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  • Interrogating Bodies: Irenosen Okojie in Conversation with Aki Schilz

    Interrogating Bodies: Irenosen Okojie in Conversation with Aki Schilz

    As part of our Digital Literary Salon, Irenosen Okojie speaks to Aki Schilz about bodies, musicality, and placing black women at the centre.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    AKI SCHILZ: Nudibranch is full of glorious weirdness. It is visceral; full of collisions, strangeness, familiar things twisted through several degrees until we cannot be sure about what we are seeing. There is music in these pages, but much is also done with silence. The characters (among whom a Grace Jones lookalike is haunted by the past and present, an albino man in Mozambique becomes obsessed with the idea of gifting a lost town water, a goddess plucks hearts from the chests of eunuchs) live on the edge in worlds where the edges bleed into the middle. The language delights in itself, words and sentences performing leaps and tumbles, rushing at the speed of the imagination.

    I’d like to start with a question about writing in general. Your debut novel, Butterfly Fish, is a book about ancestry. In this collection, the stories are wonderfully varied in theme – at once tight and loose – but there are certain hauntings throughout its pages. In terms of your own literary inheritance, can you share with us some of your writing inspirations for Nudibranch?

    IRENOSEN OKOJIE: I love Jamaica Kincaid’s visionary, often confounding stories, where the idea of narrative – or what the Western canon deems to be rules of narrative structure – completely goes out of the window. It’s like falling through a series of wormholes with the light at the end seductively pulling you in then eluding you all over again. Kincaid writes about the Caribbean landscape, specifically Antigua, in a poetic style that give her pieces an ethereal, prophetic power. It’s the Caribbean, but not as you know it. Sometimes her pieces feel like a series of paintings, mirages or elliptical vignettes. You’re not sure where what you’re reading will take you and, by the end, you wonder if the pieces themselves will shimmer away. While I was writing Nudibranch, I re-read Kincaid to give me courage. During those tricky days when I questioned whether I belonged in the writing space (I’m sure every writer has those days), Kincaid absolutely gave me permission to write the collection; to be completely uncompromising in terms of my ideas and the intentions behind the stories. The point for me is to have total freedom on the page and to revel in my love of weirdness. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a series of profound musings on the colour blue, stunned me. Maggie’s a poet and author, although I wouldn’t define the pieces as solely poetry. They’re like meditations, really. Sometimes there’s so much meaning in just three sentences that you can sit with that inside you for a while. You don’t even have to comprehend its meaning immediately; you feel like it can be slowly revealed to you throughout the day, or maybe even a week later. You’re drunk on it in the moment, then have delayed reactions later. It’s full of wisdom, melancholy and beauty, but there’s also a nakedness there about the internal injuries women carry around, which threaten to rupture at inopportune moments but also give us a quiet power, if we claim it. I really embraced that. I feel like Maggie is a writing descendant of Gertrude Stein. This makes me smile, to think of literary ancestors and descendants. I carried Bluets around in my handbag for a year. The book kept speaking to me long after I finished it.

    Musically, I was listening to Zap Mama a lot. I think she’s genius. Her albums are hybrid offerings, and at the centre is the celebration of her African ancestry, which is marvellous. I’m intrigued by her use of sound too. I walk around with my dog making odd noises all the time because playing with sound is fun. Zap Mama incorporates these strange sounds into her tracks, taking you somewhere else. One moment you’re on a certain plane, then you’re on another, ushered there by what can on first listen seem disruptive but somehow makes sense in the zany ecosystems of tracks she creates. Also, Young Fathers. I love them. There isn’t another band like them right now. Deliciously dark and modern with African ancestral rhythms shapeshifting through their tracks in subtle and overt ways. Their stuff has a mythic feel to it – like the process of listening to them is somehow giving offerings to gods.

    I would be remiss to not mention the incredible work of author and playwright Ntozake Shange. We lost her last year. Here was a writer who straddled multiple forms so excellently. For Colored Girls isn’t just a play; it’s poetry, it’s a mapping of Shange’s experiences, a blueprint that will ripple through the ages. Lastly, when I’m working on any writing project, I read one June Jordan poem a day. She was just a bad-ass – an astonishing artist, a deeply intelligent thinker. It’s like having an apple a day.

    It’s interesting that, when you describe music that has influenced you, you use terms that could very well be taken straight from a review of your own work: ‘strange sounds’, ‘shapeshifting’. The musicality and poetry of your writing can really be felt. Incidentally, I too am in love with Bluets!

    You’ve talked about the fact that this collection was written at a difficult time in your life. Without making the connection that these are the only conditions in which art might be created (an at-times dangerous untruth), do you feel that the difficulty created some of the necessary friction or impetus for these stories specifically? They feel particularly charged to me, and almost physical.

    I’m speaking here about my specific circumstances at the time of writing when I made that comment. Of course, art can be produced when that’s not the case, but the writing was a survival mechanism through a very hard period. A bit like splaying your arms out to cushion a fall. Alongside that, it’s my response to navigating the world as a black woman, where lots of spaces can be hostile or limiting or not acknowledging of the full spectrum of our humanity. The default setting is to be innovative as a response – at least mine is. One of my favourite video artists, Arthur Jafa articulates this aspect really well. He talks about the connection between Avant-gardism and blackness – that for black people to be avant-garde is the difference between life and death, a perpetual state of freefall. It’s not an indulgence for us. That really struck a chord with me. When I thought about it on a deep level, it actually makes a lot sense. When there are systems in place actively working against you, you have to get creative about how you survive that shit. I’m talking about blackness in particular here. If you look at black artistry over the ages, there are reasons why the work is often so charged and affecting. That’s not a coincidence to me. If you listen to Nina Simone’s ‘How It Feels to Be Free’, Billy Holiday, Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear’ War or read a James Baldwin novel, there are reasons why the work is so powerful: they carry multitudes within them. The true cost of writing for each writer is different. There are hidden difficulties which sometimes don’t come to the fore. The process of translating my lived experiences, and those of other black women and marginalised voices – writing them into the centre in these fantastical stories – felt liberating yet urgent. As though the window of time to write them wouldn’t come again. So much complicated stuff was happening in my life at that point. That’s the reason why the stories feel so charged. Writing them was like presenting a series of dances. Moving on the page without the restrictions I sometimes feel navigating the world.

    Speaking of dancing, the body figures heavily in this collection, in particular the body in motion and the body dismantled: there are severed tongues; there is the liquorice body of a Black woman collapsing and consumed by strangers; a too-sentient automaton of whom there is eventually ‘nothing left, as intended’; a body bending backwards through time. Then there are the more subtle references: a silver pulse physically manifest at a man’s throat, a woman’s body filled with visions that spill as beads, a man’s chest filled with a single conversation about atoms, a woman imagining herself covered in chicken skin, naked on a chopping board. Were you consciously playing with ideas of the body, and if so, what was the pull and significance for you?

    Sometimes I’m actively doing it, other times it’s subconscious. With ‘Kookaburra Sweet’ (the story about a woman becoming liquorice), I’m deliberately making a commentary here about the way the Western world treats black women and their bodies. The dichotomy of a fascination with the black female form juxtaposed against the cruelties imposed on those bodies has happened for centuries. Black women prop up their communities; they carry the burdens of the world on their shoulders – which needs to stop, since there’s really no real reward to this ‘strong’ archetype. So, yes, in one sense, it’s a story about a woman becoming what she eats. In another, there are other things going on. I don’t hide any of this. It’s there in the text. The wonderful thing about writing is that, to me, there’s no right or wrong way of interpreting a piece. There are just different takes, varied perspectives which expands the discourse around the work. Some months back, I met another black woman at a party who’d read the collection. She highlighted that piece. She said, ‘We need to talk about that story. I understand what you’re saying. There are levels there we should unpack, we need to have a conversation about it’. It just intrigued me that we were meeting for the first time yet here was this shorthand about what a story means. I think I’m in interested in interrogating the body. The body dismantled if you will, then reconfigured. The body in decline; its incredible ability to heal and regenerate. I have a sister with difficult health conditions, I’ve seen her body oscillate between good and bad states. Exploration in my work is probably one way of making sense of that.

    Exploration is a brilliant way to imagine what writing is, and what your writing is setting out to do. In another interview, you stated that you believed art should come from a place of ‘curiosity rather than authority’, which I think chimes with this. You have also said that great writing should cause ‘a shift, a reaction, a response’. Can you tell us a little more about this?

    A place of curiosity leaves room to embrace ideas or seeds you may not have expected to come your way. It makes the experience feel elastic rather than rigid. This approach lends itself to my writing style, but it applies generally too. If you think you already have all the answers, what is there to learn? Writing is a process of investigation. If you keep yourself open, and you do the work, the joy of the craft shows on the page. You gain so much more. All work has its value. Great art can move you deeply. It can cause you to change your stance on a particular subject or interrogate years of insidious indoctrination. At its heart, great art is about developing more empathy for each other, I feel. Like a lot of teenagers, I thought my mother was there to antagonise me, but then I read Buchi Emecheta’s In The Ditch; what that taught me about the immigrant experience for women like my mother made me understand her more. It made me love her even more. I gave the book to her to read and then we had conversations about it. This seemingly simple act carried a lot of weight at the time. Equally, you can’t read Toni Morrison’s work and not be moved the way she charts the histories of African Americans, or Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and her uncanny depiction of how feral young girls can be at certain age, how dangerously they toy with each other.

