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  • Translation, Revolution, and Pedagogy

    Following her appearance at the Literary Translation Centre for London Book Fair 2013, Samia Mehrez writes about working collaboratively on the book Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, which uses multiple perspectives to translate the linguistic and cultural meanings of the recent momentous events in her country

    One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the revolutionary spirit in Egypt has manifested itself in an unprecedented production and proliferation of cultural materials, whether written, oral, visual, or performative, all of which have decidedly remapped and redefined the contours and meanings of both public culture and public space. Since January 2011 there has been a radical transformation of the relationship between people, their bodies, their language, and space; a transformation that has enabled sustained mass convergence, conversation, and agency for new publics whose access to and participation in public space has for decades been controlled by an oppressive, authoritarian regime. This newfound power of ownership of one’s space, one’s body, and one’s language is, in and of itself, a revolution. Indeed, the ongoing culture of revolt and its new forms and media of expression continue to inspire a plethora of publications, both locally and globally.

    Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2012) is one such example, representing the collective work of graduate students in a seminar that I taught at the American University in Cairo in Spring 2011, immediately following the fall of Mubarak. The seminar was part of an important university-wide initiative that attempted to respond to an urgent pedagogical need to sustain the students’ engagement in and with the revolutionary moment. The largely improvised seminar attracted Egyptian and non-Egyptian students whose linguistic abilities and cultural competencies and experiences complemented each other in ways that were important and helped them maintain an informed comparative perspective on their task as translators. The participants, here future authors of the collective book, came to the task of translation with their own histories, understanding, and perspectives on translation all of which intersected throughout: there was the poet, the musician, the technical translator, the journalist, the photographer, the security translator, the activist, the creative writer, and the teacher. They had all experienced and lived through the revolution in Egypt and were all motivated by their  desire to engage the layers of revolutionary narratives and to translate these fields of meaning to each other and for each other in an attempt to understand, situate, and contextualize the historic events that enveloped them.

    Given the revolutionary context of the seminar itself, its content and pedagogical format, as well as the projects undertaken by the participants, were decided upon jointly at the beginning of the semester. The participants read, and collectively translated material ranging from chants, banners, slogans, jokes, poems, and street art to media coverage, interviews, blogs, as well as presidential speeches and military communiqués. They predominantly worked in groups and as partners, not as individuals. This is to say that their translations, even in the chapters undertaken by a single author, are the outcome of this collective and perpetual conversation and understanding. The class blog that they had created at http://translatingrev.wordpress.com chronicles the processes of translation in which they were collectively engaged, the myriad of problems, issues and challenges they encountered, how they resolved them, and why they chose such solutions.   Some of their comments addressed the division of labor among participants in each group and how, in working together, they had developed an awareness of the translator’s subjectivity, an appreciation of their difference and diversity that lay at the forefront of decision-making, and the interactive process of translation that remained incomplete without a profound appreciation and navigation of audience. They did all this with the full conviction that they had collective ownership of the translated text and that their collaborative endeavor was not at all final, but, like the revolution itself, was open to more conversation and more reflection. More importantly, they came to confront their task of translation as one that implicated them in an ethics of selection: what gets left out, what is brought in, and why; how does one justify such choices, and how their “visibility” as translators implicated them in the politics of translation. 

    Given the scope of the material and its different linguistic registers, and referential worlds, these documents and manifestations presented a great challenge to any translator not just at the immediate linguistic level but more importantly – and herein lay the real challenge – at the discursive, semiotic and symbolic meanings of revolution at both the local and global levels and contexts. As the participants continued to work as groups they came to realize that behind each text they were translating lay a myriad of other texts that had to be translated before that singular text in the source language could be carried across to the target language. Here, the task of the translator(s) is to “carry across” the different narratives and layers of the revolution as part of a complex set of dialectical relationships with other texts (political, economic, social, and religious) that exist outside its immediate “readable” boundaries. This is what I call thick translation. All the chapters in Translating Egypt’s Revolution engage thick translation in ways that have not only compelled the contributors to re-think the limits of their own disciplines but have equally empowered them in their role as translators re-writing across boundaries and beyond borders, whether these be linguistic, cultural, or disciplinary. Furthermore, the very choices of topics and texts they have translated bear testimony to the politics of selection that implicate them (as individuals and as a group) in a very particular “version” of the revolutionary text in translation, one of many more that have yet to be translated.

    Contributors to the volume: Amira Taha, Chris Combs, Heba Salem, Kantaro Taira, Laura Gribbon, Lewis Sanders, Mark Visona, Menna Khalil, Sahar Kreitim, Sarah Hawas, Samia Mehrez.

    About the Author

    Samia Mehrez isProfessor of Arabic Literature and Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo.She has published widely in the fields of modern Arabic literature, postcolonial studies, translation studies, gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani, AUC Press, 1994 and 2005 and Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, Routledge 2008, AUC Press 2010. Her edited anthologies A Literary Atlas of Cairo: One hundred Years in the Life of the City and The Literary Life of Cairo: One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City in which she translated the works of numerous Egyptian writers are published by AUC Press 2010, 2011 and in Arabic by Dar Al-Shorouk, Cairo. She is the editor of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, AUC Press, 2012. She is currently working on a translation from Arabic into English of Mona Prince’s memoir, Ismi Thawra (Revolution is My Name), forthcoming in 2013, and a book-length manuscript tentatively titled The Making of Revolutionary Culture in Egypt.

     

     

  • New frontiers for translated fiction

    Jonathan Ruppin writes for PEN Atlas about the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, what it can tell us about the context of translated fiction in the present and which names to keep an eye out for in the future

    The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize offers a rare instance of media coverage for translated fiction, with most bookshops finding front-of-house space for what many might assume to be a fairly specialised minority interest. But I suspect this year’s shortlist will entice plenty of readers to try something new: it always does.

    There are three names that few will have encountered before. Andrés Neuman‘s Traveller of the Century offers the profundity of Will Self’s Umbrella or Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Chris Barnard‘s Bundu will appeal to fans of J M Coetzee or Damon Galgut. Trieste by Daša Drndic pieces together a tragic history from tattered fragments in unforgettable fashion.

    The other three writers are more familiar. Ismail Kadare has developed a devoted following since winning the inaugural Man Booker International Prize eight years ago and in 2010 Gerbrand Bakker‘s The Twin proved to be a popular winner of the IMPAC Award. Not only Spanish-language readers are well acquainted with Enrique Vila-Matas: you can feel confident you’re in a good bookshop if you find Bartleby & Co on the shelves.

