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Tag: Europe

  • Lampedusa: Gateway to Europe

    One day my editor-in-chief called me in to his room. ‘It’s time for you to go to Lampedusa,’ he said. ‘Your colleague has to come back and we can’t leave the island without a journalist.’

    I was confused and excited at the same time. My colleague told me the first person I should call in Lampedusa was Pietro Bartolo, the doctor at the local clinic.

    ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What kind of help can he give me? I want to tell the story of the people who leave their country to survive. Why a doctor?’

    ‘Pietro isn’t a doctor,’ he answered. ‘He’s the doctor and he’s the first person the refugees meet when they reach Lampedusa. You have to talk to him.’

    So when the plane landed at the island’s airport I called Pietro Bartolo. He looked very unassuming, but came across as calm and determined. He was my first contact on the island, and each time I went to Lampedusa he gave me precious advice. He liked my way of writing about what was happening and I liked the way he welcomed people as they arrived frightened after a terrible journey. So we became friends.

    In 2014, a year after the horrific shipwreck in which 368 men, women and children died, I went to Pietro’s clinic to see a photography exhibition about that disaster. Back in 2013, on 3 October, a delegation of local healthcare professionals was in Lampedusa for a conference. When the news of the shipwreck arrived, Nino Randazzo, the bureau spokesman, went with Pietro and other doctors to the quay of the famous Favaloro pier. He started taking pictures and videos which became the first documentary evidence of the tragedy. I asked Pietro to tell me what happened that day and to describe the photos. Whilst Pietro spoke, my colleague Marco Sacchi and I cried. His voice was full of emotion and he conveyed to us the great pain he had felt as lifeless bodies began to fill up the pier. Only one picture made him proud: Pietro and a fisherman carrying a girl who seemed to have drowned. Her name was Kebrat and she was the only one Pietro could save. A miracle.

    That interview was shown on Mediterraneo, a Rai national magazine show. At the end of the interview I told Pietro: ‘We have to write a book, we have to tell people what is really happening and we have to help these people who only ask to leave in safety and to save their families.’ At first, Pietro didn’t want to write this book because he feared that telling their stories was betraying their trust. But when Fuocoammare, Gianfranco Rosi’s film, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival I called Pietro to congratulate him and he told me: ‘Now we can do the book.’

    So we started this incredible journey. We decided to arrange the stories in a way that put everyone on the same level. It was an exhausting experience; when Pietro told me the stories he relived every moment, and when I had finished writing I felt destroyed. When the book was finished I went to Lampedusa. Pietro, his wife Rita, and I shut ourselves away for two days. Every page was a punch to the stomach and by the time we had finished we had no more tears to cry.

    But writing the book was just the first step. Our mission is to speak to people. We’ve visited schools all around Europe, theatres, town squares, universities, and each time people tell us: ‘We didn’t think it was so bad.’ We want to keep on discussing this, debating it, and telling everyone that we have to face reality, that we have to help these people, that we have to realise that there’s no alternative. We must welcome those who run away from hunger and war. Lampedusa’s people did it and sent a message to Europe. And Europe has to hear this message.

  • Telling Europe’s stories

    On the morning of Friday 24 June 2016, the UK awoke to the news that it had collectively decided to leave the European Union. In London, where campaigns to form a breakaway republic would soon appear on social media walls, people found themselves muttering This Was Not Supposed To Happen, to no one in particular.

    One of the only emails to come in that day was from Mark Banting, Waterstones’ one-man-events-band champion of translated literature. His message was a rallying cry ‘to celebrate Europe’s past, present and future’. Later, in the downstairs Piccadilly bar, dark humour and wine flowed freely. But as variations on the same question – ‘what are we going to do now?’ – issued back and forth, a quiet determination began to form in response. This is an opportunity, people started to say. We need to redouble our efforts, said others.

    So: we need to do something to tell Europe’s stories, to change ‘Brand Europe’. But what role can a festival play in doing that?

