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  • Entertainment for the Middle Classes? – The success of Herman Koch

    Over a million copies sold, multiple translations, a stage adaptation  – does Herman Koch’s The Dinner show us a new way for Dutch literature? Michele Hutchison investigates for PEN Atlas

    Not long after I’d moved to Amsterdam and become interested in Dutch literature, I was confronted with an exotic word: straatrumoer. Literally, ‘the sound from the street’. I learned that, in the 1980s, an academic called Ton Anbeek, who’d spent time in the States, had caused ripples in the literary world by suggesting that contemporary Dutch literature needed a lot more of it. Anbeek had compared recent American fiction with Dutch and came to the conclusion that Dutch fiction contained too little political engagement and too much navel-gazing. Novelists should work harder to reflect and comment on social reality, presumably as Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon did.

    Anbeek was lucky, just then a new generation of young writers like Joost Zwagerman, Arnon Grunberg, Ronald Giphart, and Hafid Bouzza came along, and the problem ostensibly was addressed. Contemporary social reality and politics – matters outside the protagonist’s psyche – gained a larger role in fiction. Psychological fiction moved towards faction. Nevertheless, public complaints against Dutch literature rumbled on. In 2006, then Prime Minister, JP Balkenende, wrote to eminent novelist Harry Mulisch lamenting the lack of social engagement in the arts. Where was the Grand Design? Vision? Ideals? Anbeek’s criticism had resurfaced and had even been added to the country’s political agenda!

    Last month, the quality broadsheet NRC Handelsblad published a polemical piece by novelist Marcel Möring. The headline ran, ‘the novel has been degraded to entertainment for the middle-classes’. Möring argued that too much attention had been paid to straatrumoer, ‘the novel has become the sewage works of journalism’. Too much topicality, too much trivial autobiography, too little experiment. No Beckett or Joyce would make it through the current climate; a criticism that would hold true in more countries than just the Netherlands.

    But let’s return to that headline: ‘entertainment for the middle-classes’. Might one of the main targets just be the most successful literary novel of recent years: The Dinner by Herman Koch (2009). It has sold over a million copies here, has been adapted for theatre, and rights have been sold to twenty-five countries. The Dinner slowly reveals dramatic events which precede two middle-class couples having dinner in an expensive restaurant in Amsterdam. Their teenaged sons have committed a crime together and the couples need to talk about what to do next. The novel is a social satire, written in an appealingly light and amusing tone.

    Rival publishers speculated that its extraordinary success was due to the timing of the book, the striking jacket featuring a lobster against a bright blue background, and the fact that the author is also a successful television comedian. The jacket design has mostly been used for translations, yet the content and style seem to have universal appeal – the book has sold fantastically well in Germany, France and Italy, for example. Just published in the UK by Atlantic Booksand translated by Sam Garrett, reviews have been very positive, comparing it to recent successes by Lionel Schriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Christos Tsolkias (The Slap), fashionable novels which are also studies of the angst-ridden bourgeoisie.

    Herman Koch kindly agreed to share his thoughts last week.

    What do you think Dutch literature should set out to do? Should it contain a moral message or just entertain?

    I think literature in general (not only Dutch) should try to be as immoral as possible, but never forget to be entertaining in doing so.

    Are you more influenced by Dutch literature or foreign?

    When I was in my teens I was more influenced by the 19th century Russians than by Dutch writers. Today interesting literature is coming to us from all over the world. I never feel like I should write some Dutch version of the Big American Novel: sometimes I don’t have the patience anymore to start reading a book of more than 500 pages (not the same patience I had when I was eighteen), let alone write it.

    Were you thinking about reflecting contemporary political reality in Holland when you wrote the book?

    Not really, only in so far as that I was thinking of the Dutch political correctness as far as our famous tolerance is concerned. This tolerance now seems to have come to an end, or at least it is showing it’s true face: the Dutch feeling of superiority over foreigners. 

    *

    Thinking then about ‘straatrumoer’, it struck me that, at least to a Brit, street suggests the problematics of the poorer segments of society: drugs, violence, prostitution, immigration. But as Koch’s novel demonstrates, the middle classes are part of social reality and its problems too. His novel plays into the Zeitgeist, speaks to the majority of book readers and some of its success must surely be put down to this too. 

    About the Author

    Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

    Biography of Herman Koch

    Herman Koch, born in 1953, is a Dutch actor and writer. He studied at the Montessori Lyceum before finishing his schooling in Russia. Koch is a renowned television actor on the series Jiskefet and a columnist for the newspaper Volkskrant. The Dinner is his sixth novel and has already won the prestigious Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. Herman Koch currently lives in Spain.

    http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1848873824

    Additional Information:

    The Dutch Literary Foundation’s information on The Dinner

    Review in The Telegraph

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Dispatch from Syria: Capturing the Truth

    Following on from her piece for the English PEN magazine, Samar Yazbek describes the dangerous, often fatal struggle of capturing the truth of the Syrian revolution

    Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss     

    The young man in front of the camera points at the cloud of smoke as it rises from behind the buildings, drawing nearer to him. Breathless as he runs, he gasps, ‘Look, it’s an explosion…everyone, look at what’s happening to us here in Homs. We’re dying here. Look, they’re shelling us.’

    The image wobbles, shakes, the cameraman’s hand trembles. Suddenly footsteps appear, dusty shoes, pavement splotched blood red, then a crashing sound, some gasping, and the screen goes black.

    The event is over.

    This scene comes from one of the young men reporting the events out of the heart of the Syrian revolution. A scene that encapsulates the death of Syrians but also their defiant will to live, in spite of the destruction all around them; that tells the story of the Syrian people by relaying the truth of their revolution now that the Syrian regime, its security apparatus and its shabbiha have denied them access to the media, and after a number of foreign journalists have been killed.

    The Syrian people report the event alongside death, not from on high, never from below: they proceed side by side with death. Our young men move with the gunshots, the artillery fire, carrying their miniature mobile devices or a concealed micro-camera, but mainly they carry their cell phones, decamping towards death. Here in Syria, from where the young men report the event, news becomes part of a deathly cavalcade. Those who report the news aren’t professional journalists; they don’t know how to mould the story, they have no idea how to stage the scoop on camera or how to angle the right shot. They take their lives in their own hands, placing them before the eye of their cell phone, and set out. Reporting the truth could cost them their lives.    