    But Independent Foreign Fiction Prize does not operate in isolation. I’m certainly expecting, for instance, the English edition of Michel Rostain‘s The Son, winner of France’s Prix Goncourt in 2011, to attract a significant readership when it’s released by Tinder Press next month. 

    It is received wisdom that British readers have no appetite for fiction in translation. In any discussion, someone will cite the 3% of books sold that originate in other languages and everyone else will slowly shake their heads in sorrowful recognition, even though no one knows where the statistic came from. It was at least given credence last year when research by Literature Across Frontiers, a research organisation supported by the Cultural Programme of the European Union, revealed that the figures in Britain are 2.5% for the whole of the market and 4.5% for fiction, poetry, and drama. But while the figures in most other markets are supposedly much higher, such comparisons ignore some very significant points of context. 

    Beyond the Anglopshere, English is a national language in over a quarter of the world’s nations. It’s also the only language in common in vast swathes of Africa and Asia: the English-language heritage alone of India is considerable. English is the planet’s lingua franca.

    It should also be borne in mind that translated fiction tends towards the literary. The more commercial end of the market – such as thrillers, romance and historical fiction – already sees many more titles produced than the market can possibly sustain, so publishers are unsurprisingly wary of adding translated books to the range. Not only is there the additional cost of translation, but such genres are read principally for entertainment and escapism, and are anchored by familiar cultural references.

    This fear of scaring off readers is apparent in the way that those writers who do make it to the English-language market are presented. There’s no mention on the covers of the British or American editions of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy that the books were originally written in Swedish and Denmark’s Jo Nesbø has even lost his suspiciously Scandinavian minuscule on this side of the Atlantic.

    The success of these two authors, however, hints at a potential readership for translated fiction that remains largely untapped. Crime fiction from many European nations can now be found on the shelves of all but the most meagrely stocked bookshop. The success of writers such as Sergei Lukyanenko and Sergei Lukyanenko confirms that fantasy and SF readers are as willing to entertain new sources for their reading as well as exploring new worlds.

    The accusations of homogeneity and parochialism often levelled at British publishers can be quickly refuted by leafing through a handful of their catalogues. But there is a discrepancy between what they offer bookshops and what actually ends up on the shelves of too many of our book retailers. 

    Breaking new authors of any kind is now viewed as one of the principal obstacles to sustaining the diversity of the book trade. It’s all about bulk sales for supermarkets, who now account for over a fifth of sales by volume, and the algorithms used by online retailers bring up the same familiar titles repeatedly. Even our remaining high-street book chains focus somewhat less than they once did on expanding the horizons of their customers.

    But this conservatism leaves the independent sector with a terrific opportunity assert its credentials. Few publishers offer them anywhere near the attractive discounts that the big players can demand, so they are not hemmed in by commitments to place books backed by the biggest marketing campaigns front and centre. Their need to distinguish themselves, their superior ability to handsell and, often, their place at the heart of the local community allows them to guide readers towards unexpected pleasures.

    It also allows them to work with the many smaller, independent presses who, unfettered by shareholder expectations, are less compromised by the irresolvable dichotomy of business and art. The flourishing of publishers such as Peirene Press, And Other Stories, Hesperus Press and Alma Books demonstrates the natural curiosity of the reader, a phenomenon not so fanciful when one considers the role of the imagination in the process of reading.

    At Foyles, we realised some time ago that there is an unsatisfied demand for translated fiction and you’ll rarely see one of our shops without some sort of display. We’ve found that a table full of the obscure writers from countries whose literary heritage is a closed book to most will attract great interest, just so long as there are a handful of recognisable titles amongst the range for reassurance. 

    This isn’t revolutionary or daring. It’s a reflection of the multicultural world in which we now live, a world in which events anywhere may have their consequences for us. And what better way to explore that world than through the stories that sit at the heart of these many cultures? Storytelling is a fundamental human instinct – we’ve done it since we first sat around the fire picking bits of mammoth from between our teeth – and tales of the wondrous and strange resonate as much as those set on familiar ground.

    About the Author

    Jonathan Ruppin has worked at Foyles Bookshop for ten years, where he is now Web Editor. He is also a member of the Editorial Comittee for New Books in German and a freelance journalist. He tweets as @tintiddle.

    Additional Information

    English PEN, together with the Reading Agency and the British Centre for Literary Translation, are partnering with Booktrust to give 300 Readers the chance to shadow this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The IFFP Readers’ Prize project is funded by the Free Word Strategic Commissioning Fund and the NALD Futures Fund.

  • What is Official? Turkish writing, from state discourse to civil literature

    As part of our ongoing series of PEN Atlas dispatches from Turkey, Kaya Genç describes the struggle for the soul of his country’s literature between state officials and independent creative writers

    During my teenage years I was strongly opposed to Turkish literature. The reason behind my dissent was that the books we were assigned to read in secondary and high school literature classes belonged to a particular branch of literature which I can today describe as official state discourse. In those classes there was almost no reference to great humorists of the Middle Ages, like Nasreddin Hoca, nor were we acquainted with the works of Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi, the influential mystic and poet. We didn’t know much about Divan poetry, the elaborately composed verse poems that existed for almost half a millennium, and great folkloric poets like Yunus Emre were not properly studied. Instead what we had were the founding texts of a particular ideology which I found boring and out of touch with the reality around me. It was sometime later, in the final years of high school that I discovered that a very different kind of literature had also existed in Turkey’s culture, however suppressed and exiled to margins. This is what I came to see as my country’s genuine, civil literature.

    The official literature was produced by a particular generation of writers whose backgrounds were often quite similar. Here I am thinking of writers like Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, Namık Kemal and Tevfik Fikret: all of them well-educated, influential, prolific men with successful careers as state officials during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. Among those it was Kemal and Fikret who worked at a place called the Translation Bureau and who were the most influential. The Bureau was part (and arguably the core) of the Ottoman ministry of foreign affairs. It was there, while working in a professional capacity as state translators and clerks that those authors discovered the political power of the written word and the prestige of possessing western knowledge. Knowledge was power and thanks to their foreign language skills they were well placed to make use of it in their efforts to give shape to Ottoman society. Literature became for them a tool which helped mediate and spread their political beliefs.

