PT Data wrangler

Tag: english

  • The present of the past of things

    Patricio Pron writes a moving piece for PEN Atlas, about an encounter in a small German city that made him reflect on collective guilt, individual responsibility and the nature of the past – both for a person and a country

    Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem

    Some time ago I visited an elderly couple who lived on the outskirts of a small German city. I had never met them, but I already knew some things about them: I knew that they were my girlfriend’s paternal grandparents, that they were readers of Theodor Fontane, that he had been a teacher, that it had been a while since my girlfriend had last visited them. They lived in a small flat with views of a motorway with little traffic and they made exquisite conversation, the result of a life of readings that had left their mark on them and that they recounted without the slightest affectation as they sliced up the customary cake, served the coffee and showed an interest in us, as if there were anything interesting about our lives.

    The day after visiting them we received a card in which the old man thanked me for the Fontane book I’d bought in an antiques shop and given to him the day before, in a gesture that was perhaps antiquated but that I nonetheless (or maybe for that very reason) found particularly moving. Before that, and shortly after we said goodbye to them at the end of what for me had been one of the best afternoons to date of my stay in Germany, my girlfriend told me a story about her grandfather: he’d been drafted during the war; he had fought on the Eastern front and on the Western, involuntarily moving up in the army ranks, due to the desertion or death of his superiors; in France, in the face of the Allies’ advance, he had surrendered himself: he’d forced a subordinate to switch his regular soldier’s uniform for his officer’s one; the subordinate had been shot by a firing squad, he had escaped with his life.

    Neither my girlfriend nor her father knew the story well, (in fact) they preferred not to talk about it; of course, her father and she were very familiar with German responsibility in the tragic events between 1933 and 1945 and they had internalised the guilt that plagues Germans since then, but, even knowing about that guilt, they seemed little interested in finding out about the personal responsibility of a member of their family in those events. Actually (I thought) their recognition of German guilt in the tragic events of the first half of the 20th
    century is what kept them from evaluating that individual responsibility, it was the excuse to not dig deeper into the family story, to not confront the old man with facts that didn’t exist outside of German history (as if they occupied, for example, the back room of a building known only by its facade), but rather were German history itself, stripped of rhetorical strategies, devoid of sociological and political arguments that explain it, converted into family history and into destiny.

    There, I now think, was where it all began for me. Not necessarily in the story of that old man who I met one afternoon on the outskirts of a small German city and who died some years later, but rather in the confrontation between individual responsibility and collective guilt that I considered for the first time that afternoon and in what that confrontation had to say about my own country, where those responsible for the murder of thirty thousand people during the military dictatorship had been tried and then freed in name of the same argument that presided over the German way of thinking of the past, that the recognition of collective guilt exempted the army from elucidating individual responsibility.

    I hadn’t returned to Argentina for years and I was perfectly aware of how spot-on Stuart Hall was, when he wrote that “migration is a one-way trip” since there is “no ‘home’ to go back to”. When I returned to Argentina, however, while I couldn’t shake the story of that old man and the unanswered questions left by his death, which no one would ever be able to resolve (Was the story true? What was the name of his subordinate, the one who died in his name allowing him to survive? Were his nights filled with regret, with satisfaction, with indifference, with relief?), I thought I was returning to the past, to my country’s past (which I knew was bloody) and to my own family’s past, their participation in the tragic events of Argentina’s past (and how they had managed to escape death) that my parents and my siblings and I had pretended to have forgotten for too long; I was going back, I told myself, to the past, but, at the same time, it began to be increasingly clear that it was impossible for me to go back to the past, since, actually, I had never completely left it behind and it travelled with me wherever I went: that (in the end) it was there wherever I was, including in a flat in a small German city, one afternoon, in the words unsaid by an old man that would serve as my impetus to tell the story of what I had seen and heard and of how I had seen and heard it, in a country that was for me the past; which is to say, the present.

    About the Author

    Patricio Pron, born in 1975, is the author of three story collections and four previous novels, and he also works as a translator and critic. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Zoetrope and The Paris Review, and has received numerous prizes, including the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize, the Jaén Novel Award, and the 2008 José Manuel Lara Foundation Award for one of the five best works published in Spain that year. He was one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists of 2010. He lives in Spain.

    His most recent novel My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain is out now,  “a daring, deeply affecting novel about the secrets buried in the past of an Argentine family. It is a story of fathers and sons, the impending death of a parent, corruption and responsibility, memory and history, with a mystery at its heart.”

    About the Translator

    Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by David Trueba, Albert Sanchez Piol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron and Pablo De Santis, among others. Her translations have appeared in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, Granta, The Paris Review and McSweeneys. She is currently working on a novel by Marc Pastor.

    Additional Information

    Photo of Patricio Pron, credited to Luna Miguel (Madrid, March 2010)

    Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th century German-language realist writer. 

     http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0141392177

  • The Art of the Novella

    In this week’s second PEN Atlas dispatch, Meike Ziervogel from Peirene Press makes the case for the novella, charting the history of the form, and reflecting on her experience publishing great novellas in translation from around Europe

    “To reduce the novella to nothing more than a short novel is like saying a pony is a baby horse.” (George Fetherling, Canadian poet and novelist)

    When I set up Peirene, I knew I wanted to concentrate on publishing contemporary European novellas which had never been translated into English. I love the novella form and believe that many modern novels tend to be over-written. Too much description, too much repetitive dialogue, too much information copied straight from Wikipedia.  I, as the reader, feel spoon-fed, sometimes even force-fed. I wonder if I am being deprived of the opportunity to use my imagination.