    The young men who cover the demonstrations get ready beforehand. They make placards that express the Syrian people’s thirst for freedom, signs that criticize the positions of the international community, others that are sarcastic, maybe a few drawings. They take up their positions, set back a ways from the demonstrating crowd, in order to capture the images of the protestors, crouching in some corner so they won’t be spotted by the security forces and the shabbiha and the snipers who are posted up on the rooftops and who kill demonstrators in cold blood.          

    Other times, when shells crash down on some neighbourhood, the young men don’t have enough time to get ready. They thrust their cell phones into the air and start filming, even as the bombs fall and they run away from the shelling, one eye on the road, the other on the decimated buildings, or else towards where the rockets are being launched, which makes their shots hurried and confused as they struggle to force the words out of their mouths, with death looming over their heads. Still, somehow, they manage to focus their cameras on the sight of the truth.

    Those young men, who know that the regime of Bashar al-Assad fabricates truths in order to spuriously repeat them in the media, realise the importance of what they are doing. Now they are creators of the Truth. These scenes that they record might just be capable of creating something that can put an end to the suffering of the Syrian people who are being slaughtered on a daily basis, the Syrians for whom massacres beget only more massacres.         

    A number of the young men who were transformed into reporters without any past experience have become heroes. Some have been killed, others arrested. One of the young men whom the Syrian security services caught in the act of filming had his eyes gouged out—when his body finally surfaced it had no eyes!         

    The Syrian regime is afraid of the truth coming out, which would expose the reality of their crimes. So they target journalists who write about the revolution as well as those who broadcast it by video; therefore their punishment is still worse, whether it comes to arrest or torture or bodily disfigurement. The Syrians are unmoved when they get turned into war reporters in the blink of an eye; they have no fear. They are guided by a rare courage to report the truth of their death, the truth of their demands and their revolution. The young men who appear every day on television screens the world over via recorded snippets on YouTube are constantly changing, their faces replaced from one day to the next, just barely benefiting from the expertise of some initial appearance, which was followed by a second, then a third…

    Until this journalistic proficiency vanishes amid the dust and the bullets, lost along with their souls that take flight even as they report the truth.

    Other young men will take over the assignment, with warm hearts renewed, reporting the event, before they, too, will fall.

    And so forth and so on

    The Syrians do not tire of becoming journalist martyrs.

    They are born from the bullets but also from freedom, and their camera eyes never sleep, despite the bombing!

    An extract from this dispatch was published in the English PEN member’s magazine in September 2012.


    About the Author

    Samar Yazbek
     is a Syrian writer and journalist, born in Jableh in 1970. She is the author of several works of fiction. Her novel, Cinnamon, is to be published by Arabia Books later this year. An outspoken critic of the Assad regime, Yazbek has been deeply involved in the Syrian uprising since it broke out on 15 March 2011. Fearing for the life of her daughter she was forced to flee her country and now lives in hiding. Her book A Woman in the Crossfire published by Haus won an English PEN Writers in Translation award in 2012.

    Read more about A Woman in the Crossfire  
    here
     from Haus Publishing.

    Read about Samar’s event at the Frontline Club in London
    here

     

    About the Translator

    Max Weiss
     is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010). He is also a noted translator of contemporary Arabic literature into English. His translation of Abbas Beydoun’s novel Blood Test won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 2010.

     

  • Way to an unknown world

    Krys Lee reports for PEN Atlas from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where she appeared on the panel ‘New American Voices’. For more on the festival, please also see Daniel Hahn’s piece The Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of those rare events that bring readers, critics, and writers together in an atmosphere of comfort and challenge. Hundreds of discussions happen simultaneously during the panels, at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, in cafes, and in the authors’ cozy yurt (which actually is a yurt). Many will disagree among one another; there are not many clear-cut answers when it comes to literature. But the festival is the beginning of a conversation between writers and moderators, writers and readers, writers and writers, and readers with each other, as well as a celebration of books. I don’t think there was a single panel I went to where there wasn’t at least a slight difference of opinion between panelists or where audience members weren’t contradicting one another. This colorful cacophony, perhaps, reflects the liveliness of readers and reading and mirrors the complexity of literature. But the best conversations begin in challenge and disagreement.On the panel I participated in, some of the conversations circulated around dislocation and belonging. The panel was titled New American Voices. Panelist Nell Freudenberger’s latest novel The Newlyweds braids the narrative of a 24-year old Bangladeshi woman named Amina who has left her native country for America to marry a man she corresponded with online. The Guardian sees it as an effort to translate the American experience for the 21st century. My own story collection Drifting House focuses on outsiders and survivors in the Korean diaspora, spanning South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. The books, ostensibly, have been paired up to reflect America’s roots as a nation of immigrants.The most interesting comment raised was by a young man that ended on the note that, we can live for a long time in a country and yet never really understand it. This American man had lived in Japan and never felt as if he was accepted by or quite comprehended the country, and he questioned the ability of anyone else to do so. It was a comment disguising its challenge to us, the panelists, and our ability to successfully write the stories of people whom he saw as ‘the other’. While I sympathize with his frustrations, ironically, Freudenberger’s entire body of work questions his assumption that one may not be able to inhabit other worlds through the transformative act of fiction, directly challenging such sceptics. The Newlyweds was also based on the true story of a Bangladeshi woman whom Freudenberger struck up a friendship with on a plane ride. As for myself, I had spent over half my life in Seoul, South Korea, and at this point, am more intimate with South Koreans and Korean culture than America. My everyday spoken language is Korean and Seoul is my hometown, and most likely, my hopefully distant future burial site, will be in South Korea. I was literally writing about what I know, and not the ‘otherness’ that he indicated.What he was really getting at was the question of authenticity and who has the right to speak for another. The indeterminate space between two cultures, from his perspective, disqualified one to speak for another. This was the narrative space that he was challenging.But literature, not to mention history, society, and culture, has always been about dislocation. Some of our greatest modern writers, including Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway made it their subject, and more recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yiyun Lee, Nam Le, Salman Rushdie, Yi Munyoland Xiaolu Guoall assume a form of dislocation at the heart of their narratives.We live in a time of dislocation. Perhaps we always have. The story of immigration, that great passage of people making their way to an unknown world, is only one kind of dislocation. “Displaced” is a synonym for “dislocated”; as is “to be put out of place”. Dislocation is also one form of discomfort and, in its most extreme form, alienation. In this sense dislocation is also timeless. It is the story of migrations, journeys that sometimes end badly, as well as the displacement from being one kind of person to being another.The poet Susan Mitchell says, “The world is wily and doesn’t want to be caught.” Writers attempt, or in some postmodern literature, question the attempt, to capture the elusive. This despite the challenge by the well-intended audience member: is it even possible for a writer to inhabit and understand other worlds and other voices? I suppose the next natural questions are: how do you define what is your world, and what is your voice? About the AuthorKrys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller, UK.www.krys.lee.comAlso by Krys Lee for PEN AtlasKorean Women Writers, Part 1 What we don’t know about North KoreaAdditional InformationSusan Mitchell (born in 1944) is an American poet, essayist and translator who wrote the poetry collections Rapture and Erotikon.Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Dissident and The Newlyweds and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family. The Newlyweds was published in the UK by Viking in August 2012. Read more about The Newlyweds here at Curtis Brown. 