    It feels very much like, in a sense, you are also saying writing is an act of love. And that love can be difficult, and brutal, but that it is essential. We cannot be in the world and imagine that by force of will it will change around us. But we can do what you have done here, and reach out with loving arms and ears; lend our curiosity to the world, and create something from what we observe, hear, feel in our bones and bodies. Thank you for doing that with your work, and helping us to do the same.

    As a final question, can you tell us which of the stories in Nudibranch you most enjoyed writing, and which you found the most challenging to write?

    I really enjoyed writing ‘Grace Jones’, ‘Nudibranch’, ‘Cornutopia’, ‘Mangata’, ‘Komza Bright Morning’, ‘Daishuku’ and ‘Synsepalum’. I’ve always wanted to write about monks, so ‘Filamo’ posed an interesting challenge just in terms of which direction I’d take the story. ‘Saudade Minus One’ was challenging because I’d never written something sci-fi-ish. I was really passionate about telling that story though, so my excitement surpassed any anxieties I had. Every single story felt like a risk in some way. When that’s the case, I know writing it is the right thing.

    Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British writer. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Observer,The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize winning author Ben Okri as a dynamic writing talent to watch and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular, published by Jacaranda Books was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new collection of stories, Nudibranch is published by Little Brown’s Dialogue Books.  www.irenosenokojie.com @IrenosenOkojie  

    Aki Schilz is the Director of The Literary Consultancy, the UK’s longest-running editorial consultancy for writers, providing editing services, mentoring and literary events. She is a Trustee of Poetry London, and sits on the advisory board for the award-winning publisher Penned in the Margins. Aki is a judge for the Bridport First Novel Award and the Creative Future Literary Awards. In 2018 Aki was named as one of the FutureBook 40 (a list of the top 40 innovators in UK publishing), and nominated for an h100 Award for her #BookJobTransparency campaign and her work to improve representation and accessibility in the literature sector. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize, which recognises the contributions and achievements of women in publishing. Aki is the founder of the Rebecca Swift Foundation, in memory of TLC’s founder. The Foundation runs the Women Poets’ Prize, a free-to-enter award offering year-long support and cash prizes to women poets, supported by industry partners including RADA, Faber and Faber, Verve Festival, and CityLit. @TLCUK @AkiSchilz 

    This series features voices from the 2020 programme of the English PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair (LBF). LBF is the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. Taking place every spring in the world’s premier publishing and cultural capital, it is a unique opportunity to explore, understand and capitalise on the innovations shaping the publishing world of the future. LBF brings you direct access to customers, content and emerging markets. LBF 2021, the 50th Fair, will take place from 9-11 March 2021, Olympia London. LBF’s London Book and Screen Week will run for the fourth year, with the book fair as the pivotal three-day event within a seven-day programme. For further information, please visit: www.londonbookfair.co.uk

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  • The Darker Emotions of Being a Woman: Hazel Barkworth in Conversation with Hannah Trevarthen

    The Darker Emotions of Being a Woman: Hazel Barkworth in Conversation with Hannah Trevarthen

    As part of our Digital Literary Salon, Hazel Barkworth speaks to Hannah Trevarthen about summertime, the writing process, and ‘unlikeable’ women characters.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    HANNAH TREVARTHEN: Heatstroke really captures the oppressive heat and tension of a long, hot summer (for me, it had atmospheric echoes of Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave and Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep). Can you talk about the setting of the book and how this came about? 

    HAZEL BARKWORTH: I struggle with summer. Everyone else seems delighted, but I find direct sunlight aggressive and unbearable. There are those three weeks or so, every year, when the heat becomes something tangible, an unavoidable force to be tackled. I wanted to play with what happens in those dog days, when it’s impossible to react sanely. And I wanted to position that heat within suburbia. It is a place that’s so often seen as dull – as sub-urban – but where so much of life happens. Many of us grow up there, and lives in those less-known towns are just as full of passion and intensity. But they are also places that people yearn to leave, and being trapped somewhere overwhelmingly hot felt like a perfect setting for the emotional situation of the book.

    The catalyst for the book is the actions of one man, and then his absence; but is very much a book that explores the multifaceted nature of female relationships: mother and daughter, fraught teenage friendships, connections between mothers. Why did you choose for the women to be central to this story? I really like how you never understand Mark’s motivations from his point of view.

    I feel that, so often, we’re asked to understand and empathise with situations – even terrible ones – from a male perspective. In Heatstroke, I only wanted to look at the women who are affected: how they respond, how their distress plays out, how they process his shame, and how they begin to grow beyond it. The tangled relationships between the women were more interesting to me. Mark’s fingerprints are all over the story, but he’s never seen in person. We catch glimpses on television screens, in newspaper print, through memories, but I didn’t want to give him a voice. I wanted him to stay very much on the edges of the story.

    It is also a novel about obsession and female desire. Could you talk about the importance of representing these experiences? 

    It was fascinating to me that some early readers of the book called Rachel an unlikeable character. I was slightly taken aback, because I think she’s just realistic. I wanted to explore the darker emotions of being a person, and being a woman – vanity, jealousy, recklessness, selfishness – because I think they are things we all grapple with every day. When a male character displays these traits, they are so often seen as relatable antiheroes; in women, they are repugnant. I didn’t want to write a woman who had to be a beacon of goodness to be understood or valued. And it’s much more fun to see what happens in those shadows!

    The notion of the ‘unlikeable woman’, in my mind, harks back to the idea of the monstrous regiment of women. Could you talk a bit more about exploring the shadows, and the darker side of female identity? The comments of early readers reflect back the societal notion that women need to present as ‘likeable’.  How can we break these expectations?

    I think you’re absolutely right – female characters can be villains, but otherwise are preferred to be kind and moral. There doesn’t seem to be as much space for the ordinary cruelty and complexity of being human. We see this so much in real life – female business leaders, celebrities, politicians all must display softness, otherwise they are thought of as abrasive. I don’t think it is just the male gaze, either, but the way in which women are conditioned to see each other. For me, it was important to challenge that.

    There is some darkness and complexity that feels specifically female; both in having a female body and in certain emotional connections, like the mother-daughter relationship I look at in Heatstroke. I didn’t want to write a female character who was likeable, I wanted to write one that was thought-provoking. All that said, I do actually like her a lot.

    The use of The Glass Menagerie as the school play speaks to the themes of truth, memory and speculation in the novel. The structure of the book emphasises this, especially with the reveal in the middle of the book. How did you go about plotting the narrative to deal with these themes?

    Any experience we have can only be understood through the lens of our current situation. Anything we recall or imagine will inevitably become muddled and biased, and I wanted the landscape of the book to be inside Rachel’s jumbled mind. Hopefully, this adds to a sense of claustrophobia. This did mean that plotting was tricky, and I ended up having to balance carefully scenes of memory and those of conjecture. I wanted to play with the idea that these are just as valid and revealing as immediate experiences.

    Musical references weave in and out of the novel, and one of the epigraphs is Lana Del Ray’s ‘Cola’. How did you go about selecting the music for the book? Did you have a playlist that you listened to as you wrote?

    I listened to Lana Del Rey’s first album obsessively when I drafted Heatstroke. I think it functions in a similar way to Carol Anne Duffy’s The World’s Wife, giving voice to the female tropes of pop music – the supine Lolita, the widowed bride, the gold digger. I think it’s a genuinely subversive act, and I wanted to steal some of that energy. Also, a lot of the characters in Heatstroke are teenagers, and music is so crucial to teenage experience. The songs we hear in those few vital summers become imprinted for good. I tried to use music to tap into the idea of past selves and unlived lives. Rachel was in a grunge band in her youth, and is now a suburban teacher. Music is the thing that makes her feel special – it is the part of her she thinks other people don’t understand. 

    I made a playlist of songs that link to Heatstroke – those that feature directly in the book (one is a key plot point), those that Rachel loves, and those that inspired me as I wrote.





    Could you talk a bit about your process? When you were writing Heatstroke, did you draw out a timeline and work around this?

    Plotting is the element I find hardest in writing. It doesn’t come naturally. When I was drafting, I covered a whole wall with post-it notes – a different colour for each strand of plot and perspective. It looked bizarre, but it let me see how and when certain threads interacted, and when there were moments of thematic cohesion. A lot of the work I did in editing, especially with my agent, was structural – getting right in and twisting the framework of the novel into something new. It was technically challenging, but deeply satisfying when it seemed to work. 

    Finally, Heatstroke is your debut novel, how have you found the experience of being published for first time? Are you working on another book at the moment?

    So far, it has been a heady mixture of wonderful and terrifying. I think it is always exposing – both in that you’re showing your inner thoughts, but also that those thoughts are then scrutinised and marked out of five by readers. It is also an enormous privilege. Having people read my words and respond to them is something I’ve dreamed of for years.

    The current situation has, oddly, made it feel easier. It is not the greatest time to launch a debut but, given the bigger concerns at play, it’s meant that any anxiety I had around the book has calmed. Now it feels more of a delight. I’m also managing to find time to draft something new – something that delves again into the darkness of women, and their relationships with each other.