    Let’s take the modern Catalan classic, Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal, (translated into English by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell). It’s a miracle of compression. In a mere 120 pages we get the complete life story of an old woman, covering the entire 20th
    century. I still remember when I finished reading it. I was amazed how this book covers everything there is to cover in a person’s life: love, hate, war, peace, loss, joy, passion, desire, loneliness. How did the author achieve this? Through the narrative voice – simple, almost naïve at times and yet beautifully wise. I often return to this story in my mind, although I read it five years ago.

    A novella is a short work of fiction. It is a film for the mind – short enough to read in one sitting, but large enough to provide a satisfying read. A full-length novel often aims to deliver a complete world-view. If you present a baddy then you need a police inspector to tell you that this person is a baddy and why. The world inside the story must be kept in balance – and sometimes this has the effect of simply confirming the reader’s worldview.

    A novella, on the other hand, prefers to focus on one view or one voice, highlights one feeling, portrays one psychological human trait. It zooms in on one aspect of a story. By doing so, it prompts us, the readers, to fill in the larger picture. It provokes us to think and use our imagination.

    For example in Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi (translated from French by Adriana Hunter), we see the world entirely through the eyes of a mother who cannot cope. For her the world has become a dark, dangerous place. We believe her and follow her. Nowhere in the story does another character tell us what to make of this woman. We are left to judge for ourselves. The author shows us the protagonist without telling us what to think.

    The novella as an art form came before the modern novel. One Thousand and One Nights, written in the 10th century, is one of the earliest examples of serialised novellas. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1386-1400) followed suit.

    During the Renaissance the novella developed into a literary genre in France and Italy. The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio and Heptaméron (1559) by the French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre, stand as two outstanding examples. Then in the late 18th and early 19th century the novella became fashionable in Germany. The Black Spider (1842) by Jeremais Gotthelf and Immenseen (1849) by Theodor Storm still make haunting reads today.

    There are many examples of great novellas across the years. Many famous films have drawn from novellas, such as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

    For me, reading is a creative act. Literature presents a wonderful tool to analyse and understand ourselves better. A text should serve as a springboard  to engage our mind, our intellect, our imagination.

    The novella is the perfect form to sharpen and make use of our creative reading skills. At best plot, voice and structure form a complete whole and each of those three aspects supports the other with an intensity made possible by the novella’s obligation to focus.

    This month Peirene will publish Mr Darwin’s Gardener by Kristian Carlson, translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. Like Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood, Carlson evokes the voices of an entire village. They are held together by an impressively tight narrative structure.

    But also in Anglo-Saxon writing the novella is making a come back. Last year two beautifully short books were short listed for the Booker: The Lighthouse by Alison Moore and Swimming Home by Deborah Levy.

    About the Author

    Meike Ziervogel is a writer and publisher. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London in 1986 to study Arabic language and literature. She has worked as a journalist for Reuters in London and Agence France Presse in Paris. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an award-winning independent publishing house that specialises in the foreign literature in English translation. In 2012 Meike was voted as one of Britain’s 100 most innovative and influential people in the creative and media industries, the Time Out and Hospital Club 100 list. Meike’s first novel ‘Magda’ was published by Salt in April 2013.

    Additional Information

    To find out more about Peirene Press, please see here.

    Meike has also been interviewed here about her first novel, Magda, that tells the story of the wife of Joseph Goebbels.

    http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1907773401

  • The Walnut Tree of Gezi Park

    Following recent events, PEN Atlas is running an additional dispatch this week from Turkey. Kaya Genç writes for us about Nâzım Hikmet Ran, whose poem ‘The Walnut Tree’ has taken on a prophetic turn and an inspirational one in light of Gezi Park

    Nâzım Hikmet Ran, who died fifty years ago this week on June 3 1963, was one of the most sophisticated poets of Turkish language. His reputation as a romantic communist seems uncomplicated on the face of it. His works, however, attest to an author whose ideas were far from simple: a communist who was fascinated by the minutiae of industrialization; a poet who preached art for the masses while devoting his verses to elaborate philosophical discussions with figures as demanding as George Berkeley and Karl Marx.  

    Born in the then Ottoman-ruled Thessaloniki in 1902, Hikmet studied at a Naval Academy before traveling to Anatolia to join the anti-imperialist resistance movement. From there he moved to Moscow where he witnessed the foundation of the Soviet Union. Inspired by Futurists and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s modernist experiments he returned to Turkey where a nasty surprise awaited him in the form of an increasingly authoritarian regime. The new ruling elite, which trampled all dissent after 1925, picked on Hikmet; as a result he spent more than twelve years in Turkish prisons. After he finally decided to flee to Moscow in 1950, a newspaper printed his picture on its cover, urging its readers to spit on it. He was denationalized a few days later.