  • Scottish Translation

    Sold-out duels, ninjas versus saints, and the invisible translator made visible… Daniel Hahn reports from Edinburgh International Book Festival for PEN Atlas

    Edinburgh is one of the great international book festivals. There are plenty of terrific book festivals out there, but to my mind it’s the strength of the international literary coverage in particular that makes Edinburgh special. With writers this year from more than forty countries, I don’t know a literary event programmed with an eye to wider horizons. What this means, of course, is that it’s a celebration of – and an examination of – writers who produce their work in many languages, writers whose extraordinary work has come to UK readers through the skill of English-language literary translators.

    This year, alongside the writers, the festival has included a strand of events putting the translators and their craft centre-stage. This series, programmed with the British Centre for Literary Translation and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, isn’t just about shoving the translator onto a stage to sit next to their writer, a well-meant gesture but which is mostly about helping the original writer get by in English; rather it’s made up of events about literary translation. Typically, of course, a translator expects to be invisible (that is apparently the most desirable state of affairs) – certainly nobody’s heard of us in the way they might have heard of our authors; and English-speaking audiences, we’re always told, aren’t on the whole interested in, or perhaps just aren’t comfortable with, discussions of the subject. So if we were to programme a series of events about translation, featuring in most cases a line-up of translators nobody’s ever heard of, would anyone show up to hear what we had to say? We put it to the test.

    Following a lively talk by David Bellos presenting his book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear, my own first event in the strand was chairing a discussion on translation between Nathan Englander and Etgar Keret. These two brilliant story-writers are good friends and serve as translators of one another’s work, and they promised many insights to share on the subject. We had more than fifty people show up, but that, I thought, was probably an anomaly; both Keret and Englander are big names to a book-festival crowd, capable of attracting audiences in decent numbers. It was them, not the subject, that accounted for those tickets being sold, perhaps.

    Translators, we were told in that event, were surely “saints”; but also, to Keret’s mind, “ninjas”. “As soon as you see them,” he explained, “they stop being any good.” A couple of days later, however, the translators were altogether visible – front, centre and under some very hot, very bright spotlights. And they were, it turned out, very good indeed.

    Both Monday and Tuesday night’s evening programmes at the festival included “translation duels”, in which a text is given in advance to two translators for each to produce their own English versions; at the event we present the two versions to an audience and discuss the discrepancies and what they tell us. We look at the ways each translator has interpreted the original differently, and how each has expressed what they want to express differently. It helps people who might not have given the subject much thought before to understand translation as both an interpretative undertaking and a creative undertaking, rather than a purely mechanical one.

    The first duel featured a text from Spanish, by Basque novelist Bernardo Atxaga (who also participated in the discussion), in versions presented by translators Rosalind Harvey and Frank Wynne. We discussed mostly pronouns, commas, Don Quixote, and the difference between a stream and a brook, and between “It held its head up” and “It carried its head high.” A little recondite? A tad esoteric? Just a touch nerdy? Yep, absolutely. Shamelessly, gleefully so. The following night, Frank returned for the second duel, this time from French (with a text by Laurent Binet), matched tonight with Adriana Hunter. This discussion was about sea lions, about the air force (or the airforce), research, italics, whether that second ‘to’ was really necessary, whether ‘gutbucket’ is appropriate in the context or possibly a hint too strong, and writing in the historical present.

    Frank, Rosalind and Adriana won’t mind my saying that none of them is what you might call famous. They are all, like me, like almost every translator, entirely unknown to readers. We don’t kid ourselves – our names don’t sell tickets to festival events. And both events were held in a 190-seater venue. And both sold out. So – might someone out there be a little bit interested in this subject after all?

    There was more to come; on Sunday, Ros Schwartz ran a public all-day translation workshop at the festival. On Monday Sarah Ardizzone and I took the stage for a wide-ranging, general discussion about literary translation (also sold-out). And then, of course, there were all those writers from those forty-something countries. Because really, our job, after all, is to make them look good, and to make it possible for readers in the UK to gain access to them. Because, no, it’s not about us, deep down. Their books are the point. But access to those books requires a strange thing, the complex sleight of hand that is literary translation, and I can’t help but being pleased that, for a change, readers were queuing up to ask questions about that part of the process, too.

    About the Author

    Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with some thirty books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include novels from Europe, Africa and Latin America, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé.

    A past chair of the UK Translators Association, he is currently programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.  He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (with his translation of Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons) and a Blue Peter Book Award (for The Ultimate Book Guide, the first in his series of reading guides for children and teenagers), and judged a number of prizes including the IFFP and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. 

     

  • Why we keep going

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Lydia Cacho writes about the post-traumatic stress of being a persecuted journalist, and the media’s appetite for titillation rather than indignation

    This is an edited and updated version of the piece ‘Reluctant Heroes’, which originally appeared in ‘Beyond Bars: 50 years of PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee’, a special issue of Index on Censorship.

    The first call is the one you never forget. The person uttering the death threat has spent days preparing for this moment – to let you know that your fate is sealed. Up until this phone call, or email, threats were something ethereal and alien, something that happened to other people.

    Over time, I learned what many journalists and writers have learned before me: acquiring powerful enemies as a result of revealing deeper truths unsettles us and sets us apart from our colleagues and loved ones. Against our will the threats somehow become as important as the original story we wrote.