    When I joined last autumn it was known as European Literature Night (ELN), one of some 50-plus simultaneous ‘nights’ scattered across Europe and concentrated especially in the Czech Republic, where the initiative first began. Most participating cities put on a few local writers, together with some speakers from other parts of the world. What happens in London is a far more involved affair. A judging process invites submissions from UK publishers in partnership with the 33 European cultural institutes and embassies which make up EUNIC London. The submitted authors have to fulfil some unusual criteria: they must be recently published and in excellent translation; they need to speak good English and be engaging speakers and performers; and the final selection should represent a range of European countries, genres and ideas. The six selected writers appear at a showcase event at the British Library, which is the centrepiece of ELN London.

    Following ELN’s expansion over the years from a single night into two nights, then three, the idea of re-launching it in 2016 as a fully-fledged festival was a no-brainer. And there’s a lot to cheer about what was achieved. This year ‘ELN’ received 62 entries from 23 countries, an increase of nearly 30% from 2015. According to Rosie Goldsmith, long-time chair of the judges and director of the UK-based European Literature Network, this year’s entries were of the highest standard to date. The final six (four men, two women) were Burhan Sönmez (Turkey), Dorthe Nors (Denmark), Gabriela Babnik (Slovenia), Peter Verhelst (Belgium), Jaap Robben (Netherlands) and Alek Popov (Bulgaria). As well as showcasing them at the British Library, we took them to workshops and school events across London. We branched out into other cities too, with some modest but well-received events in Birmingham, Newcastle and Chichester.

    The new festival format gave us freer rein to add in more elements around ELN, and in a blink of an eye we had a six-week ‘season’ of literature from the continent, with more than 60 writers and poets (from 30 cultures) taking part. Some of the highlights included a Don Quixote ‘translation joust’; a poetry night where 20 poets sparked off against each other as part of the ingeniously conceived ‘Enemies Project’; and a packed-to-the-rafters conversation between journalist Misha Glenny and Italian writer Roberto Saviano, who in 90 minutes lifted the crooked lid on London’s complicit role in international crime.

    The Translation Pitch, back for a second year in association with English PEN, illustrated why translators aren’t just good for quality writing but can be a book’s best advocate for acquiring editors. The Pitch offered a fast-paced tour of stories and poetry from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Turkey and France, all not yet available in English. Translator James Womack received a special commendation for his entertaining presentation of Antonio Orejudo’s campus novel A Brief Respite (Spain), but Karen Leeder won the day with her exquisite rendering of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s poetry collection Thick of It (Germany).

    Our major translation project this year was the Poetry Periscope – or the ‘poetry jukebox’, as it translates from its Czech origins – a bright yellow, two-metre-high sound installation, which first appeared on the Piazza of the British Library in April. It contains recordings of poems from 30 European cultures, each available in their original language and in English translation. Judith Palmer of the Poetry Society helped us to put together this wide-ranging selection, which was designed to represent the ‘voices of Europe’ in all their diversity across age, race and gender. The Periscope is now touring to other venues around the UK, in partnership with regional writing agencies.

    If we are fortunate enough to develop the European Literature Festival further and stage it again next year, there is so much more we can do – other forms of storytelling we can bring in, different and unusual spaces we can stage our events. One big idea which is gathering momentum is a European Literature retail promotion, timed to coincide with a fresh edition of the Festival: discounted table displays in bookshops, promotional offers online, supported by a dedicated magazine (handed out at Underground stations, distributed at bookshops and libraries). We need to start with new readers first and then go as far as our resources and energies allow us to travel.

    Would all these ideas together help start a different kind of conversation about Europe? The European Literature Festival and any initiatives that spring from it are just a tiny part of the effort, but we all have a role to play. The stories and voices of Europe are needed more than ever to help us make sense of these extraordinary times. In the words of Rosie Goldsmith: ‘In the wonderful world of literature we can be both British, and European.’

    Jon Slack author photo by Laura BeduzJon Slack is the creative producer for the European Literature Festival, a EUNIC London project co-ordinated with the support of Czech Centre London and the European Commission Representation in the UK. If you would like to be involved in the festival initiatives please get in touch with Jon directly via jonslack.uk@gmail.com, or on Twitter @jonslack.