    The shadow of the so-called Regulation Period, where the Ottoman Empire underwent a period of modernization, fell heavily on their works. Widely known as Tanzimat, this era introduced policies of centralisation and a new imperial identity (Ottomanism) to a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population. The same period saw the introduction of uniforms, the modernisation of the army, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the strengthening of individual and property rights.

    Some intellectuals found grave faults with those reforms. Ahmet Mithat’s Felatun Bey ve Rakım Efendi (1875) and Recaizede Mahmud Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (1898) were, in essence, arguments against what their authors considered to be the “wrong-Westernisation” of Ottoman society. The authors wanted to control the westernisation process and replace it with their own understanding of modernisation. This was what they had in mind when they started producing literary characters, or types, who personified the ills of modernisation: those characters were too liberal or too conservative, they didn’t fit into their authors’ understanding of a proper citizen and so they were portrayed as dangerous and suspect figures.

    In their highly schematic works, the authors made distinctions between the liberal/degenerate and nationalist/virtuous veins of western culture, supporting the latter through idealised characters. Their fight against effeminacy, religiosity, bodily pleasures and bohemianism were later used as justification when the state attempted to label certain sectors of the society as its enemies.

    The most extreme defender of this modernising school was Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, a diplomat and Member of Parliament for most of his life. His book Yaban (The Stranger) frankly expressed, or even confessed his generation’s fury against what they saw as the regressive people of Anatolia. Yaban’s protagonist Ahmet Celal travels to an Anatolian town where Ankara’s efforts to secularise and westernise the country’s culture seem to be ignored entirely by the villagers. Much to his surprise and chagrin Celal learns that only a tiny minority of his beloved people share his generation’s Enlightenment beliefs, showing even less interest in the policies imposed on the country from the capital.

    More than seventy years after it was first published Yaban epitomises this historical disconnect between Anatolian people and the early republican government’s modernising policies. In 1925 a law called Takrir-i Sükûn Kanunu (Maintenance of Order Law) was introduced and used to trample any form of dissent against the state from “reactionaries and rebels”; i.e., socialists, conservatives, ethnic and religious minorities. Implemented by the one-party state, the law was used to send dissidents to the so-called Freedom Courts where they could face torture, imprisonment and execution (the poet Nâzım Hikmet, for example, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison by the same court).  In order to understand the ideology which justified such drastic measures, one needs to look at the kind of Turkish novels that continue to be taught at schools. The villains of those books and those convicted by the one party state of the early republican era, after all, were more or less the same.

    It was only later, when I was eighteen or nineteen years old that I began to see that almost no one (apart from wannabe civil servants) enjoyed reading those books. This is why, unlike books by Flaubert, Wilde or Proust written approximately in the same period, nobody would read those novels had they not been assigned to them at school. Instead people have discovered, over the last decades, another vein of literature which gave voice to the ideas of the writer instead of the state.

    If so many readers have changed sides and turned from teenage opponents of Turkish literature to its mature and genuine admirers, it is thanks to individual authors like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, Şavkar Altınel, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Latife Tekin, Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak and Perihan Mağden who showed us that there is indeed an alternative to speaking with the voice of the state. The voice of the creative individual, often at odds with high offices and political power, triumphed in the end.

    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

    Kaya Genç will be in conversation with Maureen Freely on Friday 19 April at 7.00 p.m at the LRB Bookshop.

    You can follow Kaya Genç on Twittter.

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

     

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Gerbrand Bakker, author of The Detour

    PEN Atlas Editor, Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Gerbrand Bakker about his novel, The Detour, walking in Wales for two weeks, and translating Emily Dickinson

     

    Wales, and in particular Snowdonia, are hugely important in your novel:  the sense of space, the atmosphere, the animal world. Do you know Wales well?  Why did you choose that area?

    Yes, I know Wales very well. Only once was I in the south of Wales, where I did – all alone – the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. Which is far too long: I walked for two weeks with the Atlantic on my left hand side. That was quite boring after a while. North Wales I like best, it is often almost like a Mediterranean country. I’ve been going there for years and years, and I have this strange habit of wanting to climb Mount Snowdon at least once a year. The country is old, feels old, almost ancient. Timeless in a way, and that is – I realise now – exactly the reason why I had to set the story of The Detour right there.

    Emily Dickinson is one of the ghosts haunting the novel. Is she a poet you have read a lot? Could you tell us a bit more about why you chose her?

    Ever since I formed a ‘poets’ society’ with two friends – this was somewhere in the early Nineties – I have loved this one particular poem, the motto-poem of the novel. We translated English poems, and this one was most elusive. We just did not understand it, we could make no satisfactory translation. After a while we also started to write our own poems. Later I read more Dickinson, and especially when I re-read her for this novel, I found that quite a few poems are, well, not so good. But I think that maybe I wrote the entire novel to be able – through the main character – finally to make a translation that comes close to what it should be, or wants to be. I’ve always found it very hard to accept a story in commission: I did not dare to accept it, for I thought: suppose I get no ideas? Suppose I cannot finish it in time? But since a year or so I’ve dared to accept such commissions, because I’ve found out that I am able to write a short story on the basis of a poem that I once wrote. And, in this case, possibly a complete novel…

    Emilie is full of grief. Your previous novel, The Twin, explored a similar subject. Do you feel that we can get close to the essence of suffering by describing it?

    Yes. Describing, that’s the right word. Not explain, not psychologize. Show through action, not so much through thoughts or little philosophies. Readers can – if they want to, of course – have thoughts or little philosophies. I love atmosphere in a novel, and I think that to create an atmosphere, you do this best by describing things, and then preferably as sober and restrained as possible. It’s a wonder that most of my novels exceed 200 pages…

    Apart from Emily Dickinson, there are other ghosts in the novel: the uncle, who nearly committed suicide; Mrs Evans, who used to live in the Welsh house; the gradually disappearing geese. Emilie looks at herself through the past, for example by thinking that she can smell Mrs Evan’s smell on herself.  Why did you decide to make these past figures so prominent in the novel?

    They just came. With Mrs Evans for instance, I did not think in advance: let’s have her invade the body of Emilie, as a symbol or foreshadowing of what would happen to her. She just came, and as she was there, her presence got stronger and stronger. And this uncle, well, that was actually the chapter that originally started the book, until my publisher suggested that that chapter be moved to chapter 4. This is something by the way that more or less really happened to one of my uncles. And I don’t do this a lot: use real people or real life in my novels.

