’s been years since he last opened it and that bulk makes it a real dust trap. Undecided, I began to leaf through the file, first standing where I was then sitting at the table. I turned the pages one by one, carefully and lovingly, as if the folder were a photo album. It held all his life’s meals, from his first culinary experiments while still a student dashing around, before my time, almost up to the birth of our grandchildren. Rediscovering the improbable omelettes from when we met, the dried spatters from his slips, the phase of the multi-coloured soups, I couldn’t help smiling. I had forgotten all the doodles that used to embellish his favourite dishes, delicate, hilarious miniatures, somewhere between illuminations and comic strips. I recognised his handwriting, changing slightly through the years, hesitant, firmer and then shakier, and my own hand now and then seconding his.

    *

    The years have passed, and she hasn’t always the strength to put on a bra. She doesn’t want me to help her but she looks at me, smiling, and says: ‘It’s a shame, a little support can make a body beautiful’.

    *

    He slept in the spare room at my house after an impromptu party. When he’d gone I changed the sheets: I put the ones he’d used on my own bed, to see, or rather smell, whether I liked his smell as much as I liked him.

    jennifer-higgins-picJennifer Higgins is an editor and translator from French and Italian. She has translated several works of fiction, including short stories from another collection by Emmanuelle Pagano, Un renard à mains nues, and has written a book about English translations of French poetry.

     

    sophie-lewis-picSophie Lewis is an editor and translator from French and Portuguese into English. She has translated Stendhal, Verne, Noll, Aymé and Leduc, among others. Her latest translation, of Noémi Lefebvre’s novel about Schoenberg, shame and the weight of history, Blue Self-Portrait, will be published by Les Fugitives in 2017. She is also co-founder and workshop leader at Shadow Heroes translation workshops for GCSE students (www.shadowheroes.net).