    Hazel Barkworth grew up in Stirlingshire and North Yorkshire before studying English at Oxford. She then moved to London where she spent her days working as a cultural consultant, and her nights dancing in a pop band at glam rock clubs. Hazel is a graduate of both the Oxford University MSt in Creative Writing and the Curtis Brown Creative Novel-Writing course. She now works in Oxford, where she lives with her partner. Heatstroke is her first novel.  

    Hannah Trevarthen is Events and Partnerships Manager at English. Hannah curates PEN’s year-round programme of high-profile public events, and has interviewed writers for Edinburgh International Book Festival, the National Centre for Writing, the Second Shelf, the Southbank Centre, and Waterstones.

    This series features voices from the 2020 programme of the English PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair (LBF). LBF is the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. Taking place every spring in the world’s premier publishing and cultural capital, it is a unique opportunity to explore, understand and capitalise on the innovations shaping the publishing world of the future. LBF brings you direct access to customers, content and emerging markets. LBF 2021, the 50th Fair, will take place from 9-11 March 2021, Olympia London. LBF’s London Book and Screen Week will run for the fourth year, with the book fair as the pivotal three-day event within a seven-day programme. For further information, please visit: www.londonbookfair.co.uk

    . 

  • Holding Up a Funhouse Mirror: Lavie Tidhar in Conversation with Robert Sharp

    Holding Up a Funhouse Mirror: Lavie Tidhar in Conversation with Robert Sharp

    As part of our Digital Literary Salon, Lavie Tidhar speaks to Robert Sharp about speculative fiction, cultural appropriation, and what we can – and should – write.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    ROBERT SHARP: By Force Alone is a retelling of the Arthurian Legend – less about chivalry, more about power. Can you describe the genesis of the book for us?

    LAVIE TIDHAR: It really comes from studying it for the first time, and realising two things that never occurred to me. One is that it’s not only entirely made up, but made up by many different (European!) writers over a long period of time. And these stories they made up are still hugely important to our modern collective unconscious. If you take the Holy Grail, for example: it’s not in the original, and it actually evolves over three different versions – first a saucer of blood, then a fallen star stone, and finally the Holy Grail as we know it. And without that we wouldn’t have Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or The Da Vinci Code. So I thought that was interesting, and I couldn’t resist, in the end, writing all three versions into the book.

    The other thing that got me is that the story itself isn’t at all about chivalry. No one’s good, really (apart maybe from Galahad, and I apologise in advance for what I did to him). I realised it’s the classic gangster narrative, the rise-and-fall. It’s The Godfather, it’s Goodfellas. And so I couldn’t understand why it’s always presented as a ‘good’ story. It’s an awful story. Uther rapes Igraine to birth Arthur. Arthur rises to power through nothing more than killing off everyone else who wants to be king. Then someone younger and hungrier, Mordred, rises and kills him. But no one was writing it like that, and I couldn’t understand why. So I sat down to write it myself. I was using new translations of the originals, of course, but I was also drawing on a Victorian children’s book – a children’s book!

    By Force Alone feels prima facie different in direction to the rest of your output so far. Do you see it that way, or does it seem a natural next step?

    It does feel different. There was only so much alternate-history-political-noir fiction (‘Tidharian’ fiction, as I’ve seen it called) I could do. The change actually starts with a book called The Escapement, which is coming out next year. It’s the only non-political book I’ve ever written. It’s about a father searching for a cure for his son’s illness across this very weird, surrealist world. And one of the things I realised is that I can use my strength, which is that I’m not really a novelist but a short story writer; I could write the books episodically. I stupidly pitched By Force Alone to my publishers with the vague notion it could be a quartet of books, and they were surprisingly keen, so I’m writing the second one right now. But after that I’ll probably go and do a big 20th Century crime novel.

    A fun aspect of By Force Alone is the way you appropriate liberally from the canon of English literature and modern pop-culture. I spotted snippets of William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Charles Dickens and Walt Whitman, and there are probably dozens of others a wider-read person would recognise. These tributes are blended with brazen allusions to The Terminator, The Wire and The Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series. Can you talk about how this pilfering / remixing / borrowing / deployment arose, and how it serves the story?

    The critic John Clute calls it ‘equipoise’ fiction, and he argues it’s a condition of being a 21st Century writer. I will use what I can – whether it’s elements of crime fiction, or historical fiction, or slice-of-life, or science fiction. I’ll mix them up. Genres don’t matter to me, but they do fascinate me as sets of rules or formulas or expectations, and what you can do with that. What I also realised is that the people I feel closest to are not writers but comics, going to any length for the sake of a joke. So, for me, putting in these little references is funny. Without the humour you can’t see the darkness; the humour is the light. Even if, or especially if, I write about the Holocaust, as in A Man Lies Dreaming. Or about Israel and Palestine, like in Unholy Land, and throw in a detail where in this alternate reality there’s a porn magazine called Zaftig (curvy, or plump, in Yiddish). Or, indeed, what I do to the poor Green Knight in By Force Alone, which I’ve already seen some readers really hated.

    But references are also, I suppose, a remnant of Modernism. If you look at The Waste Land, it’s all quotes. It’s all references, and it’s a great poem. Postmodernism is a big influence as well – the mixing and matching, the metafiction. And if I’m going to go on like this, I have to say I’m inordinately influenced by the work of the Russian Formalists and their ideas about defamiliarisation. They’ve been out of fashion for decades, though.

    Many reviewers have seized on the fact that this is a post-Brexit novel with allusions to populism and xenophobia, and their hypocrisies. But the wider theme of power is crucial right now: we see it in the way Donald Trump and other authoritarian political leaders are sustained, and we see it examined in popular culture, too. The phrase ‘By Force Alone’ is a mantra, repeated by more than one character throughout the book. So can you talk about this aspect of the book? Was this through-line always at the core of your story?

    That seems fairly obvious, but it’s hardly very original, or interesting, in itself. What I actually found much more interesting is how pointless the whole thing is. They’re fighting over England? Who cares! I’m naturalised now and all, but I’m not fundamentally from here, and to me that was the funny bit, that it’s all so silly. You see it in the book repeatedly: you get glimpses of the wider world, and you see people like Merlin yearning to leave and get out, and being shackled to Story, as it were. I got to have a lot of fun with Lancelot coming in from the outside and having much the same point of view. That’s more interesting to me than, you know, whether Henry VIII is going to divorce his wife or not.

    The new book I’m working on is set after the Norman conquest. Christianity’s taken over, and that in itself is fascinating. The crusades, and the power plays between Henry II and Becket – I go into that for a bit. But, again, it’s more to highlight the absurdity of the whole thing. I take a great delight in, for example, all the ‘genuine’ Holy Foreskins that were floating around Christendom at that time. You know, I try never to make anything up because reality is always weirder.

    Can you talk about what ‘cultural appropriation’ means to you? Are there limits on what authors can write about? Should some writers ‘stay in their lane’?

    This is such an exasperating topic. Because the only people who ever complain about how they can’t write about stuff anymore are over-privileged writers – your sort of white generics, suddenly being called up on their crap. No one is telling you what to write, but this really is about power and privilege. Can you write about a culture you don’t know and understand? Sure. Can you pull it off? Well, probably not. And the most important question really is, should you? Because why? Why do you feel the need to tell the story of marginalised people? Why do you co-opt someone else’s story?

    The problem isn’t really with writers; it’s with the whole publishing industry, which would prefer a white writer’s narrative to a black writer’s. We’ve all had rejections or heard the rejection that says we don’t publish stories about (for example) Nigeria. Or we don’t publish stories set in Mexico. And yet those same publishers will reject a good Mexican novel in favour of a white American writer writing – badly – about Mexico. You keep hearing the line it doesn’t sell. Well, nothing sells if you don’t sell it. So, you know, can you write anything you want? Sure. Should you? No, and if you do, then take the criticism and don’t whine about it. Really what we need is a more diverse publishing ecosystem, and we need to recognise the bias that publishers and writers hold.

    For me, I absolutely can write whatever I want, because frankly no one thinks my books sell anything anyway. I’m a writer – not a Jewish writer, or an Israeli writer, or a genre writer, or whatever other niche you want to stick someone into. But I ask myself, repeatedly: Do I have the right to do this book? I’m perfectly happy to write these British books because, frankly, the British are fair game, and making fun of them is fair game. But if I wanted to write, say, about South-east Asia, where I did live for a time – well, sure I can do it, but I’ll only ever be a tourist there. Why don’t I instead help promote genuine writers from South-east Asia, who have their own stories to tell? This is part of what I’ve been trying to do with the World SF anthologies and related projects (World SF Blog, travel fund, and book bundles) over the past twelve years. Let other people’s voices be heard.

    I am sick to death of this privileged nonsense about how everything is censorship and now white people can’t just take what they want when they want to and get paid a lot to do it badly. Isn’t it telling that they usually complain about it when they headline some international literary festival? Of course, I have to recognise my own privilege: that I’m male; that I’m white (or, you know, being Jewish, white enough); that I write in English, albeit as a second language; that, frankly, I’m sort of establishment at this point. But the nice thing is, I’m pretty obscure, so at least if I say something stupid it’s not a headline in the Guardian and seven opinion pieces. I just wish some writers tried harder not to say something stupid.

