PT Data wrangler

Tag: Daniel Hahn

  • 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.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: José Eduardo Agualusa

    Translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, interview by Tasja Dorkofikis.

    Your novel examines the troubled past of Angola through the life of a woman locked away from the world. Why did you choose this detached perspective?

    I thought it would be interesting to have a distant observer, like an apathetic God, someone who could watch the whirlpool of history as though looking down on it from a balcony.

    Ludovica, the main character of the novel, is said to be based on the life of a real woman. Did she really exist, and if so who was she?

    No. Ludo is me, or was me, during a certain period when I was living in Luanda, in that very building. They were days of great political intolerance. I would stay locked away in my apartment all day, working, while the city moved around me. I’d look at the city, out there, and it scared me. It was around that time, I think, that the character of this woman came to me. Someone who isolates herself out of sheer terror. Because she is afraid of the vastness she does not know.

    Apart from Ludovica, the novel has a wonderfully rich cast of characters. Are any of them based on real people too? Have you done much research for the historical part of the novel?

    There’s once character, a state security agent, who overlaps in several of my books, from Rainy Season to My Father’s Wives. I called him Monte and he was created based on a real person. A famous torturer who died the very day I published Rainy Season. He was killed by a satellite dish, just like in the novel.

    I didn’t need to do much research. I lived through those years. I followed some of the war as a journalist, as well as the years after the death of Jonas Savimbi and the end of the military conflict. I know Angola’s recent history very well.

    The novel’s patchwork structure is a perfect reflection of conflicting and shifting allegiances and stories. How did you decide on this structure and the inclusion of poems?

    The novel’s structure arises for me as the plot progresses. In this case it was slightly different, however, in that I had previously written a screenplay. I wrote the novel with recourse, partly, to the structure of that screenplay. From a certain point it became clear to me that the novel needed this poetic madness. A certain mystery and uneasiness that poetry and bring with it. Because the main character demands this. She is a disturbed person. At the same time, she’s also a person possessed by the spirit of poetry.

    Ludo tries to forget but discovers that it is not possible. But she says that: ‘Our mistakes correct us. Perhaps we need to forget. We should practise forgetting.’ Is this the advice you would give to Angola too?

    No. I believe the opposite: I think the first thing we need is to remember. People first need to remember, to cry together. Only then will they be free to forget.

    Luanda is one of the main characters of the novel. How has Luanda influenced your writing?

    If it weren’t for Luanda, I might never have become a writer. Luanda is an extraordinary setting, a place where the most brutal reality and the most delirious imagination merge noisily together. It’s a big, tough city, where you can still find magical thinking with rural origins. In the streets of Luanda you’ll come across adventurers from all over the world mixing with farmers, ex-soldiers and guerrilla fighters, sorcerers, diamond traffickers, mercenaries, etc. It’s a whole catalogue of characters.

    You were born in Huambo, Angola, and now divide your time between Africa, Brazil and Portugal. How do these three locations – with such intertwined pasts – fuel your work and sense of identity?

    The language I work with is global Portuguese, not just Angolan Portuguese. The fact that I divide my time between all these different territories helped me first of all better to understand the Portuguese language. To take possession of it.

    African Lusophone writers have recently become more visible in English-speaking countries. How important are the translations into English for you? And how important is the shortlisting for the Man Booker International Prize? Are there any other Angolan writers who would also be of interest to English-speaking readers?

    Translations into English are important because they can be read by people who speak other languages. A book translated into English has, right from the outset, a greater possibility of subsequently being translated into other languages. Being on the shortlist for the Booker is directly reflected in the sale of rights to other languages.

    And yes, I think so. There are Angolan writers who I’m sure could have a lot of readers in the Anglophone universe: the anthropologist, filmmaker, poet and novelist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, whose fiction mixes all these other areas of expertise and talents he has. It’s strong, original work, focussing on the nomadic peoples of the Namib desert in the south of Angola. Also the poet Ana Paula Tavares.