    This dilemma dominates the rest of our lives, because for us to come through safely we need to be out there, in public, and never be silenced. At the same time, we have to always remain on guard, watching our backs, alert whenever we see a police or military patrol, reacting instantly to any sound resembling a gunshot, tensing every time a motorcycle accelerates or approaches, permanently on the lookout for a weapon in case the rider is a hitman. And on and on, we have to proclaim to the four winds, until we’re fed up with doing so – and everyone else is fed up with us too – the name of the mafioso, the politician, the policeman or the corrupt businessman who has put a price on our heads. Yet we yearn for the privacy and anonymity that would allow us to move around without being recognised, for those times when we used to have no need to conceal the names of our family members (for they are now vulnerable too).

    As well as the threat of death, there is the threat of imprisonment. Many of my colleagues, from Iraq to Colombia, Cambodia to Kenya, have published memoirs that deal with post-traumatic stress they have suffered as a result of their experiences in jail. Once out of jail, there is the coming to terms with working and earning money, no longer now simply to feed our children, to pay for fuel and water, or for cinema tickets, but to pay lawyers in whose hands – like a small fish out of water – our provisional freedom rests. We spend years in courtrooms, gathering evidence and convincing witnesses to risk their lives by coming on board with us. Cases of defamation are regularly brought against us with the intention of exhausting us emotionally and financially. The courts become yet another weapon the mafia or corrupt politicians can use against us.

    There are lessons to be learnt here. As more journalists become victims of the courts, those whose plight they are trying to expose also become victims. We must learn how to interview a victim without obliging them to relive their suffering. Let us learn to show compassion for those who dignify us with the confidence of their personal histories. Let us discover how to conduct investigations so that we do not hurt further those who have already suffered. Let us develop methods of inquiry that protect those victims (of war and the mafia, of natural disasters and domestic violence) whom we interview.

    We need to learn to operate in a world where mainstream media has been captivated by the spectacle of cruelty, by a morbid fascination with pseudo-pornography of violence, in which there is no pain without blood. In the fabulous world of ratings, to survive and maintain one’s dignity is hardly good news. There are always those who demand drama: a few tears from the Mexican journalist who was tortured and imprisoned, then raped in order to ensure her silence, feeds the morbid desire for titillation, not for indignation.

    In Uganda, the reporter whose hands were mutilated by the military in order to stop him ever writing again is asked to display his stump as if begging for pity. The media ask the Iraqi journalist to recount a hundred times over how US soldiers murdered her children to quell her voice, and how she herself washed their little bodies alone in her house. They insist the South African poet stops reading his verses of love and hope and instead relives the darkness of his cell, shows the camera the marks of the torture he has spent the last ten years trying to forget, and explains how the love of his family faded to the point where, one autumn afternoon, nobody at all came to visit him in prison. And they ask Anna the Russian female journalist – only two months before she dies – “Are you afraid that they’ll kill you? Have you ever thought what might become of your children?” To which she stoically replies, as one who recognises her struggle as moral as well as political must reply, that for as long as the lives of others are not secure, then neither is our own. Later, alone in her hotel room, she calms her sobs by burying her head in a feather pillow. In her dreams, she begs her children’s forgiveness and visualises a world in which those who tell the truth – about shameful acts of war and humanity’s incapacity to negotiate conflict, about the rapaciousness of the powerful, who use war to exterminate or for the acquisition of material goods – do not pay with their lives.

    When I was abducted and incarcerated by corrupted police, during the 20-hour torture I kept thinking “if this is it and I will die at least I did what was right for the children I interviewed”.

    I love being a journalist. I believe it is useful to society and I am proud of it, it’s a privilege to be able to publish my investigations and to stay alive. Our role as journalists is to push people beyond complacency; journalism is not about fame or ratings, is about offering an echo to the voices of otherwise voiceless people.  Every morning, I remember that if I do my job well I will help citizens acquire reliable, accurate information to make decisions in their community, and that is truly powerful; it makes me remember my job is meaningful and useful to society.

    Lydia Cacho would also like to mention other journalists whose work helps to give voice to the voiceless:  

    Carolin Emke from Germany, Amal Jumah Khamis from Palestine, Blanche Petrich, Lucía Lagunes from Mexico, Natasha Walter from the UK,  and Renee Nowtarger, photojournalist from Austria.

    About the Author

    Lydia Cacho is an award-winning author, journalist and women’s rights activist. Following the publication of her book on child pornography inMexicoin 2005, she was illegally arrested, detained and ill treated before being subjected to a year-long criminal defamation lawsuit. She was cleared of all charges in 2007 but has continued to be the target of harassment and threats due to her investigative journalism. In August 2012, she was forced to temporarily flee her native Mexico in the wake of particularly terrifying death threats.

    In addition to her work as a journalist, she founded and directs the Refuge Centre for Abused Women of Cancun and is president of the Centre for Women’s Assistance, which aids victims of domestic violence and gender discrimination.

    Lydia Cacho was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage in 2010.

    About the Translator

    Amanda Hopkinson has been active in Human Rights and literature throughout her life. Much of her writing has been concerned with and for, and influenced by publications on, human rights and freedom of expression. She has contributed, through writing, translating and editing, regularly to the magazine Index on Censorship. As an academic, she has been involved in establishing both Swansea and Norwich as ‘cities of refuge’, offering a haven to refugee writers. She has long supported the goals of PEN, a founding and enthusiastic member of PEN Writers in Translation committees, both in the US and UK, and is an active member of English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee.

    Launch of ‘Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking’

    Published by Portobello Books: 6 September 2012

    ‘Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, wilfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.’ 

    English PEN will be co-hosting the launch of Lydia’s latest book Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking (translated by Elizabeth Boburg) and belatedly presenting her with her PEN Pinter Prize at the Free Word Centre on 29 August.  Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion, and to show your support for Lydia.  Event details here. 

  • Lydia Cacho has gone

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Sanjuana Martinez pays tribute to her friend and colleague Lydia Cacho who has been forced to temporarily flee their native Mexico in the wake of terrifying deaths threats. 

    Translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Cat LucasI am writing this from the heart. There is no other way for me to do it. Lydia Cacho is not just a colleague and fellow journalist, but has been a friend of mine for years. We are united by a passion for our profession, by our commitment to the causes both of women and human rights, and of course by a friendship filled with affection and solidarity.The work that Lydia Cacho does in Mexico is as indispensable as the air we breathe. Her investigative journalism aims to remove the decadent layers of political corruption, both in business and in government.We know that nowadays independent and critical journalism has become a high risk profession, but Lydia has spent seven years living under impending threats from the people in power that she has so bravely identified in her work.Her books are her evidence of it. The most recent, Esclavas del Poder: un viaje al corazón de la trata sexual de mujeres y niñas en el mundo edited by Grijalbo (Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking) is an in-depth investigation not only into human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation and financial gain, but also into the people in power who profit from it. In addition there are her newspaper columns, which have become essential reading due to the amount of information they contain, stuffed with facts that shed light on subjects that normally would remain concealed because of the vested interests of differing sources of power.When a journalistic career is characterised by constant criticism and denunciation, it is sadly not unusual to be treated as a discomforting presence, and so become persecuted and banned from numerous professional outlets.  What is unusual is for the State to remain impervious to all the death threats that Cacho and so many other journalists have received. And what is shameful is that a journalist like Lydia Cacho, under threat of death, is forced into temporary exile to save her life and her life’s work.She is not the only one. A number of Mexican media professionals have found themselves forced into exile thanks to the indifference of Felipe Calderon’s government has shown towards more than 100 crimes against journalists that have gone unpunished.In Lydia’s case the lack of governmental action is particularly alarming. Since 2009, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) has been calling on the government to take precautionary measures for her protection, but Calderon and his negligent officials (from the Ministry of the Interior and the failed Special Prosecutor for Crimes Committed Against Journalists) have consistently ignored the urgency of adopting such measures.  It is obvious that they would prefer not to come to the defence of a critical voice.In the meantime, the journalist has been subject to accusations and persecution from one source after another.  On this most recent occasion [29 July 2012] the message was clear: “We already told you, vile bitch, don’t mess with us. We can see that you haven’t learnt from that little trip that we gave you. Next time we get you, you’ll be cut into little pieces, and that’s how we’ll send you home, idiot.”No prizes for guessing where the threat comes from. It originates in organised crime linked to political power. Lately, Lydia has been highly critical of the PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party]and of other parties in government in the many different states of the Republic, whilst her work on the networks that deal with sexual exploitation have revealed the disgusting abuses of many famously corrupt PRI officials.Mexico is now second only to Thailand in the extent of its sexual trafficking. It is a haven for traffickers who collaborate with regional governors in order to maximise their already substantial profits, then expend them in the exploitation of thousands more women and children.Lydia has always worked on a wide range of issues: she denounces paedophiles, but also corrupt politicians, members of the State who abuse human rights, authorities that exploit migrants, and legislators who refuse to review the law in favour of women’s rights. With her pen, she defends the most deserving of social sectors: indigenous communities, children, homosexuals, migrants, sex workers, and a whole range of other vulnerable groups. Her information sources have enabled her to build up a comprehensive archive of predators.As independent journalists, we know that difficult times are approaching regarding freedom of expression. The PRI has never been a model of respect for our members or our craft. Hindsight is revealing. And one only needs to look at what has happened in the last month for examples of attacks on the media, for example on the daily Monterrey newspaper El Norte. Censorship is the monster with a thousand heads, which never reveals its actual self but appears in myriad forms, such as that of the news service MVS, whose pressure on leader-writer John Ackerman led him to resign rather than yield to the silence of political complicity.Persecution is still in its earliest stages. The swords of Damocles drawn in order to silence independent or critical voices are advancing stealthily. The silence among colleagues who benefit from the present power structure is palpable. Pathetic attempts to cover up corruption, crimes and abuses are apparently far more important that the life of a single journalist, which counts for nothing in Mexico.No doubt there will be many who dream of a country without independent journalists; others will breathe a sigh of relief when critical journalists are exiled; and the rest of the shameless lowlifes will rejoice at the prospective demise of investigative journalism. But it won’t happen, make no mistake.Some of us have decided to continue the fight. Lydia Cacho will soon return. She is not prepared to leave her home, her loved ones, her friends. Nor will she abandon her country. This break is simply to allow her to work on a security strategy that will allow her to sustain her work in future.To those who dream of a Mexico where journalism submits to political power, I warn you: do not let yourselves be deceived. Such a day will never come. There will always be voices prepared to defend the truth, to fight to uncover the dark corners of the power structure, and to expose the content of its filthy sewers. All in good time. Only lies are in a hurry.Insisting on freedom, independent journalists like us are answerable only to our sources, to the human beings who trust us to tell their stories; not to the government, nor to politicians of any party. We owe it to the quest for truth, for justice, and to the victory of the common good.Sensing the fetid breath of evil at our backs only serves to give us the wings to fly higher. To the prophets of evil, to those governors that prefer silence, I suggest you don’t become over-confident. I remind you of the words of Bertolt Brecht: When truth is too weak to defend itself, it has to go on the attack.So it will be.The original version of this piece, ‘Lydia Cacho, se va’ was published on SINEMBARGO.MX, and has been translated and published on the
    PEN Atlas with the permission of the author.

    About the Author

    Multi-award winning Mexican journalist Sanjuana Martinez was born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico in 1963. Her work focuses on issues related to the defence of human rights, gender violence, terrorist activity and organised crime in Mexico, the United States and Europe. Martinez has been subject to threats, harassment and persecution for her reporting since 2006, in retaliation for writing about alleged links between child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church in Mexico, and was the focus of a PEN International action to mark Women’s Day in 2009.Martinez, who has worked for a range of major media outlets in Mexico, now works as a freelance journalist, and is also a regular contributor to one of Mexico’s leading daily newspapers, La Jornada.

    About the Translators

    Amanda Hopkinson has been active in Human Rights and literature throughout her life. Much of her writing has been concerned with and for, and influenced by publications on, human rights and freedom of expression. She has contributed, through writing, translating and editing, regularly to the magazine Index on Censorship. As an academic, she has been involved in establishing both Swansea and Norwich as ‘cities of refuge’, offering a haven to refugee writers. She has long supported the goals of PEN, a founding and enthusiastic member of PEN Writers in Translation committees, both in the US and UK, and is an active member of English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee.Cat Lucas is Writers at Risk Programme Manager at English PEN, responsible for campaigning on behalf of PEN’s cases of concern around the world. She graduated from University College London in 2007 with a BA in French and Spanish. Her translations of poetry and short stories by Cuban writer Jorge Olivera Castillo have been published in the magazine Index on Censorship and online.