    The sheer range of Hikmet’s interests was fascinating. Although he spent almost a fourth of his life under confinement he had a ravenous appetite for current affairs, artistic movements and women from all nationalities. With their multiple perspectives his epic city poems bring to mind Dziga Vertov’s filmic experiments. In “The Epic of Kuvayi Milliye” he narrated the war of independence from the perspectives of ordinary people of Anatolia, challenging the official historiography of the state. As an extremely well-read poet he challenged a number other things, too. Hikmet was too clever, too bright, too passionate. Whatever happened on earth interested him; like a journalist he was quick to react to events. When the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima he described this atrocity from the posthumous point of view of a seven year old child (“I’m only seven though I died / In Hiroshima long ago / I’m seven now as I was then / When children die they do not grow”) and from that of a fisherman (“A young Japanese fisherman was killed / by a cloud at sea. / I heard this song from his friends, / one lurid yellow evening on the Pacific.”) 

    Hikmet’s love poems make good reading; as a young man I effectively made use of them while courting girls. Indeed, I have never met a Turkish girl who didn’t react to Hikmet’s love poems in a positive way. Being a reader of Hikmet provided me with the double advantage of appearing politically and sexually mature.

    Last week I remembered Hikmet, like thousands of others who opposed the cutting of trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. One of his most popular poems, “The Walnut Tree”, had a contemporary resonance here: “I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park / My leaves are nimble, nimble like fish in water / My leaves are sheer, sheer like a silk handkerchief / pick, wipe, my rose, the tear from your eyes / My leaves are my hands, I have one hundred thousand / I touch you with one hundred thousand hands, I touch Istanbul / My leaves are my eyes, I look in amazement / I watch you with one hundred thousand eyes, I watch Istanbul / Like one hundred thousand hearts, beat, beat my leaves / I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park / neither you are aware of this, nor the police.” Hundreds of people chanting those verses to defend the cutting of trees in an Istanbul park—perhaps this was a fitting way to pay tribute to his memory.

     

    About the Author

    Kaya Genç is a Turkish novelist and essayist. He specializes in late-Victorian authors and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Conrad, Wilde and Stevenson. Newsweek Turkey named him as one of Turkish literature’s 20 under 40. His essays appeared, both in print and online, in the Guardian, London Review of Books, Songlines, Sight & Sound, Index on Censorship, the Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Millions and many others. He translated ten books into Turkish (Tom McCarthy’s C, among others), writes both in his native tongue and in English and lives in Istanbul.

    Additional Information

    You can follow Kaya Genç on Twittter.

    For more on Kaya Genç and his writing visit his website.

     

  • The Sounds of Istanbul

    In the latest of our literary dispatches from Turkey, Mario Levi contemplates the sounds of the city he grew up in, and the stories that lie behind them for those willing to listen

    Translated from the Turkish by Feyza Howell

    Every life has a ‘text’, and every ‘text’ a life hiding in the dark somewhere, awaiting discovery… The choice of vantage point is, in theory, your privilege, the vantage point from which to observe the city you live in, the city you want to make sense of, and rebuild in your own way. What are you after? What do you expect to hear there, from whom, and how? Are you the victim of some voluntary captivity, hoping for deliverance through writing, or a warrior in search of his own language? There are places that you will never reach since that city will always follow you; do you know what they are?

    My ‘text’ on Istanbul insisted I ask similar questions. At the top of Galata Tower where I climbed one evening, I, who have chased many a story, or who styled himself as such, heard other people’s questions. The sun was setting. A crystal clear autumn day was about to end. More houses and streets than I could count fanned out before my eyes. Numerous houses shielding their heritage and speaking of the passage of time. Old streets trying to keep up with the changes… My city reminded me of its nature once more, the city I owed my own existence to. My ears were ringing and a familiar dizziness came over me. These sounds could have been proclaiming countless stories my life would never suffice to tell. So many civilisations, cultures, languages and faiths had left their marks. But these stones and windows stay silent to those who neither know how to listen, nor feel the need to. Like so many people… But the luxury of not hearing is denied to the twenty-first century storyteller, if anything, hearing more and more is inevitable. These were familiar sounds, and more: these were sounds I would always hear. No matter how irresistible the occasional need to plug my ears, unable to stomach the things I was hearing. Not that I ever wanted to, or could: this, you see, was the only way I could exist for the sake of my ‘text’ in a city such as this one. By relating, and by trying to understand… Just like Scheherazade, just so I could survive. That’s why I trod those streets, and others too, for so many years.

    I know an array of secrets silver Istanbul’s mirrors on the reverse. How else can I possibly explain its resolve to be heard whenever I journey to other tongues?

     

    About the Author

    Born in 1957, Mario Levi graduated from the Istanbul University Faculty of Literature in 1980 with a degree in French language and literature. In addition to being a writer, Levi has worked as a French teacher, an importer, a journalist, a radio programmer, and a copywriter. He currently  lectures in Yeditepe University, and is a board member of English PEN’s sister centre, PEN Turkey. www.mariolevi.com.tr

    You can follow him on Twitter @mariolevi_

    About the Translator

    Feyza Howell works as a literary translator as well as serving English PEN as assessor and a number of public agencies as interpreter. She has been translating fiction and commercial texts for many years as well as writing copy and non-fiction, including Waste by Hakan Günday and her translation of Madame Atatürk by İpek Çalışlar is due for publication by Saqi in the autumn. 

  • Taking a stand

    Oray Egin reports on the continuing protests in Turkey, why they began in Gezi Park and what the writers of the country owe to those marching on the streets

    It was a small, insignificant park at the centre of Istanbul. For years it served as a gay cruising area at night, but during the day families with children spent time there as it was one of the last remaining green spaces. Many couples got married at the adjacent registry office. Almost all Istanbulians have memories in the park, but none of these mattered to the administration of the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (the AKP). Their decade-long rule of Turkey brought along a construction boom, and the Gezi Park was the latest to face a similar destiny.

    Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first conceived of a construction project at the site of the park when he was the mayor of Istanbul, in the early 90s. He didn’t get enough support then, but as a powerful premier, with 50 per cent support from the electorate, he revisited his original idea. His wish was to rebuild the Ottoman era military barracks torn down by the 50s government to make way for green space. “It may be a hotel, or a residence with shops on the ground floor,” Erdoğan recently announced.

    Urban transformation projects in Turkey rarely involve public opinion, therefore the bulldozers entered the Gezi Park without much delay after Erdoğan’s statements. But that tiny park triggered a country-wide demonstration against the government when a small group, of about 20 to 30 people, stood against the bulldozers and saved a tree.

    Soon after, the word got out via Twitter and involved more people frustrated with the government’s policies – not only environmental, but an accumulation of frustration. Thousands marched to Taksim Square, where the Gezi Park is located, and similar protests erupted in dozens of other Turkish cities. Police dealt brutally with protesters using tear gas bombs and water cannons. There are numerous injuries, including a protester who lost an eye, and even a civilian casualty.

    Turkey’s media, out of fear of the government, remained silent for days. The country’s first privately owned news network, NTV, became the focus of heavy criticism. The network is part of a large conglomerate which also owns Garanti Bank, one of the largest in Turkey. On Monday, its shares dropped 9 per cent and more than 1,500 customers closed their accounts. The network’s executive issued an apology the next day: “We were wrong.”

    “It’s significant that the protest started over a tree,” says Buket Uzuner, a novelist who’s working on a quartet inspired by nature. “But of course, it is not only about a park, all of us are frustrated. And for the first time in ten years we’ve had the will to say enough.”

    Indeed, the Gezi Park protests were ignited because of the government’s increasingly authoritarian rule and threats to secular lifestyles. Just recently, a bill banning alcohol sales from 10pm until 6am was passed by the government. A symbol of the Istanbul Film Festival, the historic Emek Theatre, was torn down and is now being converted into a shopping mall. Added to this is the intimidation of free press.

    “For me one of the biggest issues is censorship and self-censorship,” adds Uzuner. “I was writing in the 70s as well, during military rule, and I can honestly say that the pressure wasn’t as severe as today.”

    Most recently, many of Turkey’s leading writers, including Uzuner, O.Z. Livaneli, Latife Tekin, Mehmet Murat Somer, Ece Temelkuran and Ayse Kulin signed a petition calling for an independent council to be formed that will hear the people’s demands and stop police brutality. “I believe that among those protesters are people who grew up reading my books,” says Uzuner. “I owe it to them to raise my voice, support them, and even march with them.”

    About the Author

    Oray Egin is a journalist and a writer based in Istanbul and New York. You can follow him on Twitter @orayinenglish

    Additional Information

    This special edition of PEN Atlas is in response to events in Turkey, and will be followed by a piece tomorrow by Mario Levi on The Sounds of Istanbul.

     

  • The Tale of Two Adrians

    Strange coincidences bring together two literary traditions in today’s PEN Atlas piece by Oksana Zabuzhko, which explores Ukrainian and Eastern European authors, their debt to history and their unjustly hidden classics

    In the European literary landscape one can hardly think of any two more distant – and historically different – literary traditions than the English and Ukrainian ones. Even when we consider, among other things, that in 1947 George Orwell himself funded the publication of the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm (which happened to be its first translation ever), the best parallel to describe how the two traditions are related would be the tale about the rich and poor brothers – only the rich brother in this tale has no clue of the existence of the poor one.

    Not that I find such asymmetry unusual. The Yiddish-American author Jacob Glatstein once astutely explained the difference between major and minor literatures: “I have to read T.S. Eliot, but T.S. Eliot doesn’t have to read me”. The rule remains the same for those who belong, as I do, to the first generation of writers of a “minor literature” starting to make it, after a century-long interlude, onto the international stage. Appearing, in the view of Western readers, “out of nowhere”, with no visible “literary ancestors” to buttress us (the best works of our classics are yet to be translated!), or even with instantly identifiable cultural markers (save for Gogol, plus The Carol of the Bells,given that anyone cares to remember the composer’s name), we, the poor relatives of the European household, have but a meagre chance of being heard in the post-informational world – that is, unless our lame-born democracy alarms news agencies with more political turmoil. So, I wasn’t even a bit surprised to have read in Julian Barnes’ interview by the Ukrainian translator of The Sense of an Ending, that he could not name a single Ukrainian author, and had never read one in all his life.