    There are some aspects of your work that might very well cause offence: Adolf Hitler as a London detective; Osama Bin Laden’s atrocities reimagined as entertainment; and, in Unholy Land, you seem to assert – please correct me if I’m wrong – that establishing a Jewish homeland necessitates abuse of pre-established peoples. I wonder whether you’ve experienced any concerted pushback? Has anyone ever said of your work, ‘This should not have been written’?

    It’s a source of grave disappointment to me that no one is ever really offended much by my work. One guy wrote a long piece for a literary magazine about how terrible I was, which was very flattering. But other than that, not really. I hope that’s because I don’t reduce ideas to caricatures – that they have some depth to them. Osama is really a book about loss, I guess, but the point it’s making about terrorist attacks is that they are performative: made to be seen, to be news.

    Adolf Hitler as a private eye, on the idea level, is terrible. I’d be mortally offended if someone else did that. The trick is to make it work, somehow. Partly, it allows me to talk about the Holocaust using the tools I have, and it also allows me, even if as a sideshow, to critique the genre that Chandler made. It has sexism and racism built in by Chandler in the same way Lovecraft baked them into cosmic horror. So, I’m talking to Chandler, but I’m also talking to Primo Levi, I’m talking to Ka-Tsetnik and Celan, I’m talking to my grandparents who survived, to my mother who was born in a refugee camp. These books come from anger, a lot of anger, I think. And then I put in some cheap jokes.

    With Unholy Land, incidentally, I don’t think a Jewish homeland necessitates abuse, as you put it. But I don’t write about some fairytale make-believe world (well, I do, but); I’m writing about Israel and Palestine. I just put a sort of distorting funhouse mirror before it. You know, one thing I would have loved to see is more than one Jewish state in the world. That would have been very interesting. Just like there are a lot of Christian or Buddhist or Muslim states, I would have loved to see a few more Jewish ones. It abounds with alternate-history possibilities too.

    I’m writing about the real world, just using fantastical elements to generate a sense of defamiliarisation – which I hope would have made that old Formalist Viktor Shklovsky happy, at least. He argued that defamiliarisation is at the root of good art. And like most writers who used genre tools, you can get away with a lot more, because as soon as you slap ‘genre’ on it as a label, nobody takes it very seriously anyway.

    Lavie Tidhar’s most recent novels are By Force Alone (Head of Zeus) and The Escapement (Tachyon), both out in 2020. He is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the Campbell and Neukom awards winning Central Station (2016), and many others. His first children’s book, Fantastic Book Award nominee Candy, appeared in 2018, and first comic,  Adler, a 5-issue mini-series, is published in 2020. As editor, he published the ground-breaking Apex Book of World SF series of international speculative fiction, and he is currently a book columnist for The Washington Post. 

    Robert Sharp is an author and free speech activist, and was the Head of Campaigns at English PEN for 10 years. His novella The Good Shabti was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. He is currently reading and blogging about The Arabian Nights at A Thousand And One Recaps.

    This series features voices from the 2020 programme of the English PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair (LBF). LBF is the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. Taking place every spring in the world’s premier publishing and cultural capital, it is a unique opportunity to explore, understand and capitalise on the innovations shaping the publishing world of the future. LBF brings you direct access to customers, content and emerging markets. LBF 2021, the 50th Fair, will take place from 9-11 March 2021, Olympia London. LBF’s London Book and Screen Week will run for the fourth year, with the book fair as the pivotal three-day event within a seven-day programme. For further information, please visit: www.londonbookfair.co.uk

  • Being Seen: Dean Atta in Conversation with Keith Jarrett

    Being Seen: Dean Atta in Conversation with Keith Jarrett

    As part of our Digital Literary Salon, Dean Atta speaks to Keith Jarrett about queer black British experience, schools, and writing for teens.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    KEITH JARRETT: First up, congratulations on having such an engaging and joyous book out in the world. It’s great to see The Black Flamingo being recognised with the Stonewall Book Award, and with a US release. How does it feel knowing that young people (and adults) are experiencing Michael’s journey in different parts of the world? Did you have an international readership in mind when you first set out to write the story?

    DEAN ATTA: This is a very British book. But British culture has been – and continues to be – exported throughout the world, so I imagined it would reach beyond the borders of the UK book market. When I was invited to two festivals in India at the start of this year, I was met with a respectful but relentless interest in me and my work, and a curiosity about the black queer experience in Britain. With India having only recently got rid of an old colonial law that criminalised homosexuality, it’s very new to be having this conversation in public, and I was a kind of role model to many people I spoke with.

    I guess I’ve always hoped I would “make it” in America. I think that’s a very black British aspiration, because there are far less options for us in the UK, especially in industries such as music and film. When I was younger, I saw acts like Floetry and actors like Idris Elba go from the UK to US and make it big. So I think that’s always been something I had hoped. But I didn’t write my story for the US specifically and, when the US deal came about, I had to do a lot of translation and Americanisation. Obvious things like ‘football’ becoming ‘soccer’, and some other things I wouldn’t have thought of, like ‘vine leaves’ becoming ‘grape leaves’.

    I think the story translates whether it’s to India or America; whether some things feel familiar or foreign, it’s about a boy becoming a man and questioning what that means.

    I’ve known you as a poet in the spoken word scene for years. How much of a gear-change was it for you to write a novel – albeit a novel-in-verse? Could you talk a bit about the process of switching genres (or whether you even see it that way)? I’m particularly interested in what the process was like for you: developing Michael’s character, sustaining the story, and any challenges along the way.

    It was a very painful process. I cried a lot, but feel much lighter having shed those tears. I learnt a lot about craft through this process, and have even greater respect for both genres. The main difference is length: most poems are less than 200 words but with a novel you are dealing with tens of thousands of them. With a novel-in-verse, you are aiming for each page to be as tight as a poem but to work as part of something bigger. Sometimes I had to think of the book as one long poem, writing parts and moving them around. I didn’t originally write the book in chronological order; I imagined it jumping around in time. But my editor convinced me that working chronologically would work best for the teenage reader. Perhaps if this were an adult book, it would have been a bit more experimental.

    Speaking of challenges, could you maybe talk more about what it was like to write a teenager’s story for a predominantly teenage audience, while taking into account certain limitations? I know you’ve spoken before about how, for instance, you carefully had to negotiate how to broach sex and sexuality without being too graphic. Were there any other considerations you had to make for a younger audience?    

    The story is far more streamlined than I had in mind when I set out, but I really appreciate my editor’ input, and the questions she asked that helped me make quite drastic cuts to the storyline. All the characters have so much backstory that isn’t on the page, but I hope it informs their interactions in a way that makes them feel fully realised. Rather than show you everything, some scenes in the book ‘pan away’ from the action or ‘fade to black’. I use these kinds of terms in the book, which I have knowingly borrowed from TV and film, because the influence of on-screen representation is very prevalent in Michael’s story (Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Moonlight, Kinky Boots).

    When Michael has his first sexual experience and he has been smoking weed and sniffing poppers, it ‘fades to black’ because he passes out. I think the story is as graphic as I would feel comfortable with it being. At sixteen, Michael is already weed-smoking, popper-sniffing and Grindr-using. I think my editor let me go pretty far with the authenticity of this gay teen experience. I don’t describe sex in any graphic detail because I don’t think it would have added anything to the story. In fact, it may have raised alarm bells with some gatekeepers, and perhaps even prevented the book from reaching some of the young people who need it.

    We both spent time in schools as spoken word educators, and I know how important it is – for both of us – to use poetry and stories as a tool of empowerment for young people, as readers and as creators. How important do you feel it is to be visible – as black, as queer, as being someone of mixed heritage –  in these spaces, and now as an author? 

    It feels wonderful for me to take my whole self into school settings. For me to be able to talk about being gay, when it’s relevant, is I know empowering to LGBT students. To discuss my identity as black and mixed race and British opens up a conversation about us having multiple identities. Being open with students that I am dyslexic and didn’t read many books when I was a teenager seems to encourage dyslexic students to be open about their experience. And students with other learning difficulties or anger-management issues seem suddenly to view me as more relatable. I’ve had students tell me things like, ‘You being here makes me feel safe and understood’, and, ‘I don’t really read but I would read your book’.

    I think teachers have to have their guard up a lot more with students; as a visiting poet or author, I come as I am and sometimes that can be challenging. I had a school visit in Glasgow this year where a student was sent out by the teacher for saying, ‘I don’t want to be read to by a gay person’. That was the first time in over a decade of doing this that I’ve had anything discriminatory said to me by a student. If the teacher hadn’t sent them out, I would have wanted to keep them in the class and unpack what was behind that statement.

    Without too many spoilers, Michael’s coming out doesn’t quite go to plan. In a touching but poignant sequence, Kieran, a black classmate of his, points out to Michael that Justin Fashanu was the first openly gay footballer and was black too. The way they respond to each other shows both the sense of affirmation and hesitancy (earlier, when asked by another friend if he finds Kieran attractive, Michael wonders whether he finds him ‘fit or frightening‘). I guess this is related to the above question in some ways but, for me, this really showed up how black gay role models are needed to resist the prevailing stereotypes of black male aggression and homophobia, among other things. How much do you see this story as speaking to this resistance? How much research went in to including black queer history in the book?