    Additional Info

    Lydia Cacho is an award-winning author, journalist and women’s rights activist. Following the publication of her book on child pornography inMexicoin 2005, she was illegally arrested, detained and ill treated before being subjected to a year-long criminal defamation lawsuit. She was cleared of all charges in 2007 but has continued to be the target of harassment and threats due to her investigative journalism. In August 2012, she was forced to temporarily flee her native Mexico in the wake of particularly terrifying death threats.In addition to her work as a journalist, she founded and directs the Refuge Centre for Abused Women of Cancun and is president of the Centre for Women’s Assistance, which aids victims of domestic violence and gender discrimination.Lydia Cacho was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage in 2010.

    Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking

    Published by Portobello Books: 6 September 2012‘Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, wilfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.’English PEN will be co-hosting the launch of Lydia’s latest book Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking (translated by Elizabeth Boburg) and belatedly presenting her with her PEN Pinter Prize at the Free Word Centre on 29 August.  Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion, and to show your support for Lydia.  Event details here. 

  • Roots of Corruption: the perils of free expression in Azerbaijan

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece Azerbaijani writer and dissident Emin Milli discusses the power – and corruption – of words and reflects on journalist Khadija Ismayilova’s recent experience of blackmail by the authorities

    In Azerbaijan, you often hear from all sorts of different people that words do not matter. Expressions like “bosh-bosh sozler” (empty-empty words) or “bosh-bosh danishir” (empty talking) are common. Our society is extremely sceptical about the power of words. This, in my opinion, has been the major victory and achievement of the autocracy in our country since 1993. But how is it possible to make the whole nation believe that words do not really matter, that they are empty and meaningless? How is it possible? Well, it is possible when people who present themselves or are presented to a society as masters of words, written or spoken, shapers of forms and meanings of the words, start to use the words as barriers behind which they hide their cowardice, venality and hypocrisy.To corrupt the whole of society the regime decided to corrupt words first, to deprive them of their true meaning. Corrupt authoritarianism needs words to lose their meaning. But the victory of corruption here is only temporary. It is temporary because we always have rebels who believe that words are not dead and who bring the words back to life by standing behind them and often suffering the consequences. These people are on the frontline of the struggle for the purity of words, they fight for words free from corruption and thus fight for a society free from corruption.These people have courage not to run away when the corrupt state wants them to pay a high price for reinstating words with their true meaning. One of those courageous people is Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova. She started to investigate and write about businesses owned by the family of the president in Azerbaijan and around the world. Of course, she had to be punished for writing the truth and exposing the regime. It was decided that her private life would be exposed in order to tarnish her reputation and to provoke “natural” attacks on her. The regime planted a hidden camera in her bedroom. Her relatives received the incriminating photos of her with her boyfriend. When she refused to be silenced, a video of her and her boyfriend was put online. The official newspaper of the ruling party started to accuse her of lax morals hinting at the video with its intimate content available online.Azerbaijan is a country where the majority of the population considers itself to be Muslim. It is fairly secular after 70 years of communist rule, but socially, it is still very conservative and increasingly more religious. To show a woman in this way is to invite her relatives to defend the honour of the family, to possibly kill her and to invite society to condemn her for her liberal lifestyle. Khadija is also an outspoken atheist who provokes religious circles and there was genuine fear that the masses might want to lynch her in the streets. That might have been “the grand plan” of the regime. But the opposite happened, something miraculous, deeply touching and human. The most conservative religious circles issued a statement in her support praising her courage in exposing the lies and corruption of the ruling elite. Everyone was appalled and even those who usually remain silent and live in fear, spoke up against such an immoral attack against a powerless woman. The government suddenly formally condemned “this crime” despite the prosecutor’s office ignoring Khadija’s officially lodged complaint for several days. The video was not shown on any television in Azerbaijan during prime time, something that had happened before with other journalists and unfortunately had silenced them.Questions keep going through my mind when I think about Khadija’s case. Why did the corrupt state with their billions of dollars and the absolute monopoly on violence fail to silence one woman and basically step back, why were religious and conservative circles on her side and not against her, why was a socially conservative society overwhelmingly on her side? Perhaps because everyone in our society started to feel in this particular case the power of true words and saw the courage of this woman who stands behind her words no matter what the consequences? She tried to fight the root of corruption in our society – the corruption of words. Only free words can liberate millions of hearts and minds from fear and corruption.Khadija today is the center of the Free Word in Azerbaijan. It is one of those cases when one person turns into an institution and becomes the symbol of struggle for freedom of expression. She made many people believe again that words are not empty, but can become powerful tools in the transformation of human conscience and social reality. There is still a long way to go for our society to declare independence from corruption, but her act of courage undoubtedly leads us in that direction.About the AuthorEmin Milli is a writer and dissident living in Azerbaijan. In 2009, he was imprisoned for two and a half years for his critical views about the government of Azerbaijan. Amnesty International considered that Emin Milli was a  prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression and association and campaigned for his release. He was conditionally released in November 2010, after serving 16 months of his sentence.

    Additional Information

    Khadija Ismayilova is an award-winning professional journalist based in Baku. Between 2008 and 2010 she served as Bureau Chief of RFE/RL which she left to host full-time apopular phone-in radio programme, ‘After Work’, on the Azerbaijani RFE service, Azadliq Radio. She has held editor positions with several Azerbaijani newspapers since 1997 and as a reporter for EurasiaNet and Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.”Taken from News Xchange You can read more about Khadija’s case here in Index on Censorship and here, in the Independent.

  • Grammar and Glamour: On Translating Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar

    Following our previous PEN Atlas piece by Diego Marani, his English translator Judith Landry talks us through the strange music of Finnish and translation as walking a tight-rope

    Diego Marani, the author of ‘New Finnish Grammar’ which I have recently translated, adopts a blessedly laissez-faire attitude towards his translators: they know best. Such modesty and trust are surely unusual; many translators have their work criticized by authors who clearly do not know their language as well as they do. I had always dreamt of translating a living author whom I could consult if difficulties arose. But in this case none did (or so I am blithe enough to believe). It felt like an opportunity missed. When asked what it felt like to be ‘collaborating’ with Marani, I would reply that there was no collaboration. He wrote and I translated. But it was strange, and exciting, to set eyes on ‘my’ author; I only wished that I had some questions to ask him … At one point he and I had our photograph taken by a photographer specializing in ‘authors and their translators’. Now there’s a subject for you. The photographer asked us to sit nearer to one another on the sofa; I said we didn’t know each other very well.

    On first reading this novel, I was not at all sure that I could do it justice, but as I proceeded things just seemed to fall into place (or so I am blithe enough …) There is a lot in it about sound, about breathing, about the way words are formed in Finnish, that strangest of languages – it often seems to me that writing in French and Italian, the two languages from which I translate, has more in it about sound than writing in English does; words about sounds are inevitably abstract, and I have sometime found this to be a problem; I’m not sure sound interests me all that much, though the loss is certainly mine.