    The novel is partly about loneliness, and our inability to really connect with the others.  Yet Emilie meets a boy, who stays in the house with her, and there is a sense of closeness. Is language essential to being close?

    No, not at all, I think. Remember the song ‘Enjoy the silence’ by Depeche Mode: “All I ever wanted/ All I ever needed /Is here in my arms/ Words are very unnecessary /They can only do harm

    Vows are spoken/ To be broken/ Feelings are intense/ Words are trivial/ Pleasures remain/ So does the pain/ Words are meaningless/ And forgettable.”

    I quite like this song, especially the acoustic harmonium version of it. Maybe I am not normal, but for me non-verbal language is much more important than spoken language. But: people want to talk to each other or have to talk to each other. And that’s also what Bradwen and Emilie do, but I think that both of them would rather do everything in silence, Emilie more than Bradwen, but still.

    Your novel is translated from the Dutch. How closely do you work with your translator, David Colmer?

    For this novel very close, because I woke up one night, almost two years ago now, almost in a panic. I thought: one cannot translate this novel, there is far too much language-stuff in it, and it is about the translation of an English poem into Dutch! So I contacted David and he stayed very calm and said: “That’s my problem, relax.” He is wonderful. But for the first time I read a translation of one of my novels before it was sent to Harvill Secker. And we worked on it, I had some comments, and then David had counter-arguments, and so on. It was nice to do it like this.

    The Twin brought you much international recognition. Was it difficult to write a new novel after winning the IMPAC? Or was it in some way liberating to know that you have that official stamp of approval?

    The Detour was already finished when The Twin was awarded with the IMPAC. It came out in October of 2010 here in Holland. So: no. But: since The Detour (or Ten White Geese in the USA) I haven’t written anything, apart from my weblog and the occasional story or column. I simply did not feel like it. What I did do in the end with the prize money was to buy a house with land in The Eifel, Germany. Since the first of December last year I own it, and I go there a lot. One part of the house will be renovated later this spring, and there I will have a – I hope – wonderful, big writing room with only a wood burning stove in it, accessible via a staircase, outside the house. I’ve been having some problems with depression and stuff, and now I feel just fine, writing is not a part of my daily life, but I do feel like I have to have the feeling of wanting to write, if you know what I mean. Usually I’m very happy when I write. I work like a horse then: I don’t think or analyse much, I just move forward until the book is finished.

    What are your literary influences if any?  Who do you enjoy reading now?

     Carson McCullers is, come to think of it, one of my influences. I love the way she writes, very subdued, very brooding, very ‘Southern’. And she uses beautiful language. Lord of Dark Places by Hal Bennett is a book that has in a way ‘unleashed’ me; that was a book (also Southern USA) that made me realise that one is permitted to write everything one wants to write. And here in Holland, J.J. Voskuil, who wrote, among other things, Het Bureau (The Office): a novel consisting of seven volumes, in total 5000 pages, about, well, nothing much. But at the same time about everything. And that is what I love about it.

    PEN Atlas promotes international literature in the UK, a lot of it in translation. Who else from your country would you recommend to British readers and British publishers?

    J.J. Voskuil. The first part of this 7-volume novel has come out in Germany last year, and I believe they want to move on…

    Interview conducted by Tasja Dorkofikis, Editor, PEN Atlas

    Additional Information

    Gerbrand Bakker is a Dutch writer. In 2010, he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the English translation of his novel, The Twin (Boven is het stil).

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Gerbrand Bakker, author of The Detour

    PEN Atlas Editor, Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Gerbrand Bakker about his novel, The Detour, walking in Wales for two weeks, and translating Emily Dickinson

     

    Wales, and in particular Snowdonia, are hugely important in your novel:  the sense of space, the atmosphere, the animal world. Do you know Wales well?  Why did you choose that area?

    Yes, I know Wales very well. Only once was I in the south of Wales, where I did – all alone – the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. Which is far too long: I walked for two weeks with the Atlantic on my left hand side. That was quite boring after a while. North Wales I like best, it is often almost like a Mediterranean country. I’ve been going there for years and years, and I have this strange habit of wanting to climb Mount Snowdon at least once a year. The country is old, feels old, almost ancient. Timeless in a way, and that is – I realise now – exactly the reason why I had to set the story of The Detour right there.

    Emily Dickinson is one of the ghosts haunting the novel. Is she a poet you have read a lot? Could you tell us a bit more about why you chose her?

    Ever since I formed a ‘poets’ society’ with two friends – this was somewhere in the early Nineties – I have loved this one particular poem, the motto-poem of the novel. We translated English poems, and this one was most elusive. We just did not understand it, we could make no satisfactory translation. After a while we also started to write our own poems. Later I read more Dickinson, and especially when I re-read her for this novel, I found that quite a few poems are, well, not so good. But I think that maybe I wrote the entire novel to be able – through the main character – finally to make a translation that comes close to what it should be, or wants to be. I’ve always found it very hard to accept a story in commission: I did not dare to accept it, for I thought: suppose I get no ideas? Suppose I cannot finish it in time? But since a year or so I’ve dared to accept such commissions, because I’ve found out that I am able to write a short story on the basis of a poem that I once wrote. And, in this case, possibly a complete novel…

    Emilie is full of grief. Your previous novel, The Twin, explored a similar subject. Do you feel that we can get close to the essence of suffering by describing it?

    Yes. Describing, that’s the right word. Not explain, not psychologize. Show through action, not so much through thoughts or little philosophies. Readers can – if they want to, of course – have thoughts or little philosophies. I love atmosphere in a novel, and I think that to create an atmosphere, you do this best by describing things, and then preferably as sober and restrained as possible. It’s a wonder that most of my novels exceed 200 pages…

    Apart from Emily Dickinson, there are other ghosts in the novel: the uncle, who nearly committed suicide; Mrs Evans, who used to live in the Welsh house; the gradually disappearing geese. Emilie looks at herself through the past, for example by thinking that she can smell Mrs Evan’s smell on herself.  Why did you decide to make these past figures so prominent in the novel?

    They just came. With Mrs Evans for instance, I did not think in advance: let’s have her invade the body of Emilie, as a symbol or foreshadowing of what would happen to her. She just came, and as she was there, her presence got stronger and stronger. And this uncle, well, that was actually the chapter that originally started the book, until my publisher suggested that that chapter be moved to chapter 4. This is something by the way that more or less really happened to one of my uncles. And I don’t do this a lot: use real people or real life in my novels.