    How do you see your role as a writer in a country like Angola, which is still recovering from the long civil war?

    I think writers in Angola have an important role to play in asking questions, contributing to an open debating of ideas. Even for the process of national reconciliation. As I’ve said before: we need first to remember, then we can forgive.

    Who do you think your readers are? And who do you write for?

    Many different readers. People interested in dilemmas of identity, in questions relating to memory and the process of constructing identities.

    How do you think Angolan writing is influenced by Brazilian and Portuguese writing and vice versa?

    Brazilian literature was – at least until the late 1970s – very important for the development of Angola’s writers. Essential, even. It doesn’t seem so important now. All the same, it does still have more impact than Portuguese literature.

    Do you work closely with your translators?

    Yes, with some of my translators. Especially with Daniel [Hahn, Agualusa’s English translator], and also with my Dutch translator, Harrie Lemmens, and my German translator, Michael Kegler. Today they’re my friends. Translators are a lot of help in making a book better, they find all the mistakes that the editors, proof-readers and literary critics miss. Translators are always our best readers. I actually think a book shouldn’t really be published in its original language till a good translator has cast their careful eye over it. I make a note of their corrections for the new editions in Portuguese. My new Portuguese editions are corrected, practically speaking, by my translators.

    I have books translated into 26 or 27 languages. Unfortunately I don’t know most of my translators.

    José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, in 1960, and is one of the leading literary voices in Angola and the Portuguese-speaking world. He is the author of Creole, which was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and The Book of Chameleons, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007. Agualusa lives between Portugal, Angola and Brazil.

    Photo credit: Rosa Cunha

    2007743010DH bos smallDaniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some forty books to his name. He won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, and a Blue Peter Book Award for the first in his Ultimate Book Guides series of reading guides for children and teenagers.

    A former chair of the Translators Association, national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme, he is currently chair of the Society of Authors and on the board of trustees of a number of organisations working with literature, literacy and free expression, including Pop Up and Modern Poetry in Translation.

    Daniel Hahn joins three other Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted translators (Charlotte Collins, Ekim Oklap and Deborah Smith) for a special English PEN event tonight at Foyles Charing Cross, London. More information

    Find more about A General Theory of Oblivion on the World Bookshelf.

  • A rather grim story

    When I agreed a few years ago to put together a new edition of the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature I was determined that one of the ways it would be different from its 1984 predecessor was that it would have much better coverage of non-Anglophone writing. The Companion is, after all, supposed to represent our whole world of children’s literature – all times and places, for children and teens of all ages (a crazy undertaking, obviously, but I won’t dwell on that); but while the old edition was a really wonderful book, truly a masterpiece of its genre, it was very firmly, comfortably rooted in the Anglosphere of children’s lit, and I wanted to change that. But the book I finally published last week (oh, these things do take time…) has in fact only a relatively modest increase in its coverage of translated work. Why?

    Well, it’s a rather grim story. (Not to be confused with a Grimm story, which would obviously be great.) Those of us in the UK’s translation family have long complained about our country’s resistance to literary import, and we’ve done a lot of work – with organisations like English PEN, among others – to try and change that bad habit, to improve the ‘bibliodiversity’ of UK publishing, to increase the variety of voices to which our readers have access. And things do seem to be getting better – with more being translated, and more visibly, and translators themselves more dynamic and more appreciated. It’s a slow process, certainly, but it’s all good. But one area where we haven’t made our progress yet is in books for children; in recent years our children’s publishing world has been as closed to work from other languages as it’s ever been.

    The truth is, of course, most of us grew up on diets of translated books as much as anything else. For me it was Asterix and Tintin, the Moomins, Emil and the Detectives and others. It could just as easily have been Andersen and Grimm, Astrid Lindgren, The Swiss Family Robinson or so many others. (Did I even know I was reading translations? Probably not – it hardly mattered.) But now?