    The title itself is bewitching, if in a sense meaningless. New Finnish Grammar? Not many novels have the word ‘grammar’ in the title, and no doubt it was as off-putting to some as it was intriguing to others, though I gather that the words ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ are somehow related, odd though this may seem. In any translation, there are always particularly appealing phrases or sentences in the original to which the translator simply cannot do justice, and all that he or she can hope for is to improve on the original at some other point, thereby evening things out after a fashion.

    There is much talk nowadays about the most apposite metaphor for translation. I go along with the tight-rope walker metaphor myself; it’s not quite like walking between the Twin Towers, but it does feel dangerous, you’re never sure quite how much of a safety-net you have or which phrase might cause you to lose your balance. In a way, perhaps, that long pole that tightrope walkers hold is your knowledge of your own language, and the safety-net is your knowledge of the other. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

    About the Author

    Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

    Her translations are: The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Prague Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.

    Her latest translation is The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, published in May 2012 by Dedalus.
     
    She won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for New Finnish Grammar in June 2012.  Find out more.

     

     

     

  • Worlds apart: Russia online and offline

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Arkady Babchenko writes on freedom of speech, media and the internet in Russia

    Freedom of speech in Russia remains only on the internet. In fact, Russia exists in two parallel worlds, as it were, two roughly equal parts. According to the recent statistics, the number of internet users has matched the audience of the state-owned TV Channel One, which is the main propaganda tool of the authorities today. These two worlds do not cross at any point. A person who tries browsing the internet once will never go back to television. Internet users no longer want to watch the low-quality Russian TV which offers cheap propaganda of the sort that probably does not exist even in North Korea. Russian TV has been reduced to a downright rubbish heap. When my daughter was born five years ago I unplugged my TV and have never had any need for official TV news again. The Internet is much faster and provides more accurate and objective news. Moreover, it is not censored yet.

    On the other hand, television still enjoys enormous influence in the country and the government effectively uses it to brainwash the public. Not a single piece of news can seep through if it is undesirable. All the information is carefully filtered and presented in the intended light. No live shows are permitted.

    If you were to compare the news on the same day on TV and the internet the difference would be colossal. It’s as if they showed two countries. The online and offline Russias are worlds apart. People who get their information from the Internet will hardly find a common language with those who get it from the “zombie-set”, as the TV came to be called here. They would simply have different points of reference as facts are shamelessly distorted on TV.

    One recent example to illustrate the difference between the censored TV and the uncensored internet view of the same event is how differently the opening of a bridge by Medvedev was reported. The TV showed Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (former president replacing the current president and former Prime Minister Vladimir Putin) pompously opening a new bridge in Vladivostok, which was specially erected for the summit and declared to be the largest suspension bridge on earth. It would seem we have a great cause for pride and celebration. However, it was not mentioned anywhere, except on the internet, that after Medvedev’s departure the bridge was immediately closed because it was not properly finished yet and was unfit for driving. Moreover, the newly built road leading to the bridge (which cost one billion dollars!) was simply washed away by the floods.

    There is also no news in the official media about the hundred- and two-hundred-strong anti-Putin rallies taking place not only in Moscow but all over Russia for the past few months. As if they never happened. You will not learn how the governor of the Krasnodar Region, where Sochi is situated, the venue for the Winter 1914 Olympics, stole several hundred hectares of preserved forest, fenced it in and built a mansion there for himself while two ecologists who tried to protect the national preserve were tried and convicted. You will only learn the truth from the internet, the sad truth of how top officials steal from the state while their children become managers of state corporations and banks, how opposition activists are languishing in prisons, how elections were brazenly forged, and much else. Instead, the Russian TV tells you some nonsense about a handful of discontented individuals who come out to protest against the universally adored Vladimir Putin because they’ve been paid by our enemies from the US State Department and personally by Hilary Clinton. This is not a joke – such is the level of information at the official Russian TV. These programs are interspersed with all sorts of rubbish, such as appalling films full of vulgar humor, violence and sex. The rhetoric of the Stalinist times is coming back to Russian TV. The authorities are obviously aware of an imminent catastrophe and in their attempt to hold on to their feeding troughs they are losing their minds and any sense of reality. We can speak today about a new iron curtain, this time in the sphere of information.

    As a result, increasing numbers of people boycott the TV. I personally stopped having anything to do with TV journalists – all my interviews were crudely put together from random phrases taken out of context so that my ideas were completely distorted. The internet presents real danger for the authorities today. I think either the authorities will have to do away with the internet or the other way round.

    The situation is much the same in the print media. Prior to publication any text has to pass three levels of censorship. The first is the general political censorship existing in our country. Everyone is aware that there are forbidden subjects and forbidden names. They are well known and no clarification is necessary. Putin’s friend, Yuri Kovalchuk, is buying one newspaper after another and establishing strict censorship there. At the same time they publish private correspondence obtained from hackers, recordings of private telephone conversations from bugged phones, and other illegally obtained dirt. All this is dug up with the help of the secret services, but none will lead to public enquiries and possible downfall, as in the case of Rupert Murdoch because the demand comes not from the public, but from the powers that be.

    The second level of censorship is the internal editorial control in the media, not officially imposed by the government, and which functions differently depending on the media. For example, the media who wish to be independent, but have to play by the rules or disappear, like Yandex. They started as a search engine and soon became a starting point for the entire ru.net and a powerful information resource, a Russian alternative to Google. Yandex sincerely wanted to behave in a civilized manner but finally was obliged to introduce censorship. A few days ago all the top news lines were devoted to Putin – welcome to North Korea!

    Then there is truly independent media. But the problem is that they are no longer objective.  In the absence of a political field in Russia the media no longer perform the function of an information source as such. And since, as is well known, nature abhors a vacuum, the media has assumed the aberrant role of political parties. Nowadays readers choose periodicals not on the basis of their quality, but according to their political orientation and compatibility with their own views. For instance, the readers of the Zavtra (Tomorrow) will never subscribe to Novaya Gazeta (New Paper) even if Hemingway himself were to publish there. Or vice versa.