    If anything, I had to hold back some of what I knew in order to allow Michael’s story to be one of discovery. Every instance of black queer representation gives Michael a bit more confidence: learning about Justin Fashanu, seeing Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Kinky Boots and Moonlight – these all show Michael that there isn’t just one way to be black and queer. I include a whole list of names of black queer people toward the end of the book (yours included, Keith), because I wanted readers to be able to go away and read about lots of other black queer role models. There are way more than could plausibly fit into this story.

    With regards to black male aggression, whilst Michael grows up without his father, he has a black male role model in Uncle B, who is ever-present, generous with gifts, money and advice. The only time Michael sees Uncle B lose his temper is after the police stop them for no apparent reason; this has a profound impact on Michael, and his outlooks on race and racism. Equally, by the end of the book, his relationship to Kieran has changed his outlook. In a way, Kieran appears to be the antithesis of Michael because he’s sporty and gets into fights, but he’s also incredibly tender and thoughtful.

    I’m particularly concerned about how we give young people access to a wide range of stories, so that they feel able to create their own paths, especially when we are at the mercy of gatekeepers (schools, parents, libraries, publishers). Growing up under Section 28 – it’s difficult to believe it was actually illegal for schools to “promote” homosexuality right up until 2003 – there was hardly any overt representation of LGBT stories. Even so, in my teens, in a few of the books we were given to read at school, I felt seen – I got chills, finally recognising myself in what I was reading! Were there any books or films for you, growing up, that had a deep effect on how you saw yourself?

    As a teenager, the movie Beautiful Thing was the first time I felt like I saw myself. I’m not too similar to the character of Jamie, and my mother is not at all like Sandra, but this London story of a gay teenager and his single mother made me feel so incredibly seen.

    Will we see Michael again, or any of the other characters in The Black Flamingo? What’s coming next for you?   

    I don’t think we will see Michael again, unless The Black Flamingo is made into a movie or TV series. I think that would be really cool because, as someone who wasn’t a big reader when I was younger, I looked for my representation in movies and on TV, and I would love if this story could reach those who might find the book. For those wanting another young adult book like The Black Flamingo, they should look out for Boy Queen by George Lester.

    Named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday and “one of poetry’s greatest modern voices” by Gay Times, poet Dean Atta’s work has appeared on BBC One, BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service and Channel 4, often dealing with themes of gender, identity, race and growing up. Dean regularly performs across the UK and internationally. He is a member of Keats House Poets Forum and Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, as well as a Tutor for Arvon and Poetry School. Dean’s debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. His latest book, The Black Flamingo, follows a mixed-race gay teen as he spreads his wings at university as a drag performer; a bold story about embracing your uniqueness and finding your inner strength. 

    Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and educator. UK poetry slam champion and Rio International Poetry Slam Winner, his work has included bilingual performances in Bilbao and Madrid, in addition to UK-wide commissions, from arts institutions to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Houses of Parliament. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was aired on BBC Four. Keith was selected for the International Literary Showcase by Val McDermid as one of 10 most outstanding LGBT writers in the UK. Having recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck University, Keith is finishing his first novel. Selah, his poetry collection, was published in 2017.

    This series features voices from the 2020 programme of the English PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair (LBF). LBF is the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. Taking place every spring in the world’s premier publishing and cultural capital, it is a unique opportunity to explore, understand and capitalise on the innovations shaping the publishing world of the future. LBF brings you direct access to customers, content and emerging markets. LBF 2021, the 50th Fair, will take place from 9-11 March 2021, Olympia London. LBF’s London Book and Screen Week will run for the fourth year, with the book fair as the pivotal three-day event within a seven-day programme. For further information, please visit: www.londonbookfair.co.uk

  • Out of the Ashes

    Out of the Ashes

    The last in our series with Granta magazine on writers and their translators, Geovani Martins writes new short fiction, and Julia Sanches writes on translating it.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Out of the Ashes

    Geovani Martins, translated by Julia Sanches

    C’mon Vigidal-Leblon-Ipanema-Gávea, we’re off! Carlos yelled, even though he knew they’d still be five minutes, much to the annoyance of hurried passengers. He was itching to leave, too. The beginning of that trip – when the van rolled down Avenida Aquarela do Brasil and passed beneath enormous trees until it reached Avenida Niemeyer, coming face-to-face with the ocean – that was his favourite bit.

    Carlos was quick to learn the art of fare collection. If it wasn’t for his mixing up street names, no one would’ve known he’d started that gig just over a week ago. Used to the streets of Bangu, Padre Miguel and Realengo, the streets of the South Zone – named after a bunch of generals and marquises – seemed to belong to another world. On top of that, there were the buildings, the people paid to walk packs of dogs, the crowds of nannies hefting other folks’ children this way and that.

    The van finally left, not at maximum capacity but a good way there. Now he just had to pray it filled up in Vidigal. The rest was profit, Carlos thought, cut off by the sight of the looming ocean. He had the feeling again that the world was too good to be true. Carlos wondered if he’d ever get used to that view, like the passengers who rarely bothered to turn and face the window. As long as that didn’t happen, he’d relish every second of it.

    One stop before Vidigal, in the Fourteenth, the college girl climbed on again. They’d ridden together at least three times that week, always at the same hour. She went from there through Leblon and Ipanema, till the van came down to Jardim de Alah and then back through Gávea, dropping her in front of PUC. She was one of the passengers with the longest route. As he saw her flag down the van, Carlos realised he didn’t only look forward to the ocean but also to that moment, when she climbed into the vehicle, took out one of her earbuds and said: Afternoon, how’s it going? Carlos could hardly answer, busy thinking to himself: I could love this woman.

    In the house where he used to live, his sister and mother admitted he needed a change of scene, of air, and of friends. It was the only way for him to turn over a new leaf, something they agreed he needed. Even so, Dona Creuza was heavy-hearted. She was scared of what might happen to her son in an unfamiliar place. Whether she liked it or not, even with all his screw-ups, he was family and that always counted for something. Since Carlos moved to Rocinha, Dona Creuza’s had several dreams in which her son gets himself in a fix on a strange hill, with no one to stand up and say that he was a good kid – that he’s Dona Alzira’s grandson, that he went to Clementino then Ana Amélia, studied to be an electrician, that he’s just going through a rough patch, that friends are foda: they can lift you up and drag you straight to hell. In Rocinha, the only person Carlos has to lean on is André, his ex-brother-in-law and the driver of the van he’s ended up working. Guy’s tight, he’s trying to give him a hand, but he’s not from those parts either; if shit flies, there isn’t much he can do.

    Aside from the striking route, another thing Carlos likes about fare collection is competing with other vans. Every trip is a new race. And every detail counts: the time spent calling for passengers at every stop, the traffic lights, pulling up to let people off. The fare collector rides shotgun and warns when somebody’s nearing or if the van in front does something stupid. It’s just as important to know when to accelerate – so you can blow through and reach the crowded stop to collect passengers – as it is to know when to slow down and let the van in front get a good distance ahead so you don’t pull up right after to an empty stop. On the first day, Carlos just sat around, thinking all he needed was to call passengers, collect their fare, let the driver know when they were getting off. As the day unfolded, he watched the other fare collectors’ movements and noticed the game they were playing. At the end of the day, André clued him in on how it all worked. He said Carlos needed to wrap his head ’round it quick and get behind it 100 per cent, ’cause a good fare collector makes all the difference.

    Now and then some cracked-up chick or dude would get in the van, either mission-back or mission-bound, at all hours of the day, in all kinds of states. From the most put-together, to folks in dirty clothes who hadn’t slept in days, and nine-to-fivers in their work gear with bibles under their arms – all kinds of specimens. They were heavy with worry and had a look in their eyes that reminded Carlos of his very worst moment, when he hit rock-bottom.

    It happened on a day he and 2D spent smoking a ton of zirrês by the trainline after finishing a gig together, tossing out some rubble for a tia in Vila Vintém. Soon as they’d smoked all their cash came the torture of figuring out what to do to scare up some more green – but then a playboy from Castelo Branco rocked up wanting a toke. Fiend got to the trainline all amped up. Hell knows where he started to end up there, but player was way too fucked up to hit the boca. He asked them to mission for him, and they went in exchange for a ten-real rock. And they went once, twice, three, four times, till player decided to stop snorting and smoke rock instead, but not with weed like they were. It had to be in a cup: pure crack. 2D said he’d fetch two rocks; playboy smoked it straight and they carried on with their zirrê. Except then the player said he was running low on cash and that’s why he’d switched to rock. That was the sitch: if they weren’t game, he’d find some crackhead in a minute flat to mission for him instead. 2D shoved off after that, kid had never smoked crack out of a cup. Carlos spent the rest of the day with the playboy. Once it got dark and they were peaking, some of the playboy’s friends came to the trainline to bail him out. They were all players too, gym-rat types, and shit went sideways: they wanted to come down on Carlos, claiming he was the one who dragged their buddy there, that the guy was clean, been off drugs for months. Wasn’t for the other junkies around Carlos, he would’ve got his ass beat, for sure. On his way home to see if there was an umbrella or anything to sell, he remembered that before that mess had started, playboy’d left him twenty reals.