    New books for children published in English translation are desperately hard to find. (Books, in other words, originating in any of the languages spoken by some 6.7 billion of the world’s population.) Submissions to the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation, which I recently judged, while extremely high in quality, are pitiful in quantity. And yet I’m writing this post from the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (where I’ve been deployed with a grant from Arts Council England to try and identify good books for potential translation by English publishers), and the whole world is here in this huge hall and it’s excited and energetic, and productive, and diverse, full of books that sound and look utterly wonderful – and how frustrating not to be able to read any of them, nor to have any prospect of doing so any time soon.

    It’s hard to deny, of course, that the Anglosphere is an extraordinary source of great children’s writing, and it has long been so. (Lewis Carroll’s first Alice book turns 150 this year.) The 3640 entries that make up my Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature do, I hope, demonstrate that – that richness, that variety, the scope of talent and inventiveness we’re so lucky to have access to. But I hope it gives some suggestion, too, of what we’re missing. What we see as our ‘world of children’s literature’, as I’ve been able to describe it to my Anglophone readers, actually has so very little of the world in it. We still have some way to go.

    dannyDaniel Hahn is the author of a number of works of non-fiction, including the history book The Tower Menagerie, and one of the editors of The Ultimate Book Guide, a series of reading guides for children and teenagers, the first volume of which won the Blue Peter Book Award. Other titles include Happiness Is a Watermelon on Your Head (a picture-book for children), The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland (a reference book), biographies of the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a new edition of the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. His translation of The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007. He is also the translator of Pelé’s autobiography; and of work by novelists José Luís Peixoto, Philippe Claudel, María Dueñas, José Saramago, Eduardo Halfon, Gonçalo M. Tavares and others.

    A former chair of the Translators Association and national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, he is currently chair of the Society of Authors and on the board of trustees of a number of organisations working with literature, literacy and free expression, including English PEN, Pop Up and Modern Poetry in Translation.

  • Identity and durability

    Paulo Scott writes for PEN Atlas about the need for Brazilian authors to move away from stories about ‘white guys, living in the big urban centres’, and how a vain desire for durability has stunted the literature of his country

    Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

    Anybody would advise caution to a critic of narrative fiction who claims that a work has successfully used recent historical events as a vital component (and also as a backdrop) of its unfolding plot, in particular those events that relate to political positions. Books of this kind run the risk of becoming quickly dated – and there are few things considered worse for a work of literature.

    It is undoubtedly the case that historical events, particularly recent political events, are inevitably susceptible to re-readings and mutations. It does not, however, follow that a novelist ought to worry that his own personal – and therefore decisive – reading of a certain socio-political landscape (even if it is a barely examined one, and whether or not he is writing a predominantly realist narrative), might perhaps be capable of jeopardizing the durability of his story.

    A concern about the durability of a piece of literary production even before it has come into existence – as though such things could be reduced to an engineer’s calculations – is not something that can be taken seriously. Durability is a condition that is disconnected from a writer’s efforts and from his control, though I admit that a misreading of a given political landscape can substantially shorten the life of a novel with settings of a socio-political nature. Readers tend not to waste their time on narrative premises that are flagrantly incorrect (or, even worse, which are exposed by an about-turn in recent events). What I do not see as credible is that the writer should become fearful and run away from any kind of risk, which sometimes is an inescapable dimension of the creative process.

    The period of recent Brazilian democratisation (following the dictatorship that started in 1964), a period already within the gaze of Brazilian history, a period whose conclusion, depending on the criteria you use, ended in the second half of the 1980s, has so far failed to produce an even moderately impressive number of novels that manage to get away from the reality of white guys, living in the big urban centres, belonging to a middle class that is modernised and advantaged. Nor has it produced novels that risk a more substantial (and also more vertically-oriented) and challenging weighing-up of the social impact of recent political choices. There are, of course, people who claim that the country is still in a transitional phase towards true democracy, especially taking into account the demonstrations in June 2013, which triggered political repression that various levels of government considered perfectly acceptable in view of the greater freedom existing today as compared to the exorbitant restrictions in place during the years of the military dictatorship.