    All the more striking is the book’s emergence. For Julian Barnes has woven a magnificent story on the non-linearity of time: on the past that never passes, continuing to shape our lives without our awareness, and on our essential human incapacity to fix things inour memory. These are the subjects that have been on my mind for the entire past decade, and resulted, back in 2009, in a 700-page novel, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. When swallowing – thirstily, almost ecstatically – The Sense of an Ending, I was thus overtaken with something stronger than a Barthesian ‘jouissance du texte’. It’s the feeling of an explorer in a desert who suddenly sees somebody else’s tracks along her route, growing in numbers with each step forward: the same turns and devices employed, even the same name of the character who motors the plot – Adrian, and, yes, he commits suicide too (though in a different way, and for different reasons), and vanishes off the records with no chance for the living to ever learn “all of the truth”, and fathers a son he never sees, and the son grows up a cripple, too (though in a far more literal way than in The Museum)… More important, however, than all these freaky coincidences, was the sense of the route that I experienced while reading the book – the same route that drives explorers with the same Kantian question, “What can I know?”, and ends with the same answer, however hard for a European (Cartesian!) mind to digest: you’ll never know, nor understand, mortal; curb your pride…

    I can dutifully submit all my Ukrainian rationale for my long-time obsession with the seemingly buried-for-good ‘secrets’ of the past that begin surfacing after decades, dramatically changing people’s self-awareness: in my novel I was busy with national memory first-hand. My story embraces three generations, some seventy years of Ukraine’s recent history (starting with Stalin’s man-made famine of 1933), during which the country was forced into silence, unable to speak for itself. It’s now time for my generation of writers to put together the scattered pieces of unrecorded memories, to dig skeletons out of closets, and to speak for the dead. The same, to varying extents, applies to all Eastern European literatures, and I can name dozens of novels following the trend – from the Finnish novel Purge by Sofi Oksanen, to the Croatian novel Srda Sings in the Twilight at Pentecost by Milenko Jergovic:  with our stories, we all struggle to make our mutilated post-war history livable. But in no way can I comprehend  how on earth Mr. Barnes managed to play out the same existential drama to the solo tune of an ordinary Bristol alumnus in whose culture everything is sealed and archived, and Alzheimer’s disease is a medical term, not a social diagnosis.  

    Perhaps the novel, as a genre, is simply drifting back to myth-making – with the same structures and archetypes repeating themselves everywhere. But what if the two Adrians – two beautiful losers, English and Ukrainian – signal a more profound disease of our digitized age: “a great unrest”, coming from the fact that we no longer need to know what else in the past we’ve done wrong?

    About the Author

    Oksana Zabuzhko (b.1960) is Ukraine’s major contemporary writer, the author of nineteen books of different genres (poetry, fiction, essays, criticism).  In the early 1990s she lectured in the USA as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh.  Her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996) was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”.  Her recent novel, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009), won in Ukraine The Book of the Year, and was rated among The Best Books of the Year by Die Zeit Online, and Swiss Radio DRS.

    Ms. Zabuzhko lives in Kyiv with her partner, artist Rostyslav Luzhetsky.

    Website: http://www.zabuzhko.com

    Additional Information

    Oksana Zabuzhko will be appearing at the Dash Cafe, Rich Mix on Wednesday 5th June 7.30pm.

    To read more of Oksana’s work, please see Words Without Borders.

    http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1611090113

  • Turning up the volume

    Yasmine El Rashidi, contributor to the PEN-award-winning title Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, tells PEN Atlas about growing up learning English: exile and community, being alienated and finding her voice

    I am asked, frequently, what it means to be a woman in the Arab world; what it means to be a woman writing, expressing herself, making statements – often contrarian – in a context so dominantly male. I often choose not to respond, not to write those pieces people ask of me, not to feed an assumption of difficulty and struggle associated with gender. But occasionally, I succumb – offering editors and audiences a response to what, from their view, must be the most pressing question, the greatest struggle, for me as a female writer in Egypt.

    It’s not easy being a woman in the Middle East, and much less so today, in Egypt, with all the tumult and rising conservatism that has come to pass in the months – or years now – after the uprising. It’s not easy, but one finds ways to deal with the challenge, of the invasion of privacy, of space; of the objectification and the patriarchy that interferes and takes liberties on both the superficial and intimate levels of one’s life. There are challenges, but we find ways of tending to them and after a lifetime of it, waste little energy lamenting; we either carry on with our lives and put on blinders and trudge along, or, we take up the rights of women as a cause and calling. I know many women who take up this fight each day.

    The greatest challenge, and struggle, for me is a different one – it is the one of language, of voice. I made the decision years ago, as a teenager, to be a writer, and my parents had made the decision even years before that their children would go to an English school. It meant, without any choosing of my own but merely fluke – default – that I found my writing voice in a language not native to my country, and I struggle, often, almost daily, with this – with the sensation, or sense, of being muted.

    “It is the cause of significant disquiet.”

    “Feeling I’m on mute.”

    (excerpt from panel discussion – Berlin Festival of Literature, 2012)

    In ways, I am not the only one – I watch my generation of young Egyptians grapple with trying to find their form, their language. The product of a flawed and less than adequate school system that gave you either a foreign language, or a sub-par schooling in your own native language along with one or two others of your choice, we seem to be a generation whose volume is turned down, to varying degrees; a generation without a real mastery of any single language. Or that is, many of us at least – our Arabic is okay, our English is okay, our French comes in bits and pieces.

    To write in English, in particular at this moment of change and possibility, is to sever myself from community – from the people who matter, who affect change, who are building – or rebuilding – the country. To write in English, is to be exiled in the place in which you are from. To write in English is to write for the world, and to be subjected to the standards and expectations of editors, and readers, who demand something particular from writers of, and in, that language. To have written that same text in Arabic and have had it translated into English, would be to have it received with an alternative eye, with more space for “difference” – difference of style, difference of syntax. The “difference” of being “foreign”, a non-native speaker of the English language, a writer of a language perhaps more florid, more hazy, more idiosyncratic by its very nature of difference, of the so-called “other”.