    He was headed to the boca when he bumped into 2D. He tried to sneak past but his friend clocked him, came up to him, and said: Yo, I’ve got a hold of seven already, throw in three and we’ll smoke a zidane. Carlos said he was cool, player had left him tripping and he was homebound to see if he could get some grub. 2D stuck around, on the mission to find a buddy to go halves with, while Carlos headed to the other end of the favela, where 2D wouldn’t catch him copping two ten-real rocks. He was bent on smoking from a cup, and doing it solo. It was only when he was crumbling the rock over some foil that he remembered the ashes. He didn’t have a cigarette and, without ash, there was no smoking from a cup. Asking another junkie was out of the question – folks didn’t give handouts and the junkie’d want a pull at the very least. He’d have to ask around on the street, knowing people were wise to what the ash was for. Doing that in the favela where you grow up is foda, like filing for junkie credentials, bottoming out. But being all the way on the other side, he decided to risk it.  

    He spotted a couple of parás drinking at the bar door and waited to see if one of them smoked. They all did, one cigarette after the other. Carlos hung around, working up the courage. Till one of them stepped away a little, and he approached him. He started by asking for a smoke, wanting to keep a low profile. But when the guy turned him down, Carlos said the ash would do. Dude flipped. Said if he wanted ash or some other crap like that he could get a job and buy it himself, that he hadn’t come to Rio to support a bunch of bums, much less junkies.

    Carlos figured he’d best ask a girl instead. Though wracked with hatred and shame, he wasn’t about to give up. He was there after all, rocks in pocket, and there was no turning back now. He passed a young piece smoking a cig and made to approach her but didn’t, then leaned back on the wall to wait for his next chance. A girl rocked up to the gate opposite Carlos. She called out a bunch to some chick called Brenda and, when it looked like she was about to leave, leaned back on the house wall and lit a cigarette. It was time. The girl was raging, cigarette between fingers. Carlos thought he’d best just ask for the ash so the girl could wash her hands of him fast; sometimes folks even spared a cigarette if the packet was full. He got there and, sure enough, when he asked for the ash, the girl, fed up and ready to eighty-six him, pulled out a packet. As she was handing over the cigarette, about to say something or other, she looked the crackhead right in the face. Carlinhos? she asked. It was Priscila. They’d gone to school together as kids and, in their teens, they’d even made out a couple of times in one of those bailes. He left the cigarette and hightailed it out of here, wanting to bury his head in the concrete.

    He bumped into 2D again on his way home, said he’d got a hold of two ten-real rocks and been trying to track him down so they could split that zirra. 2D had dropped seven on a five-real rock and some two-real weed but he had a cig and they could fix a zirrê with some tobacco – not ideal, but that’s what they had. They sat on the trainline. Everything was dark and crawling with junkies. They smoked the first one. Complete silence. Carlos crumbled the second rock and handed it to his buddy so he could roll another, which he didn’t finish smoking. In the middle of that bagulho, something real weird went down. Carlos got the feeling he’d start crying right there on the line, then split. That was when he settled it: he had to change.

    Up top, Rocinha looks like another city. Every time Carlos passes route 99 he turns to scope the view of Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, even for just a second. For folks who work in transit, it’s not the best spot to start spacing out. That’s where the fierce bustle on the hill begins. Moto-taxis, cars, buses, moving trucks, garbage trucks, police vehicles – all of them fighting for space on a street halved by the parked cars. As Carlos tries to commit the name of each part of the hill to memory, he gets used to that new reality too. Everything’s fast; there are 24-hour stores, 24-hour noise. Even with the confusion, Carlos has the feeling he could live there for the rest of his life. Maybe, in time, he’d buy his own van, start a business, make a life for himself. He’d always heard that the South Zone was where the money’s at and, now that life had taken him there, it was a matter of diving in and seeing what happened.  

    After his last trip on his seventh day of work, it was time for his wages. Dona Creuza had asked André only to only pay him at the end of the month, and her former son-in-law had agreed, but after talking to Carlos he realised it’d be foda to get through the month withouta cent. He’d pay him on that day so he had something to keep him going, then every two weeks. André believed that showing a person you trusted them could help give them the strength to be better. With this feeling in mind, he pulled his pouch out of his bag, set aside R$560, and handed them to his assistant. Carlos pocketed the money, lit a cigarette, said goodnight, see you tomorrow, and walked off into the hill.

    On Translating in a Not-So-Vast and Noisy Room

    Julia Sanches

    Now and then, I imagine people think translation happens in a vacuum. An unadulterated translator (picture a vessel) sits alongside her unimpeachable text in a vast, mostly empty and colourless room, with all the words – past, present, and future – of her source and target languages floating around her like invisible apples to be picked as needed. The text she translates and its author may have a history, a baggage; they may have influences and motives, politics and intent. But not the translator. She is to approach her task unattached and apolitical, and handle each word gingerly so as not to smoosh or deform it, or make it too much her own. She should not, in fact, think of these words as hers at all; they belong to the English language – that wriggly thing that we are constantly trying to pin down, curate, make sense of. Now and then I imagine people think of translation as solitary and soundless, as effortlessly graceful as sex in a Hollywood movie.

    We translators know better, of course. Although we may want to come at the text fresh and uncontaminated, armed with words come from goodness knows where that click into place with a sound that announces their rightness, we know that’s not how it happens. We also have our histories and our baggages and our politics and our very own trajectories to our very own Englishes. Korean translator Anton Hur recently tweeted that, ‘in a literary translation, finding the voice is an act of triangulation between the author, the translator, and a third voice’. (In that vast colourless room, there is also, always, Twitter.) What appeals to me about this is that the translator, rather than sit on the author’s knee as a quiet ventriloquist dummy, has not only words but also that very authorial thing: voice.

    When I first started translating Geovani Martins, it was (I mean, it still is) as a white, middle-class Brazilian who has spent all but three months of her life outside her home country. My voice (my English voice) has been formed by the American public-school system, a smattering of international schools, a Scottish university, British and American friends, and British and American literature and cinema, not to mention the British and American translators I have read throughout my life. Geovani’s voice has been crafted by exposure to several of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, a keen interest and ear for their various and varied slangs, fiction by authors like Machado de Assis, the crônicas of Rubem Braga, and Brazilian hip-hop, samba, and rap; information I’ve gleaned from conversations with the author and some light online stalking.

    The Portuguese voice in ‘Out of the Ashes’ reflects many of these formative points: Rio street slang mixed with the democratic eye of a writer of crônicas, which demand a careful attention to the minor details that make up daily life. It’s important to note that the voice in this story shifts according to the protagonist’s circumstance. In the beginning, when Carlos seems more at peace, the rhythm of the writing is regular and staid. Towards the middle, when we read about the day Carlos hit rock-bottom, there is a hankering, restless energy to the prose; the language is at street-level. And then, at the end, a lull, followed by a certain ominousness as the narrator’s omniscience retreats and leaves a lacuna of information. As Carlos walks off into the hill, we know what his hopes are and we know the weight of his history. But we have no idea how things will go.

    Thinking back, I realise that the van Carlos rides through Rio de Janeiro, and those of his competition, first appeared in my readerly imagination as the dollar vans I would see screech and honk and yell their way down Utica Ave. and Flatbush Ave., toward south Brooklyn, when I lived in New York City. It’s possible that some of the texture of this image has found its way into the translation, much as a person will begin unconsciously to use a word she has recently read or heard. (Weeks ago, I picked up Sophie Lewis’s translation of Colette Fellous’s This Tilting World, and her use of the verb ‘heft’ obviously stayed with me, edging fittingly into my translation of ‘Out of the Ashes’.) This past Saturday night, after a day spent surrounded by people at my ceramics studio (where I learned that in the schools of South Providence, kids are using the term ‘kiki’ to mean ‘hang out’), my partner and I watched John Waters’s certifiable Cecil B. Demented, about an independent film director who kidnaps a Hollywood actress called Honey Whitlock (played by Melanie Griffiths) to star in his film rebellion against Hollywood and in favor of independent cinema. Adrian Grenier plays Lyle, a young man constantly off his head on some narcotic. At some point, Lyle/Adrian yells at Honey/Melanie: ‘Honey, I’m peaking!’ In ‘Out of the Ashes’, Carlos and the playboy with whom he gets high also peak.

    Now and then, I imagine people think translation is or should be as self-contained and handsome as a Hollywood actress in a perfume ad, or a suburban front lawn (I can’t help thinking of Ocean Vuong’s ‘suburbs with suicidally pristine lawns’). And I wonder if what we translators should be doing is making our baggage (read: voices) more visible, if not louder; if we should not be exposing our army of make-up artists and dieticians, our home chefs and careful lighting, our mowers, water sprinklers, and trash bags full of mown grass and litterfall.  Perhaps the truth is that our vast and colourless room is rather noisy, colourful, and not very vast at all but a labyrinth of corridors and chambers. And that, from this mess of experiences, we translate. 

  • Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds

    Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds

    The second in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn share an embrace.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I – LIGANDO MUNDOS, INVENTANDO MUNDOS

    José Eduardo Agualusa

    O narrador de um dos meus romances, “A Rainha Ginga”, é um tradutor – um padre brasileiro, com sangue indígena, africano e português, enviado para Angola, no final do século XVI, para trabalhar como intérprete para a Rainha Ginga, ou N’Zinga M’Bandi. 