    These contemporary novels describe the reality of a social class with access to education and culture in general, which the overwhelming majority of Brazilians do not possess. There is a certain modesty in the choice of narrators, of characters, of plots, of settings and spaces. There is a need to correspond to a contemporaneity dictated by literary production in Europe and North America, as though by reflecting them we might attain some of our own authority or greater visibility or even durability. There is a short-sightedness that is entirely unproductive and anti-literary, if we accept that literature is an important means of getting closer to the other. There is a fear of taking a frank look at Brazilian reality.

    Of course, there are some contemporary writers (I shall not risk naming them) who do not deny the full breadth of Brazil’s culture, and who do not refuse a hard look at Brazilian identity – something that is undeniably interlinked with current events as well as with recent conflicts, with the period of democratisation (which for some people is still incomplete and is not being completed), with a tremendous difficulty in learning from our own mistakes – but they are names not present in any quantity that is reasonable and desirable; they are, in other words, few and far between.

    From this perspective, contemporary Brazilian literature – even keeping in mind those writers producing literature that is original and facing outwards to a Brazilian social reality of relevance, though one as yet little explored – is still quite timid compared to what is being produced in the rest of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina. Brazil is vast (so vast that whenever it responds as a State, as a Nation, it’s frightening), it has a plurality that is almost impossible to bind together, but this is no excuse. To my mind, taking on a bit more risk and being unafraid to write about what are actually the most pressing concerns within the seriousness that is today’s Brazil would not be a mistake.

    Cultural expression, literary expression, can become dated for countless different reasons, so arranging things in such a way as to avoid the label of becoming dated, whether in theme, in the profile of the characters, in the events that propel the narrative, in whatever it may be, might be an unforgiveable error. Someone once said, and it is worth remembering, that if you are going to write governed by fear, even just with an eye to the little aspirations and vanities related to the illusion of durability, then you would do better not to write at all.

    Paulo Scott is appearing in the UK at the following events.

    He will also be appearing in the US.

    Nowhere People is Paulo Scott’s first novel to be translated into English.

  • PEN Atlas – Editor’s Round Up

    In the first of a monthly series, PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis rounds up some of the highlights so far, and suggests some great further reading for our literary travellers

    Dear Readers,

    We launched the PEN Atlas over six months ago and have now 30 pieces published online, all newly commissioned and written for us. I would like to highlight the most recent blogs and books we mentioned.

    At the beginning of September we published dispatches from two exceptional women.

    Samar Yazbek wrote from Syria about the dangers of reporting and writing from a conflict zone. Yazbek, a writer and a journalist, was active in the first four months of the Syrian uprising in 2011. She witnessed and experienced cruelty and torture from the Assad regime. During that time she kept a diary of her own reflections as well as of oral testimonies from other opposition fighters. In her book, Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, she shows the reality of what’s happening there and brings us stories of many people who risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. The insight that Yazbek offers into the complex and bloody conflict is both incredibly valuable and inspiring.

    Her novel, Cinnamon, will be published by Arabia Books later this year. Fearing for her daughter’s life she was forced to leave Syria and she is now in hiding. 

    Lydia Cacho wrote from Mexico about censorship and about the power the government and media over journalists and reporters. Her new book Slavery Inc; the Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, just published in the UK, follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, and exposes the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, money laundering,  and terrorism.  Cacho’s powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity make us aware of the terrible human cost of this exchange. Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the scope of its investigation, and for the bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

    English PEN has also been busy this month promoting a biography of Ryszard Kapuscinski by Artur Domoslawski, one of the winners of its Writers in Translation award (PEN Promotes!). You can read on our site a conversation with the author and some further recommendations of Polish reportage recently published in the UK. It is worth remembering that Polish reportage has an established and celebrated tradition from Ryszard Kapuscinski and Hanna Krall to Mariusz Szczygiel (winner of European Book Award for Gottland) and recently to Andrzej Dybczak, who has just won the prestigious Koscielski Prize for his reportage on the nomadic tribes of Evenks in Siberia. And one more piece of Polish literary news – many Polish writers are touring UK this autumn: the details are here.