    The novel is partly about loneliness, and our inability to really connect with the others.  Yet Emilie meets a boy, who stays in the house with her, and there is a sense of closeness. Is language essential to being close?

    No, not at all, I think. Remember the song ‘Enjoy the silence’ by Depeche Mode: “All I ever wanted/ All I ever needed /Is here in my arms/ Words are very unnecessary /They can only do harm

    Vows are spoken/ To be broken/ Feelings are intense/ Words are trivial/ Pleasures remain/ So does the pain/ Words are meaningless/ And forgettable.”

    I quite like this song, especially the acoustic harmonium version of it. Maybe I am not normal, but for me non-verbal language is much more important than spoken language. But: people want to talk to each other or have to talk to each other. And that’s also what Bradwen and Emilie do, but I think that both of them would rather do everything in silence, Emilie more than Bradwen, but still.

    Your novel is translated from the Dutch. How closely do you work with your translator, David Colmer?

    For this novel very close, because I woke up one night, almost two years ago now, almost in a panic. I thought: one cannot translate this novel, there is far too much language-stuff in it, and it is about the translation of an English poem into Dutch! So I contacted David and he stayed very calm and said: “That’s my problem, relax.” He is wonderful. But for the first time I read a translation of one of my novels before it was sent to Harvill Secker. And we worked on it, I had some comments, and then David had counter-arguments, and so on. It was nice to do it like this.

    The Twin brought you much international recognition. Was it difficult to write a new novel after winning the IMPAC? Or was it in some way liberating to know that you have that official stamp of approval?

    The Detour was already finished when The Twin was awarded with the IMPAC. It came out in October of 2010 here in Holland. So: no. But: since The Detour (or Ten White Geese in the USA) I haven’t written anything, apart from my weblog and the occasional story or column. I simply did not feel like it. What I did do in the end with the prize money was to buy a house with land in The Eifel, Germany. Since the first of December last year I own it, and I go there a lot. One part of the house will be renovated later this spring, and there I will have a – I hope – wonderful, big writing room with only a wood burning stove in it, accessible via a staircase, outside the house. I’ve been having some problems with depression and stuff, and now I feel just fine, writing is not a part of my daily life, but I do feel like I have to have the feeling of wanting to write, if you know what I mean. Usually I’m very happy when I write. I work like a horse then: I don’t think or analyse much, I just move forward until the book is finished.

    What are your literary influences if any?  Who do you enjoy reading now?

     Carson McCullers is, come to think of it, one of my influences. I love the way she writes, very subdued, very brooding, very ‘Southern’. And she uses beautiful language. Lord of Dark Places by Hal Bennett is a book that has in a way ‘unleashed’ me; that was a book (also Southern USA) that made me realise that one is permitted to write everything one wants to write. And here in Holland, J.J. Voskuil, who wrote, among other things, Het Bureau (The Office): a novel consisting of seven volumes, in total 5000 pages, about, well, nothing much. But at the same time about everything. And that is what I love about it.

    PEN Atlas promotes international literature in the UK, a lot of it in translation. Who else from your country would you recommend to British readers and British publishers?

    J.J. Voskuil. The first part of this 7-volume novel has come out in Germany last year, and I believe they want to move on…

    Interview conducted by Tasja Dorkofikis, Editor, PEN Atlas

    Additional Information

    Gerbrand Bakker is a Dutch writer. In 2010, he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the English translation of his novel, The Twin (Boven is het stil).

  • No offence meant

    Award-winning translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones experiences extreme reactions to the latest crime novel she has translated on a recent trip to Poland…Here she tells the PEN Atlas of her time in Sandomierz, where she visits the setting of the novel by Zygmunt Miłoszewski.

    I recently translated a crime novel, A Grain of Truth, by Polish author Zygmunt Miłoszewski. The story is set in the city of Sandomierz, famous for its picturesque, seventeenth-century Old Town, set on a high hill above the modern city. The book makes use of historical facts about the city’s insalubrious past as the scene of pogroms against the Jewish population in the eighteenth century. It also refers to a ‘small town’ mentality, and implies that some people there would still fairly readily express anti-Semitic feelings. Knowing that in Poland reactions to fiction can be extreme, personal and literal, Miłoszewski was keen to take me to Sandomierz before the book was published, to show me the places featured in it before he became persona non grata.

    In fact, we ended up going to a meeting with the deputy mayor and the publicity people from his publisher, because the deputy mayor had read the book. She loved it, and was planning to host a book launch and a special edition. So that was a relief. However, forgetting that the beginning of the book had just been published in the Polish edition of Newsweek, Zygmunt then rang the man who runs the archive – central to the plot of the book and housed in the former synagogue – to ask if he could bring me there to show me around. “You might not remember me,” he said politely. “How could I forget you?”came the answer. “I’ve had calls from colleagues all over the country asking how I could let anyone spend all night in the archive!” Something that only happens in the novel, of course. We were told to be there in the next five minutes. It really is a small place, where you keep bumping into the same people, so we were there in no time.

    We were met at the door by the archivist, a gaunt man with white hair and a drooping white moustache. As I looked around, I understood why the author wanted me to see this building – it is an extraordinary place, a library housed inside a fine old hexagonal prayer hall. Many of the original features are still there, including an incredible Zodiac painted on the ceiling (with a crocodile for Scorpio and a crayfish for Cancer), gryphons and Hebrew writing on the walls. But the entire space is bizarrely filled with metal shelving on several levels, a sort of scaffolding, crammed with fat parish record books which miraculously survived the war. At the top level of the scaffolding, special gantries, like miniature drawbridges on pulleys, can be lowered to reach the high-up windows, set deep into the building’s thick walls.

    As I took photos, the man said to Zygmunt, “So what does a big-city goodbye look like, then?” Zygmunt was puzzled. “There’s an extract from the book on your publisher’s website where it says, ‘The waiter tossed him a small-town goodbye’. People are sensitive about that sort of thing, you know.” “Er, er,” said Zygmunt, “that’s just on the website, not actually in the book.” “And our cleaning lady is very upset,” said the man.