    Levei a vida inteira para escrever este livro. Passei anos lendo  velhos textos sobre a história de Angola, conversando com especialistas, colecionando documentos que mencionassem aspetos menos conhecidos da extraordinária vida da grande rainha. Queria escrever partindo de um olhar africano, de alguém que se movesse na corte de N’Zinga, mas não sabia como fazer a ponte para o mundo que estava invadindo aquele, e, sobretudo, para o nosso tempo. Uma tarde, sem aviso, emergiu dentro de mim a figura do padre, o tradutor, Francisco José, e então comecei a escrever e só parei nove meses depois. Francisco José não é apenas um tradutor (um língua, como se dizia então) – ele é um mediador entre mundos. Cabe-lhe a ele o esforço de traduzir universos. 

    Eis, afinal, o difícil ofício de todos os tradutores. A parte mais fácil é a de encontrar na língua de chegada a palavra que melhor espelha a da língua de partida. Difícil mesmo é traduzir conceitos. Se um escritor enfrenta o desafio de ser outros, sempre que entra na sua ficção, ao tradutor cabe o desafio duplo de ser esses outros num idioma remoto, e conseguir que, ainda assim, todos os personagens soem coerentes e convincentes, como se aquela língua fosse a deles desde o leite materno. 

    Um escritor raramente escolhe os seus tradutores. Com sorte, é escolhido por eles. Se tiver mesmo muita sorte, encontra um companheiro para a vida, alguém capaz de partilhar com ele a  aventura de inventar e reinventar mundos. Eu tive essa sorte na língua inglesa. Fui o primeiro autor de ficção que o Daniel Hahn traduziu, e ele foi a primeira pessoa a ocupar-se da tradução de um romance meu. Assim, começámos juntos. Daniel é o meu língua no idioma inglês. Devo-lhe, em larga medida, o sucesso internacional dos nossos livros. 

    Um escritor que tenha a desventura de ver os seus livros recriados para um determinado idioma por múltiplos tradutores há-de parecer, nessa língua, um tanto incoerente e despersonalizado – por muito bons que sejam todos esses profissionais. Em contrapartida, um autor medíocre, beneficiando de um único tradutor extraordinário, pode até transformar-se, nessa segunda língua, num escritor sólido e interessante. Há casos assim, de tradutores que aperfeiçoam de tal forma as obras originais que o melhor a fazer em benefício destas seria retraduzi-las de volta. 

    A Rainha Ginga teve, na vida real, secretários e tradutores, portugueses e brasileiros, homens da igreja, como o meu personagem, que traduziam para português a correspondência que esta lhes ditava. Desta forma, o que hoje tomamos por falas da rainha, pela expressão direta do seu pensamento, é, na verdade, uma recriação dos seus tradutores. Assim acontece comigo. Também eu sou, enquanto romancista em língua inglesa, uma invenção de Daniel Hahn. Um abraço ao meu criador.

    ~

    II – CONNECTING WORLDS, INVENTING WORLDS

    José Eduardo Agualusa

    (Translated Created by Daniel Hahn)

    The narrator of one of my novels, Queen Ginga, is a translator – he’s a Brazilian priest, with indigenous, African and Portuguese blood, who is sent to Angola at the end of the sixteenth century to work as an interpreter for Queen Ginga, or N’Zinga M’Bandi.

    It took me my whole life to write that book. I spent years reading old texts about the history of Angola, talking to experts, collecting documents that mentioned lesser-known aspects of this great queen’s remarkable life. I wanted to write from an African gaze, a story as seen by someone who moves about in N’Zinga’s court, but who doesn’t know how to build the bridge connecting it to the world that’s invading his, and, especially, to our own time. One evening, without warning, a character appeared inside me, the figure of the priest, the translator, Francisco José, and then I started writing and only stopped nine months later. Francisco José isn’t only a translator (a língua as they used to say: a tongue) – he is a mediator between worlds. It is his role to strive to translate universes.

    That, ultimately, is the difficult task faced by all translators. The easiest part is finding the word in the target language that provides the best mirror-reflection of the one in the source language. What really is difficult is the translating of concepts. If a writer confronts the challenge of being other people each time he enters into his fiction, the translator is faced with the double challenge of being these others in a distant language, and yet still managing, somehow, to make every character coherent and convincing, as if this language had come to them with their mothers’ milk.

    A writer rarely gets to choose his translators. If he’s lucky, he is chosen by them. If he’s really very lucky indeed, he finds a friend for life, somebody capable of sharing with him the adventure of inventing and reinventing worlds. I had just that very luck in the English language. I was the first writer of fiction Daniel Hahn translated, and he was the first person to take on the translation of a novel of mine. We began together, then. Daniel is my língua in the English language. To a great extent, I owe the international success of our books to him.

    A writer who has the misfortune of seeing his books recreated for a given language by multiple translators must inevitably, in that language, seem somewhat incoherent and depersonalised – however good all those professionals might be. On the other hand, a mediocre writer, benefiting from a single remarkable translator, can even be transformed, in this second language, into a writer who is substantial and interesting. Such cases do exist, of translators who improve the original works to such an extent that the best thing one might do for them would be to translate them back.

    Queen Ginga, in real life, did have secretaries and translators, from Portugal and Brazil, men of the church, like my character, who translated into Portuguese the correspondence she dictated to them. In this way, what we today take as quotations from the queen, as direct expressions of her thinking, are in reality a recreation by her translators. So it is with me. I, too, as a novelist in the English language, am an invention of Daniel Hahn’s. I’m sending my creator a hug.

    ~

    III – CONNECTING WORDS, INVENTING WORDS?

    Daniel Hahn

    (After an original idea by José Eduardo Agualusa)

    Agualusa starts thus: The narrator of one of my novels, Queen Ginga, is a translator – (OK – sorry to interrupt, but Queen Ginga will have to be in italics, otherwise readers will think she’s the narrator referred to. Whereas the narrator is actually…) a Brazilian priest, with indigenous, African and Portuguese blood, who is sent to Angola – taking out a comma here, I think – at the end of the sixteenth century – and another – to work as an interpreter for Queen Ginga, or N’Zinga M’Bandi. (Possibly add a little gloss here – my readers likely won’t have heard of her. Though maybe readers of the original wouldn’t either? OK, leave it for now.)

    And so it begins.

    Second para: this one looks – oh – surprisingly easy! I shouldn’t say that out loud. Agualusa is often very much easier to translate than I’ll admit. (Don’t tell anyone.) He goes on: It took me my whole life to write that book. God, I’m glad I’m not a novelist. (Sorry, that last bit’s me, not him, obviously. Don’t mind me.) I spent years reading old texts, collecting documents, etc. (Etc. etc. This bit’s a doddle.) Ah, now the priest character appears to him: Then, one afternoon, without w–. Oh damn.

    You wouldn’t think ‘one afternoon’ would be the biggest challenge in this paragraph, would you? But Agualusa’s ‘tarde’ covers some of what we’d call the afternoon, and some of what we’d call the evening – *sends JEA e-mail asking ‘What time exactly did imaginary priest materialise?’*. (This afternoon/evening thing is a recurring annoyance in my work, and there are many similar examples – languages are precise or imprecise in entirely different ways. English basically needs a new word coined and all my troubles in the world will be over – eveternoon, perhaps. Or afterning. No?)

    I do like the idea of a writer being possessed by the spirit of a translator, btw – we usually talk about just the opposite happening, of course. Revenge!

    Anyway, on we stumble: Francisco José is not only (isn’t only?) a translator – a língua, as they used to say (oh, shit – OK, I’ll come back to that), he is a mediator between worlds. It falls to him to make an effort to translate universes. Wait – ‘Falls to him to make an effort to’ is horrible, though. To struggle to? But that seems to emphasise the unlikelihood of his managing it. Can I get away with a word like strive, which is such a lovely word? I think I can.

    To strive to translate universes. Yes – nice. I’m quite pleased with the clarity I’ve retained from that line of Agualusa’s. He couldn’t have put it better myself. Or vice versa.

    But back to that ‘língua’. The word means ‘tongue’ (in the same double-sense as English, both language and organ in your mouth), so I might drop in a little gloss for my Anglophones who don’t know this: Francisco José isn’t only a translator (a língua as they used to say, a tongue) – he is a mediator between worlds. But there’s another problem, which is that ‘língua’ meaning ‘tongue’ is a feminine noun (uma língua); here, used as a sort-of-synonym for translator-person, it’s masculine (um língua). Christ, I hate writers. ‘He is a tongue man’? No, that absolutely doesn’t help. I think I just have to live without that little gender-swap, tbqh. Not entirely satisfactory, but this time I’m going to admit defeat. I wouldn’t usually, but I have a deadline, and, well, my work happens in the real world, and circumstances here are sometimes imperfect.

    (Aha – answer just in from author-oracle email: the imaginary priest materialised late in the tarde, which is to say, in the evening. Good – strange things are more interesting when they happen in evenings than in afternoons.)