    My struggle, then, is as a writer, to be aware that my audience is dominantly a global one, aware that my work has less of an impact in affecting change in my home country as it does in perhaps altering perspectives and shedding light and nuance on Egypt for readers around the world. This particular point – this reality – I agonize over. I wish, at this moment, that I were writing for my own community – locally – rather than for the world.

    My struggle, is also about freeing myself, creating time and space to write about things beyond the borders of my own country; liberating myself from the consciousness of “audience” and “expectation” and “validation” and “publication”. My struggle as an Egyptian female writer is, then, ultimately not about gender or nationality or place, but of motive – of intent – regardless of outcome.

     

    About the Author

    PhotoyasmineYasmine El Rashidi is a Cairo-based writer. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun. Her writing has also appeared and is forthcoming in publications including Frieze, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The Happy Hypocrite, to which she contributed a work of fiction in an edition guest-edited by Lynne Tillman. A collection of her writings on the Egyptian revolution, The Battle for Egypt, was published in 2011, and her essays feature in the anthologies Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. She is currently a fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, working on a nonfiction book about Egypt, as well as a novel set in Los Angeles.

    Additional Information

    Writing Revolution is a winner of an English PEN Award 2013

    You can catch writers, editors and contributors to Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus at the following events.

    Monday 27th May: Guardian Hay Festival, 2.30pm
    Tuesday 28th May: Frontline Club, 7.00pm
    Wednesday 29th May: Mosaic Rooms, 7.00pm
    Thursday 30th May: Oxford Student PEN, 5-7.00pm
    Fri 28th June: The Rich Mix, Shubbak Festival, 7.00pm

     

     

  • What’s authentic about global literature?

    Michele Hutchison investigates what the future might hold for the 21st Century novel: provincial literature with a global reach, or the literature of the cosmopolitan flâneur?

    Dutch writers and critics can be quite prescriptive about literary fiction; it is a frequent topic of discussion in the broadsheets here, and the debate is an eye-opener about Dutch culture and attitudes. Most recently, the acclaimed writer Oek de Jong offered his own views of what a novel should be, to coincide with publication of his latest magnum opus Pier en ocean (Pier and Ocean, an eight-hundred-page Bildungsroman which has been praised for both its style and its detailed reconstruction of local social history on a micro level). Predictably, given his own production, he is inspired by the greats of the nineteenth and twentieth century – Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce, Babel, Chekov. He says, ‘A good writer can only succeed if he knows the canon.’

    One point he makes mirrors something I touched on earlier on in my PEN Atlas piece on globalisation.  According to him, it is difficult for a writer to make his way (both in international publishing and in attracting a large readership) if he sets his novel in a different country from his own. De Jong refers to the ‘pseudo-cosmopolitanism’ as he calls it, of Dutch writers who set their novels abroad in the [mistaken] belief they will attract foreign publishers.  He then quotes the great W.F. Hermans:

    ‘All great literature is provincial literature. What is world literature? That is literature from provinces the whole world is interested in.’ De Jong concludes, ‘The future is a combination of the local and the global.’ [1]

    I was recently forced to re-address my own assumptions on the subject – I was onboard with Oek that novels (in translation) are more interesting when they tell the reader about local culture –  when I read two excellent novels, both set in countries not the writers’ own. The first was the wonderful Leaving the Atocha Station by American Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press, 2011). The protagonist is a young American poet on an academic fellowship to Madrid. Rather than writing a thesis on the Spanish Civil War in the form of an epic poem (!), he spends his time learning the language and observing what goes on around him. The title is a taken from a poem by John Ashberry and the latter even gave a quote, ‘[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life.’ One of the joys of the novel is the way Lerner questions the poetic experience and replaces a new vision of reality, vanity dismantled, back at the centre. The novel feels authentic because the view of Madrid is that of an outsider, perhaps better equipped to really ‘see’ the city than a local writer might be; the story is about the experience of being abroad, of otherness. I cannot imagine that Lerner did not spend a gap year in Spain.

    The second example is a just-published Dutch novel La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, whose debut Rupert I translated for Open Letter a few years ago.  Like Lerner, Pfeijffer is a talented poet, and both have chosen poets as protagonists – as did Roberto Bolaño in The Savage Detectives, it occurs to me now.  Pfeijffer gives his protagonist his own name as a nod to the semi-autobiographical nature of the piece, but also because he likes postmodernist game-playing.  The lines between fiction and non-fiction are deliberately blurred.

    Like the writer himself, the Dutch protagonist has moved to Genua in Italy and is living the ex-pat dream. The result is a wonderfully European novel: a mystery surrounding an amputated leg is a nod to the Anglo-Saxon thriller genre, but at its heart the novel recalls the nineteenth-century French roman de flâneur. These were novels featuring ‘a gentleman stroller of the city streets’ according to Walter Benjamin, one of the first to describe the genre. The flâneur would walk around Paris or sit in its bars and cafes and simply observe life in the city. Essentially this is Pfeijffer’s approach too, like these former decadents he sits on terraces drinking and watching the world go by, or goes for long walks around his adoptive city. Perhaps the genre is enjoying a minor revival, American-Nigerian Teju Cole’s flaneur’s roman Open City (2011), was a critical success too.