    At the start of the book, which was in Newsweek, there is a crucial scene that sets off the whole intrigue and draws the reader inexorably into the plot. The genealogist doing his research in the small hours becomes unnerved by the creepy atmosphere of the archive, and the tension is compounded when he hears a loud crash; it’s just that one of the window gantries has fallen. As he tries to raise it again, he thinks he sees something outside, and approaches the window for a better look; it’s dirty, he can’t see properly, so he opens the window to look out, and sees a ghastly, bloodless corpse shining in the moonlight.

    “The window has to be dirty in the book for the purposes of the plot, so the character opens it and looks out,” said Zygmunt. “You’ll have to explain that to Mrs Janeczka!” We were duly marched to a cubby hole under the stairs. The tall man knocked at it importantly. “Mrs Janeczka, it’s the writer fellow from Warsaw!” Out came a small woman in a blue pinny and plum-coloured hair. Without a word, she defiantly pointed her chin at Zygmunt, her stare so stony that he visibly aged down from thirty-five to five. Stammering like a school boy, he tried to explain. “It’s just fiction, I never meant to imply… to cast aspersionson your no doubt impeccable cleaning skills…” “But it’s gone out into the world,” she said.

    “Book launch at the Town Hall, reception at the bar, author’s public execution in the Marketplace!” I said as we ran off. Later we learned that a local primary school teacher, who just happened to have the same (not unusual) name as one of the characters in the book, had insisted that the publisher must withdraw and pulp the entire first edition – the pupils had cottoned on to the book character’s nickname: “piczkazasadniczka” – “the principled pussy”. Before the book launch could happen, it was abruptly cancelled; allegedly the bishop had been offended by the book’s criticism of the Catholic church, and the mayor was offended by its suggestion of scams run by the city administration. “But no one was offended because I dragged up the city’s anti-Semitic past,” says Zygmunt. “Perhaps, because I did my best in the novel to point out the path of common sense, to show that both anti-Semitism and mad political correctness are built upon the same hatred.”

    Needless to say, it was a bestseller at the local independent bookshop (which features in the book), and eventually Miłoszewski got a reprieve. His author’s event in Sandomierz happened and was very well attended, a huge success and a happy occasion – with no need for the discreet bodyguard offered by his publisher.

    Antonia_Lloyd-JonesAbout the Author

    Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her translations of non-fiction include reportage, literary biographies and essays. She also translates poetry and books for children, including illustrated books, novels and verse. She occasionally takes part in translation conferences, reads her work at public events, and interprets for the writers whom she translates at literary festivals. Last year she participated in Translation Nation, a project to teach primary school children the value of knowing languages. She recently mentored a younger translator within a project run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and initiated by the UK Translators Association, of which she is currently a committee member.

    A Grain of Truth, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones is published by Bitter Lemon Press.

    Entanglement, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones, was published in 2010.

  • PEN Atlas – Editor’s Round Up February 2013

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis reviews the first few months of 2013 for the Atlas; offering up a few personal highlights so far and drawing our attention to upcoming translation Prizes and literary events and festivals.

    Dear Readers,

    The cold weather is usually pretty conducive to reading and exploring the world through stories and I very much hope that some of you have been inspired by recent dispatches to seek out the books we’ve covered.  Since the beginning of 2013 we have visited many places; from China and India to the Netherlands and Poland, and we will continue broadening our literary horizons. We looked at many genres too; from poetry to graphic novels and memoirs.

    First to our selected PEN writers – each year English PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee select around 12 newly translated and published novels through their PEN Promotes programme. This January we had Nihad Sirees, the Syrian author of The Silence and the Roar, writing about Aleppo, his childhood town and literary inspiration. Gregor Benton looked at revolution, resistance and the Beijing University literature class that nurtured three of China’s best-known intellectual and political adversaries, in the light of his forthcoming translation of Mei Zhi’s prison memoirs F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years. Alejandro Zambra, the author of Ways of Going Home, talked to the PEN Atlas about his new novel, the responsibility of memory, and contemporary Chileans grappling with their country’s violent past. 

    Our other dispatches looked at similar themes of history and its effects on the present. Jeet Thayil reported from the Jaipur Literary Festival about the unusual experience of attending the festival under police guard, because the previous year he had read from The Satanic Verses. During his stay in Jaipur he was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his novel Narcopolis, which is also short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize (to be announced on the 14th
    of March).

    Basia Howard, the translator of Mother Departs  by Tadeus Różewicz, published in March in the UK, wrote about Tadeusz Różewicz who is seen alongside Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłoszas one of the greats of Polish poetry. According to Seamus Heaney he is one of the great European poets of the twentieth century and Tom Paulin remarks that ‘Tadeusz Różewicz (…) sends messages from underground that are like jammed radio signals. Though he would not agree, he has succeeded in writing poetry after Auschwitz.’ 

    Michele Hutchinson, one of our regular contributors, looked at international graphic novels and their new popularity, and travelled with Dutch writers all over the UK during their High Impact tour. High Impact is a brilliant new initiative, bringing new foreign writers to British readers.  The Greeks will be following the Dutch touring the UK later this year.

    The PEN Atlas also compiled a selected list of books coming out in the UK in translation during 2013. It is an incredibly rich and stimulating list which includes crime, graphic novels, romance, memoir, poetry and many others….Despite the fact that the numbers of translated books published in the UK are still rather low, there are marvellous books there and we have a lot to celebrate.

    The growing profile of books in translation is partly due to various translation initiatives, many worth exploring; from a wonderful selection of events at London Review of Books Bookshop, to translation summer schools in Norwich and London, a translation mentorship scheme, and a host of international writers attending UK literary festivals. And if you happen to be in New York, there is always the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just announced its line-up.

    The PEN Atlas will travel extensively through Turkey during the next few months, and will bring you some new voices from Africa.  I hope that you will continue reading the PEN Atlas and the books we cover.  Read it, like it, and then share it!

    Tasja Dorkofikis,

    Editor, PEN Atlas

    tasja dorkofikis photo (2)

    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 February 2013

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis reviews the first few months of 2013 for the Atlas; offering up a few personal highlights so far and drawing our attention to upcoming translation Prizes and literary events and festivals.

    Dear Readers,

    The cold weather is usually pretty conducive to reading and exploring the world through stories and I very much hope that some of you have been inspired by recent dispatches to seek out the books we’ve covered.  Since the beginning of 2013 we have visited many places; from China and India to the Netherlands and Poland, and we will continue broadening our literary horizons. We looked at many genres too; from poetry to graphic novels and memoirs.