    It goes for the journalists too – a text contradicting the views of the editors will never be published. Journalists, generally known here for their lack of principles and for moral pliancy, know this factor very well and make good use of it. For instance, if you write for the opposition media, you are supposed to avoid mentioning certain things and emphasize certain other things while some word combinations would be taboo altogether. For the liberal-minded media you can get away with just mentioning the “bloody regime”. For the patriotic-minded press the word “regime” should be replaced with “NATO” which naturally should also be called “bloody”.

    If you observe only these rules of censorship, you can get any text published, however mediocre, even on the front page. If you don’t observe these rules and write what you really think and how you actually see things your text has very little chance of publication.

    In today’s journalism your intellectual abilities and your talent are of the least importance – the main thing is the tendentiousness of your text, and a required orientation. If you play by the rules you’ll be in clover.

    In apolitical periodicals there is another form of censorship – the format. In my understanding there are two types of texts: good or bad, interesting or boring. But the difference between the right format and the wrong format is something I don’t understand. Or perhaps I do. This is the editors’ pretext to reject articles, a reason well known the world over, a kind of a soap bubble: pretty on the outside and empty inside, a trendy envelope with zero content.

    To sum up: I’m sick and tired of selecting the correct words. I’m sick and tired of taking into consideration the editors’ views and political orientations. I’m sick and tired of kowtowing to them so as to be able to publish some banal rubbish instead of producing intelligible and well-written articles about really urgent and interesting things.

    Therefore, I abandoned the media in favour of the internet and now I use a simple scheme which is already functioning in many countries. Essentially, it boils down to a short formula: “I write what I think and you pay what you can.” In other words, I write my texts with maximum objectivity, without taking into account any editorial policies, I share my thoughts and ideas with the reader without regard to format, and the reader evaluates my texts in the form of a direct payment, bypassing any middlemen and editorial offices with their correct policies and incomprehensible formats.

    I’m satisfied with this relationship and it seems my readers are as well. In my blog I can write what I want without thinking whether the editors will accept my texts or not, whether I’ll be promoted or discharged. And it gives me a sense of freedom.

    Moreover, now that I’m only writing for my blog I have not fallen out of the information space but, on the contrary, I’m now more actively involved in it. Due to the vacuum in the media “Live Journal” (Zhivoy Zhurnal) in Russia has grown into a powerful independent resource, at least for the time being. My articles came to be reprinted by many leading information agencies and periodicals.

    This involves some personal risks, of course. As an active oppositionist calling on people to fight for their freedom I have had a court case opened against me, accusing me of “instigating mass riots”. The secret services are watching over me, my telephone is bugged, and when I make myself a cup of tea I hope to god there is no polonium in it. But as we say in Russian: “He who is afraid of wolves should not go into the forest” – that is, nothing ventured nothing gained.

    In fact, thanks to the internet, everything becomes public now. The journalistic community rose to my defence and so I do not feel alone in the face of the regime. There are many bloggers like me and victory will be ours. Long live the internet, a perfect space for freedom!

    About the Author

    Arkady Babchenko was born in 1977 in Moscow. A lawyer by training he was drafted to the army while still a student and spent three years fighting in Chechnya (Northern Caucasus). After demobilization he finished college and wrote his famous war memoires now published in 22 countries. He has mainly worked as a war correspondent for various media, including for Novaya Gazeta. The last two years he has been an active blogger and opposition activist. He lives in Moscow, is married and has a little daughter.

    One Soldier’s War in Chechnya was published by Portobello Books and English PEN’s Writers in Translation Programme supported the book in 2007. Arkady Babchenko’s blog can be found here.

    About the Translator

    Natasha Perova is the publisher of Glas, a magazine for contemporary Russian writing and a coordinator of international programme for Debut Prize Foundation.

  • Translation as a Creative Process

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, award-winning Italian writer and European Commission official Diego Marani considers the role of the author in the translation process

    For any writer, being translated is always flattering. But it is also a delicate passage, because the translation implies a transformation of the text an author cannot control. Even with a good knowledge of the target language, no writer is able to express a pertinent judgement on the translation of his book and is in some way condemned to have a passive role in the process. Many writers are very jealous of their texts and cannot accept not to have any control on the translation. They often adopt an intrusive attitude towards the translator and pretend to interfere in his work, even when they have a very superficial knowledge of the language. They think in this way to preserve the authenticity of their text and to protect it from alterations. Alteration of the original: this is the obsession of all writers! They forget that their sacred original text is but one of the many possibilities they had, the compromise between what they felt and what they were able to say. The translation of a book should be seen in this light, as a mediation between the original and the target culture. There is no other translation possible. To translate is not to pour out from one language into another. It is a kind of chemical process where the text must be reduced to its essential components and reassembled into the target language.For my part, I tend to have a completely different approach when one of my books is translated. I consider the translator a “second author” of my book, engaged in a creative process as deep and delicate as mine. He too must decide which of the  many possible ways best  conveys my meaning into his own language. I am ready to place my trust in him. He will have a perception of my text which I cannot have, he will see similarities between my language and his own which I cannot see.I am very much aware that sometimes, in order to obtain the same effects and atmosphere of a text in the target language, you have to modify the original. The translator needs to recreate connections that would be lost with a rigid translation. He has to take into account the cultural background of both languages. He will be the only one, able to grasp the music of a text, and I expect him to recreate in his translation a rhythm as similar as possible to the original. We must not forget that languages are first of all spoken, only afterwards written. Even if we read in silence, there is a music in our page like in a musical stave. I attach great importance to what my page sounds like. I often recite my texts after having written them. I need to hear also the sound of the language: it must fit with the rest. The smoothness of the words, the way they stick together, the pace of narration are as important as the plot. They are one of the ingredients of my writing. What I can do in order to help the translator is not to check words in a language I do not know and presume meanings I cannot completely grasp, but rather give him the most exhaustive information on the spirit of the text, the ideas that lie behind it, my thoughts and my feelings on the matter. Then there has to be trust. Though in a different way, we are both artists. The creativity of the translator lies exactly in this, that he grasps what I mean and has the ability to extract it from my page and graft it in the living tissue of another language.

    About the Author

    Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He works as a senior linguist for the European Union in Brussels.Every week he writes a column for a Swiss newspaper about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus.In Italian he has published six novels, including the highly acclaimed New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs, published in the UK by Dedalus Books.English PEN’s Writers in Translation Programme supported Diego’s latest novel The Last of the Vostyachs in 2012Judith Landry, the translator of  New Finnish Grammar was awarded the Oxford- Weidenfeld Prize for Translation in May 2012.