    Combining the global with the local, La Superba’s structure follows several immigrants – not just Westerners like the Dutch poet and a retired British academic, scraping by with enough money to get drunk every day, but immigrants from elsewhere – transvestite prostitutes involved in petty crime, the Senegalese labourer Djiby P. Souley – who naturally lead a much harder life. The displacement of immigrants from poorer countries is contrasted with the mobility of immigrants from richer ones. Pjfeijffer’s gift is to bring together a ragbag of people who have all made Genua their new home and bring down the veils on their illusions. A better life elsewhere? No, just a different one.

    Perhaps this is the next step in the twenty-first century novel – our new reality means that more people move around, don’t have roots, and so won’t be able to write the purist (authentic) regional novel with global appeal that Oek de Jong was thinking of. New Bohemians like Lerner and Pfeijffer will take us somewhere else, as long as readers are prepared to accept their authenticity.

    About the Author

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

    Additional Information

    Review of Leaving the Atocha Station in the New Yorker

     

    Article on Poetry Foundation website about novels featuring poets as protagonists

     

    References

    1. NRC Handelsblad, Boekenbijlage, 22 maart 2013

  • What's authentic about global literature?

    Michele Hutchison investigates what the future might hold for the 21st Century novel: provincial literature with a global reach, or the literature of the cosmopolitan flâneur?

    Dutch writers and critics can be quite prescriptive about literary fiction; it is a frequent topic of discussion in the broadsheets here, and the debate is an eye-opener about Dutch culture and attitudes. Most recently, the acclaimed writer Oek de Jong offered his own views of what a novel should be, to coincide with publication of his latest magnum opus Pier en ocean (Pier and Ocean, an eight-hundred-page Bildungsroman which has been praised for both its style and its detailed reconstruction of local social history on a micro level). Predictably, given his own production, he is inspired by the greats of the nineteenth and twentieth century – Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce, Babel, Chekov. He says, ‘A good writer can only succeed if he knows the canon.’

    One point he makes mirrors something I touched on earlier on in my PEN Atlas piece on globalisation.  According to him, it is difficult for a writer to make his way (both in international publishing and in attracting a large readership) if he sets his novel in a different country from his own. De Jong refers to the ‘pseudo-cosmopolitanism’ as he calls it, of Dutch writers who set their novels abroad in the [mistaken] belief they will attract foreign publishers.  He then quotes the great W.F. Hermans:

    ‘All great literature is provincial literature. What is world literature? That is literature from provinces the whole world is interested in.’ De Jong concludes, ‘The future is a combination of the local and the global.’ [1]

    I was recently forced to re-address my own assumptions on the subject – I was onboard with Oek that novels (in translation) are more interesting when they tell the reader about local culture –  when I read two excellent novels, both set in countries not the writers’ own. The first was the wonderful Leaving the Atocha Station by American Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press, 2011). The protagonist is a young American poet on an academic fellowship to Madrid. Rather than writing a thesis on the Spanish Civil War in the form of an epic poem (!), he spends his time learning the language and observing what goes on around him. The title is a taken from a poem by John Ashberry and the latter even gave a quote, ‘[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life.’ One of the joys of the novel is the way Lerner questions the poetic experience and replaces a new vision of reality, vanity dismantled, back at the centre. The novel feels authentic because the view of Madrid is that of an outsider, perhaps better equipped to really ‘see’ the city than a local writer might be; the story is about the experience of being abroad, of otherness. I cannot imagine that Lerner did not spend a gap year in Spain.

    The second example is a just-published Dutch novel La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, whose debut Rupert I translated for Open Letter a few years ago.  Like Lerner, Pfeijffer is a talented poet, and both have chosen poets as protagonists – as did Roberto Bolaño in The Savage Detectives, it occurs to me now.  Pfeijffer gives his protagonist his own name as a nod to the semi-autobiographical nature of the piece, but also because he likes postmodernist game-playing.  The lines between fiction and non-fiction are deliberately blurred.

    Like the writer himself, the Dutch protagonist has moved to Genua in Italy and is living the ex-pat dream. The result is a wonderfully European novel: a mystery surrounding an amputated leg is a nod to the Anglo-Saxon thriller genre, but at its heart the novel recalls the nineteenth-century French roman de flâneur. These were novels featuring ‘a gentleman stroller of the city streets’ according to Walter Benjamin, one of the first to describe the genre. The flâneur would walk around Paris or sit in its bars and cafes and simply observe life in the city. Essentially this is Pfeijffer’s approach too, like these former decadents he sits on terraces drinking and watching the world go by, or goes for long walks around his adoptive city. Perhaps the genre is enjoying a minor revival, American-Nigerian Teju Cole’s flaneur’s roman Open City (2011), was a critical success too.

    Combining the global with the local, La Superba’s structure follows several immigrants – not just Westerners like the Dutch poet and a retired British academic, scraping by with enough money to get drunk every day, but immigrants from elsewhere – transvestite prostitutes involved in petty crime, the Senegalese labourer Djiby P. Souley – who naturally lead a much harder life. The displacement of immigrants from poorer countries is contrasted with the mobility of immigrants from richer ones. Pjfeijffer’s gift is to bring together a ragbag of people who have all made Genua their new home and bring down the veils on their illusions. A better life elsewhere? No, just a different one.