    First to our selected PEN writers – each year English PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee select around 12 newly translated and published novels through their PEN Promotes programme. This January we had Nihad Sirees, the Syrian author of The Silence and the Roar, writing about Aleppo, his childhood town and literary inspiration. Gregor Benton looked at revolution, resistance and the Beijing University literature class that nurtured three of China’s best-known intellectual and political adversaries, in the light of his forthcoming translation of Mei Zhi’s prison memoirs F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years. Alejandro Zambra, the author of Ways of Going Home, talked to the PEN Atlas about his new novel, the responsibility of memory, and contemporary Chileans grappling with their country’s violent past. 

    Our other dispatches looked at similar themes of history and its effects on the present. Jeet Thayil reported from the Jaipur Literary Festival about the unusual experience of attending the festival under police guard, because the previous year he had read from The Satanic Verses. During his stay in Jaipur he was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his novel Narcopolis, which is also short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize (to be announced on the 14th
    of March).

    Basia Howard, the translator of Mother Departs  by Tadeus Różewicz, published in March in the UK, wrote about Tadeusz Różewicz who is seen alongside Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłoszas one of the greats of Polish poetry. According to Seamus Heaney he is one of the great European poets of the twentieth century and Tom Paulin remarks that ‘Tadeusz Różewicz (…) sends messages from underground that are like jammed radio signals. Though he would not agree, he has succeeded in writing poetry after Auschwitz.’ 

    Michele Hutchinson, one of our regular contributors, looked at international graphic novels and their new popularity, and travelled with Dutch writers all over the UK during their High Impact tour. High Impact is a brilliant new initiative, bringing new foreign writers to British readers.  The Greeks will be following the Dutch touring the UK later this year.

    The PEN Atlas also compiled a selected list of books coming out in the UK in translation during 2013. It is an incredibly rich and stimulating list which includes crime, graphic novels, romance, memoir, poetry and many others….Despite the fact that the numbers of translated books published in the UK are still rather low, there are marvellous books there and we have a lot to celebrate.

    The growing profile of books in translation is partly due to various translation initiatives, many worth exploring; from a wonderful selection of events at London Review of Books Bookshop, to translation summer schools in Norwich and London, a translation mentorship scheme, and a host of international writers attending UK literary festivals. And if you happen to be in New York, there is always the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just announced its line-up.

    The PEN Atlas will travel extensively through Turkey during the next few months, and will bring you some new voices from Africa.  I hope that you will continue reading the PEN Atlas and the books we cover.  Read it, like it, and then share it!

    Tasja Dorkofikis,

    Editor, PEN Atlas

    tasja dorkofikis photo (2)

    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.

  • Ghentish Talent – Graphic Novels from Flanders

    Michele Hutchison takes us on a far-ranging tour of the European comics scene, with a focus on the beautiful, moving and innovative graphic novels coming out of Belgium

    Graphic novels are hot. One of the most talked about books of 2012 was Chris Ware’s Building Stories, an interactive graphic novel in a box – possibly better described as a game – published by Jonathan Cape. It looks stunning but makes for challenging reading. A lot is required of the reader or ‘story-builder’. And then there was the shortlisting of two graphic novels for the Costa Awards, one of which, Mary Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, illustrated by her husband, Bryan, won the Biography category. This was actually seen as controversial by some in the UK. In fact I’d almost completely forgotten about that narrow-minded view that graphic novels aren’t real literature, or art for that matter. It seems so dated to me, and it’s probably for that  reason that we ended up with two terms in the first place – ‘comics’ for character-driven series and the more serious-sounding ‘graphic novels’ for single volume stories-in-pictures.

    Outside of the UK things look rather different. In America there is less critical resistance, super-hero comics are an integral part of popular culture, while arty graphic novels have long been accepted as part of high culture. The US comics industry prizes, the Eisner Awards were established as far back as 1988.  In last week’s Publishing Perspectives  Duncan Jepson pointed out that graphic novels also have a long tradition in Asia, which interestingly he believes might be related to having a more visual written language made up of pictorial symbols.

    Franco-Belgian comics also have deep roots. Think of Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke and Suske en Wiske (translated in the US as Willy and Wanda). Yet alongside these series created by teams of writers and illustrators and often aimed at a children’s audience, there is now a thriving graphic novel scene in Belgium – more specifically in Flanders where the Sint Lucas Art Academy in Ghent is churning out a wide array of talent from its Illustration course. One of their most famous alumni is the young graphic novelist Brecht Evens, whose stunningly-illustrated books The Wrong Place and The Making Of have been published in English by Cape in the UK and across the pond by Drawn & Quarterly to great critical acclaim. (As an aside, I confess to being one of his translators, along with Laura Watkinson, and for the first book, Rhian Heppleston.)

    Brecht Even’s lush and complex watercolour panoramas have made him most hip artist on the scene right now. He was the obvious choice to curate a show of Flemish graphic talent at Angouleme Comics Festival last month – which sees 200,000 visitors descending on a small town in France. In ‘La Boite à Gand’, Brecht chose to showcase four other illustrators with whom he’d trained at the Sint Lucas: Brecht Vandenbroucke, Hannelore Van Dijck, Lotte Vandewalle and Sarah Yu Zeebroek. Not all of them make books yet and the exhibition made the overlap between contemporary art and graphic art very clear. Brecht Vandenbroucke has just published an entirely textless first book, White Cube, which was the subject of much foreign interest at the festival. The explosions of colour are indeed reminiscent of ‘the other Brecht’s’ work.

    General agreement that graphic novels are in vogue hasn’t yet translated into an increase in sales figures, I hear from editors and graphic novelists alike. On the High Impact tour, I talked at length to another fantastic Flemish talent, author of the beautiful and moving When David Lost His Voice, Judith Vanistendael, who told me that rights to her books have been sold in countries like Korea and Egypt but she feels that most of the hype is still confined to conversations and awareness of graphic storytelling rather than it being a money-earner. Her works still mainly reach a niche audience and are not yet mainstream. In the Dutch-language market, this translates to sales figures of up to ten thousand copies, which represents major success in the field.

    Producing books in colour is expensive, debutants generally have to make do with black-and-white line drawings which scan more easily. Yet small specialist publishing houses like Self-Made Hero and Drawn & Quarterly do manage to maintain high production values for their books. Young entrepreneur and director of Self-Made Hero, Emma Hayley, told me she was actually planning on doing more graphic novels in translation and it seems that others are listening to the jungle drums too. With subsidies available to cover translation costs from Dutch, we might be seeing a lot more of that Ghentish talent.