    Our other dispatches took us to the Netherlands where Michele Hutchison examined the success of The Dinner by Herman Koch, a novel full of suspense and middle-class anxiety, and to the Edinburgh Festival where Daniel Hahn considered the issue of translation and Krys Lee looked at how migration and displacement encourages creativity.

    As we know, there is far too little literature in translation published in English. Our aim at the PEN Atlas is to introduce new international writing to readers in the UK and to encourage publishers to bring that writing to the British market. We hope to give new insights into the rich literary landscape beyond the English language and to inspire people to seek out new writers in translation. I hope that you will enjoy reading our site and our writers, and will find them enriching and inspiring.  

    Tasja Dorkofikis

    Editor, PEN Atlas

    Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

     

  • PEN Atlas – Editor's Round Up

    In the first of a monthly series, PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis rounds up some of the highlights so far, and suggests some great further reading for our literary travellers

    Dear Readers,

    We launched the PEN Atlas over six months ago and have now 30 pieces published online, all newly commissioned and written for us. I would like to highlight the most recent blogs and books we mentioned.

    At the beginning of September we published dispatches from two exceptional women.

    Samar Yazbek wrote from Syria about the dangers of reporting and writing from a conflict zone. Yazbek, a writer and a journalist, was active in the first four months of the Syrian uprising in 2011. She witnessed and experienced cruelty and torture from the Assad regime. During that time she kept a diary of her own reflections as well as of oral testimonies from other opposition fighters. In her book, Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, she shows the reality of what’s happening there and brings us stories of many people who risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. The insight that Yazbek offers into the complex and bloody conflict is both incredibly valuable and inspiring.

    Her novel, Cinnamon, will be published by Arabia Books later this year. Fearing for her daughter’s life she was forced to leave Syria and she is now in hiding. 

    Lydia Cacho wrote from Mexico about censorship and about the power the government and media over journalists and reporters. Her new book Slavery Inc; the Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, just published in the UK, follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, and exposes the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, money laundering,  and terrorism.  Cacho’s powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity make us aware of the terrible human cost of this exchange. Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the scope of its investigation, and for the bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

    English PEN has also been busy this month promoting a biography of Ryszard Kapuscinski by Artur Domoslawski, one of the winners of its Writers in Translation award (PEN Promotes!). You can read on our site a conversation with the author and some further recommendations of Polish reportage recently published in the UK. It is worth remembering that Polish reportage has an established and celebrated tradition from Ryszard Kapuscinski and Hanna Krall to Mariusz Szczygiel (winner of European Book Award for Gottland) and recently to Andrzej Dybczak, who has just won the prestigious Koscielski Prize for his reportage on the nomadic tribes of Evenks in Siberia. And one more piece of Polish literary news – many Polish writers are touring UK this autumn: the details are here.

    Our other dispatches took us to the Netherlands where Michele Hutchison examined the success of The Dinner by Herman Koch, a novel full of suspense and middle-class anxiety, and to the Edinburgh Festival where Daniel Hahn considered the issue of translation and Krys Lee looked at how migration and displacement encourages creativity.

    As we know, there is far too little literature in translation published in English. Our aim at the PEN Atlas is to introduce new international writing to readers in the UK and to encourage publishers to bring that writing to the British market. We hope to give new insights into the rich literary landscape beyond the English language and to inspire people to seek out new writers in translation. I hope that you will enjoy reading our site and our writers, and will find them enriching and inspiring.  

    Tasja Dorkofikis

    Editor, PEN Atlas

    Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

     

  • Scottish Translation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    About the Author

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

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