    Perhaps this is the next step in the twenty-first century novel – our new reality means that more people move around, don’t have roots, and so won’t be able to write the purist (authentic) regional novel with global appeal that Oek de Jong was thinking of. New Bohemians like Lerner and Pfeijffer will take us somewhere else, as long as readers are prepared to accept their authenticity.

    About the Author

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

    Additional Information

    Review of Leaving the Atocha Station in the New Yorker

     

    Article on Poetry Foundation website about novels featuring poets as protagonists

     

    References

    1. NRC Handelsblad, Boekenbijlage, 22 maart 2013

  • What is a country?

    Following her visit to the UK last week for the London Book Fair Turkey Market Focus, Ece Temelkuran reflects on ‘Writing Turkey’ and what the term ‘country’ has come to represent for her.

    I became fixated with this question when I started reflecting on the topic I was asked to talk about at the Arcola Theatre in London: ‘Writing Turkey’. As Turkey was the Market Focus for this year’s London Book Fair, we, the writers from Turkey, were supposed to represent ‘all the colours of Turkey’, as advertised in promotional materials. Well, we did not have that much to do. The bad news about Fazil Say exploded on the first day of the fair while the Turkish Cultural Ministry was busy representing the country as a haven of multiculturalism.

    It emerged that the acclaimed pianist had received a ten-month suspended sentence for comments posted on Twitter ‘insulting religion’. The charges against him included retweeting a poem by Omar Khayyam. Thanks to English PEN the visitors at the Fair learned that the official version was not the only colour of Turkey.

    The campaign for imprisoned journalist Zeynep Kuray was also very much alive at the Fair. Zeynep is one of the hundreds of imprisoned journalists in Turkey and Turkey currently has the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world. My country is indeed a colourful place. Apparently so colourful that the political power needs to erase a few colours, just to tone it down a little.

    Coming from such a country, during my talk at the Arcola Theatre, I decided to pose the question: ‘Is it possible not to write about Turkey?’ rather than ‘Writing Turkey’. As a writer and a journalist I am trying to avoid daily politics in Turkey at the moment. I’m trying to move from reality to truth, from journalism to literature. I have two reasons. The first reason is, I think, fairly obvious considering the incidents mentioned above. The second is more theoretical. Journalism, I have come to believe, is just a form of reality, and a rather boring one. There is an untold agreement in journalism. In every piece of news you promise the reader: ‘I am going to shock you now!’. You guarantee that ‘this time is different’.

    ‘Today is not like yesterday.’ After repeating this promise to myself for about 20 years I finally understood that repetition is the most sickening form of torture that the human mind can endure. And in this case, it was my own mind. After writing two novels I admitted that I need a new ‘country’ from which only I can report and where there is no need for repetition: Literature. Literature, for me, is a country where I don’t have to shock people but I do hope to amaze them. All in all, I am at a stage where reality and fiction are not that far apart. Fiction can become real and reality can be passed off as fiction. A little anecdote about how easily reality and fiction can be mixed.  In my first novel, Sounds of Bananas, I created the concept of the Bread Tree. One of the characters, Zeinab Khanim, was hanging bags of left-over bread on a tree and the whole neighbourhood was following her. After reading the novel some Turkish readers went to Beirut and started asking about the Bread Tree. I heard that there are people in Beirut now, who after being asked about it so many times, came to believe that the Bread Tree actually existed; they just didn’t know about it.

    After working as a journalist for so many years and seeing that nothing has changed in my country, I think one would agree with me that I have enough reasons to believe that fiction is stronger than reality.  And although my journalism didn’t set any of the imprisoned journalists free, at least my fiction created a Bread Tree in Beirut.

    Yet again it is almost impossible not to write about my country even when I am writing fiction. In Sounds of Bananas  Diyarbakır, a Kurdish town in Turkey, becomes Sabra Shatila Camp. And in my second novel, people in Libya are actually Kurds. I guess one cannot get away from one’s country even if one distances oneself from it. Therefore the central question remains: What is my country to me?

    While reflecting on the question I remember Angelopolous’ film Eternity and a Day. I remember the question that the protagonist was asked: ‘What is tomorrow?’ The answer was as the title of the film: ‘Eternity and a day!’ My answer would be similar if I was asked: ‘What is a country?’: ‘A land much bigger than the world and as small as a table.’ Much bigger because, for me, a country is a moment. It is that moment when friends burst out laughing, interpreting a reference in a joke the same way. A moment of mutual and deep understanding. It is as small as a table because actually what you long for, when you are away, is a bunch of good friends who would only fill a space at a table. You miss that very table, not the vast land. You miss the colours of your country. Not all of them. But certainly those that are being erased.

    About the Author

    Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known journalists and political commentators, writing regularly for the Turkish newspaper Habertürk. She has published widely and won numerous awards for her work, including the Pen for Peace Award and Turkish Journalist of the Year. Temelkuran, whose articles have been published in Nawaat, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Global Voices Advocacy and the Guardian, has written regularly for Al-Akhbar English. Her book Deep Mountain, Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide was published by Verso and Book of the Edge  by Boa Editions.

    Additional Information

    Ece will take place in European Literature Night at the British Library on 15 May 2013.

    You can read more about the Turkey Market Focus in this piece by Andrew Franklin, Director of Profile Books, in BookBrunch.

    You can also read Ece’s previous PEN Atlas piece: Literary festivals: playground or construction site?