    Incidentally, the Grand Prix Angouleme this year went to a Dutchman, Willem, who lives in France and produces a cartoon for Charlie Hebdo. It coincided with the Dutch Literary Foundation producing their first comics offensive: Ten Graphic Novelists from Holland.

    A name to watch out for there is Tim Enthoven whom I came across when he was still finishing his graduation project. The project, his as yet untranslated book, Binnenskamers, was published in 2011, and like his Flemish contemporaries, his work also crosses over into the field of contemporary art.

    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

    Article in Publishing Perspectives about the British attitude to graphic storytelling

    Film on ‘La Boite à Gand’ featuring Brecht Evens (in French)

    The Flemish Literature Funds (for subsidy information and the free publication Bangarang, Comics from Flanders)

    My blog for the Dutch Literary Foundation, Judith Vanistendael on the High Impact Tour

    London Super Comics Con: 24-25th February

    Angouleme Comic Festival 2013

     

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  • Tadeusz Różewicz and The Struggle for Poetry

    For PEN Atlas this week, Basia Howard writes about Tadeusz Różewicz, Poland’s most translated author, considered by many to be of the same stature as Szymborska and Milosz. His memoir Mother Departs, published by Stork Press next month, describes the war he survived, his artistic journey and the experiences that forged his poetic conscience

     

    They were so happy

    the poets of old

    They were like children

    and a tree was their world

     

    What can I hang for you

    on the branch of a tree

    where iron rain

    fell brutally

     

    Tadeusz Różewicz is Poland’s pre-eminent living author. His writings include poetry, drama, prose and film scripts. He was awarded the European Prize for Literature in 2007.

    The first English-language edition of his poetry was published in the ’60s in fine translations by Adam Czerniawski that helped build his reputation internationally as one of the greatest writers of the immediate postwar years. This was followed over the next decades by a steady flow of his work in English translations, on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Różewicz was born in 1921. His youth was cut short by the Second World War. His home town of Radomsko was one of the first to fall when Germany invaded, and he joined the Home Army partisans to fight the Nazi occupation. Europe’s collective tragedy was magnified by his family’s personal tragedy when in 1944 Tadeusz’s elder brother and mentor, Janusz – also a poet, and an intelligence officer in the Underground resistance – was captured and murdered by the Gestapo. Also, we have to infer from the fact of his mother’s Jewish descent that the family had to evade the constant threat of extermination posed by the Nazi regime. During the war they moved repeatedly, always one step ahead of the raids and mass arrests.

    Tadeusz Różewicz began writing for the underground press. But for him the Holocaust and all the War’s other atrocities signified both the death of God and the death of poetry. Later he tried to replace the religious experience with an aesthetic one – he  studied Art History at Kraków’s great Jagiellonian University –  but he soon realised that it was futile: “I turned away… the source of creative work, I thought, can be ethics.”

    And so in his poetry he rejected all the adornments of rhyme and metre. He stripped it down to the bone, to the essentials.

     

    After the end of the world

    after death

    I found myself in the midst of life

    creating myself

    building life

    people animals landscapes

     

    this is a table I said

    this is a table

    on the table there is bread a knife

    the knife is for cutting the bread

    bread feeds people

                   

    man must be loved

    I was learning night and day

    what must be loved

    man I answered

     

    He was writing, he said, for survivors, tasked with the reinvention of devalued language and proving that poetry could, and must, be written after Auschwitz – but through an awareness of Auschwitz:

     

    behind clean glass

    lies the stiff hair

    of those suffocated in the gas chambers

    there are pins in the hair

    and bone combs

     

    The simple stark testament of a poet who was a participant and witness in history continues to fall on receptive ground worldwide. Różewicz has been translated into over 40 languages, making him Poland’s most translated author.

    He is also an innovative playwright.  His drama The Card Index presented the modern European everyman, an antihero with no fixed name or identity.  Różewicz proved to be visionary in his choice of subject matter, writing as early as the 1960s about overpopulation and environmental disaster, as well as about the futility and immorality of war, about depression and the loss of moral compass in modern consumerist society. But all this is told through the spectrum of a new form, which he’s relentlessly invented and searched for – he believes this is the task of art. And although austerity and brutal honesty define Różewicz’s most celebrated poetry, his new forms, especially in the theatre, also embrace the humour and irony that he sees as the saving grace of the modern world.

    Różewicz has been quietly and consistently present in the English-speaking world for over 40 years. Today at 91, he’s still speaking to us, and indeed in 2012 he wrote a clowning parody of Hamlet to illustrate our cultural deflation and confusion.

    Stork Press is about to publish Różewicz’s memoir Mother Departs. It is a biography – told through a kaleidoscope of different genres and the different voices of his family, set against the dark epic backdrop of a country ripped apart, invaded and repressed throughout the 20th century. Tadeusz Różewicz’s vision has not changed during the seven decades of his literary career. But Mother Departs adds to our understanding of the discordant forces that shape a writer. Wars, religion, poverty, politics all do so – but so do the kitchen-table actualities of family love. This is absolutely fundamental to Różewicz. 

    After the War he wrote:

     

    I am  twenty-four

    led to the slaughter

    I survived

     

    Ever since, he has written about all of us who have endured and survived, because we must. Now in Mother Departs he brings us face to face with those closest to him, whom long ago he lost.

     

    About the author

    Photo-BasiaBasia Howard (aka Barbara Bogoczek) is a translator and interpreter based in London. She has had a strong working relationship with Tadeusz Różewicz, publishing his poetry (ARC Press) and drama (Marion Boyars) in collaboration with Tony Howard. She has also translated the work of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska and many other Polish poets. She often works in theatre and with the Polish Cultural Institute. She is a legal interpreter and is also a member of the Translators Association / Society of Authors.  Her most recent publication is the poet Ewa Lipska’s novel Sefer (AU Press).  Please see this link for more about the novel. Her translations have been published in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Holland and Poland, and have appeared in the New York Times and on the London Underground.

    Mother Departs is published by Stork Press in March.

    Additional Information

    You can read more about Tadeusz Różewicz at Culture.pl, the online magazine promoting Polish Culture abroad, run by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.

    They also host a full resource library concerning Polish literature.