    OK, looks like para 3 at least I can speed through. That, ultimately, is the difficult task faced by all translators. (All translators, but especially those whose writers use language-play involving changing the gender of nouns that aren’t gendered in English. Just saying.) If a writer confronts the challenge of being other people each time he enters his fiction, the translator is faced with the double challenge of being these others in a distant language, and yet still managing, somehow, to make every character coherent and convincing. Yes! (Oh, sorry – the interjection is me again.) This is well said. I agree, obviously. Naturally I don’t need to agree with the substance of everything I say on behalf of my writers, but it helps! A good sympathetic match between writer and translator can be a blessing.

    Which – oh – is exactly where it looks like paragraph 4 is going.

    A writer, we continue, rarely gets to choose his translators. If he’s lucky, he is chosen by them. If he’s really very lucky indeed, he finds a friend for life. Yeah, I think I’m going with friend, but the Portuguese companheiro can be companion, collaborator, partner, comrade depending on context, and none of them neutral, so I am simply choosing, based on what I presume to claim about my relationship with my author. The word companion would be better, in the sense of a travelling companion, a fellow traveller, except that a companion for life suggests the wrong things. A friend for life, then, capable of sharing with him the adventure of inventing and reinventing worlds. (A lot of vent-ing in that line – advent/invent/reinvent – but it’s the same in Portuguese so I should probably just grit my teeth and go with it.) I was the first writer of fiction Daniel Hahn translated (God it’s weird writing stuff like this in the third person – I know it’s meant to be in his voice, but I’m here, too, you know!). We began together. Daniel is my língua (I know, I know, I’m a failure – don’t @ me) in the English language. To a large extent, I owe to him the international success of our books. No, hang on – sorry! – that sounds unnatural to me – ‘I owe to him the success’? More natural would be to reorder as ‘I owe the success of our books to him’ – though ending the paragraph in this way now shifts more emphasis onto the final ‘him’. (Me!) Yeah, OK, my ego and I can live with that. (Also, what a nice thing to say!)

    Onwards.

    A writer who has the misfortune of seeing his books recreated for a given language by multiple translators must inevitably, in that language (this word is repeated in English, where it isn’t in Portuguese – damn – no matter, ignore it, no one’s going to notice…), seem somewhat incoherent and depersonalised (right word?). On the other hand, a mediocre writer, benefiting from a single remarkable translator, can even be transformed, in this second language, into a writer who is solid (this is the ‘correct’ translation of the Portuguese word, but doesn’t work for me – robust? substantial?) and interesting. Great.

    And so to the conclusion.

    (That was quick! Well, it’s easy when you know how…)

    Queen Ginga did have secretaries and translators who translated into Portuguese the correspondence she dictated to them. What we today take as quotations from the queen are in reality a recreation by her translators. So it is with me. I, too, as a novelist in the English language, am an invention of Daniel Hahn’s. And then comes that lovely final line, in which he sends a hug to ‘my creator’. (So tempted to capitalise that as Creator. Would be nice to make a Shakespearean ‘onlie begetter’ reference, too, but he hasn’t so I mustn’t. He hasn’t so I mustn’t – good translators’ rule of thumb, that.) Actually ‘sending a hug to my creator’ is less natural in English than a ‘sending my creator a hug’, so let’s go with that – also thereby redeeming me for the earlier paragraph where I moved the ‘him’ to the end – here the reversal is opposite, balancing out, with the object in question (still me!) moved slightly away from the focus. That’s it. A lovely simple ending:

    I’m sending my creator a hug.

    And thus, as a humble, invisible translator, I let him get the last word.

    Oh. Oops.

    Well, since I’ve broken cover and am here anyway, companheiro, I’m sending you a hug back.

    José Eduardo Agualusa is a novelist and a reporter, born in Huambo in 1960. He studied in Lisbon and currently lives in Portugal, Angola and Brazil. In 2007, Agualusa was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2013 the Fernando Namora Prize, as well as a translation grant from English PEN in 2014. His novel A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award 2017.

    Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His translations include six novels by José Eduardo Agualusa, with whom he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. He is on the board of English PEN.

  • A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    The first in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, Peter Stamm pens new short fiction and Michael Hofmann writes on translating Stamm.

    After twenty years with one barber, I’m looking for a new one. At the age of exactly a hundred, Herr S. has closed his salon. He started out in 1933 as a trainee in Winterthur, worked in Lindau on Lake Constance and then in Lichtenstein for a few years before the war, before setting up his own business in 1945 in Zurich, where he has worked for the past seventy-four years. His salon looked just the way it must have looked in the forties, or even earlier, given that he had taken it over from a predecessor and barely changed anything.

    Herr S. was a great reader of newspapers. Over the years, he had more and more time for the habit, as his customers died away or lost their hair and were no more trouble to him. Once, when I brought along my two boys for a trim, he groaned: ‘All that hair!’ It was the only time I ever saw him in a bad mood. After that, I went on my own again. It was the unfussiness of his salon that attracted me, our halting conversations, Herr S.’s movements that had become mechanical and streamlined over the decades, his ‘Merci, thank you,’ when I paid him. Over the years, he would occasionally mention retirement, but he kept putting off the moment. Quitting, I had the impression, would have been more onerous than going on working.

    Herr S.’s salon seemed to be always open, from 7.30 in the morning to 6.30 at night. He hadn’t had a holiday for many years, in his younger days he had enjoyed going away, but that was no longer the case. Herr S. would occasionally tell me that someone from the paper, or from the local TV station had been by, suggesting an article or magazine feature about him. He was surely the oldest barber in Switzerland, perhaps in the whole of Europe. The interest flattered him, but he declined. He just wanted to do his job, and otherwise be left in peace. Perhaps he sensed that no newspaper article or TV spot was enough to encompass the thick end of nine decades in his profession: so many days, so many customers, so much hair. Any reportage would have turned him into a sort of freak, and that was the last thing he was or wanted to be.

    When I sat in his ancient barber’s chair, I would often think of the Hemingway story called ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’ about the old waiter telling his young and impatient colleague not to send the drunken regular home, but to let him have another drink. ‘Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.’ Later, he tries to explain to himself what it is that makes the place, the cafe, so important. ‘It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music.’ There then follows the famous riff on nothing: ‘It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it, and never felt it but he knew it all was already nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.’ Now Herr S. has closed his salon, and the only thing I can do is write about him, so that the clean, well-lighted place isn’t completely lost to me.

    ~

    Translating Peter Stamm

    Everything of Peter Stamm’s that has appeared in English – certainly, all the books of his that have come out in English – has been in my English. This has the feeling of a contented, faintly-worried boast (no translation being entirely without guilt). Peter is not hard to translate – he doesn’t write in Swiss dialect, he doesn’t use the glutinous, agglomerative syntax of German, his books are not buried in historical periods or in the specialist vocabularies of orchestral music or the law. Until lately, he didn’t even write about Switzerland, but set his books all over. He is in fact a distinctly Anglo-Saxon type of writer: limpid, efficient, swift. His stories move quickly and end suddenly.

    His stars are the stars of the Anglo-Saxon world, Hemingway (as here), Chekhov, Carver, others. (In the German-speaking world this gains him readers but many suspicious reviewers and few prizes: where is the difficulty, they want the difficulty.) From the six novels and two (in the original, four) books of his stories I’ve translated over the past twenty years I owe him the memory and the feeling of many stories, many people, many places: Paris, the French Atlantic coast, New York City, Estonia, Barcelona, Norway north of the Arctic Circle, Munich, Stockholm; cities, islands, mountain villages; young people, old people; young men and girls, empty-nesters; latterly a kind of ghostly alternate reality in the story ‘Summer Folk,’ the novels To the Back of Beyond and the forthcoming Gentle Indifference of the World. What I feel towards him is an utter trustingness. Whatever he brings me will be fine. A feeling of having been promised.

    Peter is kind enough to reciprocate. He trusts me back. I think of my trust as anticipatory, given in advance, his as retrospective. Whatever I do, it will have been all right. He knows this from experience. There will be reasons for it. It will have been given thought, and it will work in English, and it will be the best I can do. The style of the books is simple, but simple, as Peter’s admirer and defender, the translator or sometime translator and now thinker-about-translation Tim Parks concedes, isn’t the same as easy. It comes with its own difficulties. How to be absolutely natural. How not to come over as simple-minded, artless. There are always things to be learned, problems to be overcome.

    The British variant of English seems to me to need at least an occasional minimum of showing off. (In his piece about his hairdresser, for example, I have ‘onerous’ and I have ‘riff’.) I give perhaps surprising amounts of thought to naturalness and clarity of surface on the one hand, on the other to a kind of Nordic sourness, lack of illusion, abruptness, suddenness and uncompromisingness of bad outcome. Blankness. Sometimes I run pairs of sentences together so that they aren’t too curt; I’ve thought a lot about polysyndeton and run-on sentences (what captious American grammarians are pleased to call comma-splice sentences). I’ve worked quite deliberately with pairs of prepositions to – as I thought – make an impression of pain. Sometimes, this has even been noticed. By my lights, it’s not fancy, and I would never inflict such a thing on Peter’s writing. If anything, it’s a little like what Frost called ‘the sound of sense’. Monosyllables at work.

    Peter Stamm was born in 1963, in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novels Agnes, On A Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, Seven Years and the collection In Strange Gardens and Other Stories, as well as numerous short stories and radio plays. He lives outside of Zurich.

    Michael Hofmann has translated books by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen and many others. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in March 2008.