    Photo by Laura Beduz.

    Find out more about the European Literature Festival 2016, which took place 27 April – 9 June 2016. Watch highlights from across this year’s Festival here.

    Photo by PeWu.

  • In praise of longhand

    Meet A: Italian, fiercely bright and talkative in fluent English – it’s hard to believe he only arrived nine months ago. There’s R, shy about his Portuguese even though he used to help his mother with her translation work. B and G bicker jovially in Spanish all the time, but they both turn in honest, thoughtful writing about the difficulties of settling in the UK. Y writes in Spanish too, about being of Moroccan descent and being called „moro”.

    They are all teenagers, students at a school in south London whom I met for a few weeks to do some creative writing and translation, in my capacity as the Free Word Centre’s Translator in Residence. They all went through the wrench of migration when they were very young; compared to them I had it easy when I moved from Poland to the UK in my late 20s. They will all grow up in a country going through a gigantic wrench of its own.

    It’s impossible to predict the long-term consequences of the referendum. If these young people choose to stay in the UK, will their identities be subject to increased scrutiny, their multilingualism and difficult-to-pronounce surnames a cause for suspicion? If they stay and naturalise (are they not natural enough?), will they need a visa to attend a university in their birth country? How much more difficult will they find it to be in touch with all parts of who they are? If they chat with a friend in Portuguese on the bus, will someone tell them they were voted out of the country and should leave? Nobody knows, but this much is certain: people like them – people like me – were used in the lead-up to June 23rd
    as shorthand for everything that is wrong with the status quo.

    The aftermath of the referendum was quite an emotional rollercoaster for me. I was angry that it called into question principles I valued in this country. I was angry that it would throw the UK into economic and political disarray. I was furious at the inevitable deepening of social divisions and the limitation of opportunities for science and culture. I felt a bit sorry for myself, for the years I spent learning and teaching English, immersing myself in British literature, culture and habits, translating English novels into Polish. In fact, I translate and interpret both ways – into and out of Polish – and have mediated between these two languages in more ways than I could have imagined when I first began an MA course taught entirely in English (although it was based in the good old Polish city of Sosnowiec).

    Somewhere in Poland there’s a tape recording of a three-year-old me singing ‘Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?’ in a reedy little voice. I have my opinions about the right way to eat a scone (cream first, jam second) and the funniest sentence in Withnail and I (we can discuss it over a quadruple whisky). All this sticks in my craw slightly: now it seems like the UK doesn’t return the feelings.

    More than for myself, I felt sorry for the people who felt so out of place in their own country that they were compelled to vote ‘Leave’, and immensely sorry for the immigrants who have been quietly (maybe illegally, probably precariously) working night shifts in hospitals, at Tube stations and for construction companies to keep things going. To say this was a slap in the face for them is an enormous understatement.

    I felt grimly gleeful about the whole sorry spectacle and morbidly interested in how the UK intended to deal with this unprecedented situation. You want ‘Keep calm and carry on’ to feel like a real challenge again, not just a slogan on a tea towel? Here you have it.

    I am aware that some people voted ‘Leave’ for reasons unrelated to the issue of immigration. However, what it means for those millions of us who live in the UK and are more than one thing, have more than one home (or none), more than one language, more than one passport (or none), is that suddenly another layer of decisions about us will be made without us. We’ll be present in this country only as shorthand, if at all. One would think that the UK – of all places – would have already processed both the idea that you might go abroad to improve your economic situation and the idea that it is possible and even desirable to integrate people from elsewhere into your society. But it seems there is some way to go on this.

    Like immigrants, translators are more than one thing; we reach beyond, we mediate, provide hospitality, carry across (choose your favourite metaphor). We have found other cultures which fascinate us and which we feel have something valuable to say about being human. We’ve travelled, eaten surprising food, listened to music with unexpected rhythms, got lost in alien streets – and we’ve considered ourselves richer for all that, and wanted to share it.

    Maybe we feel so frustrated by this new reality that we want to act.

    My plea to translators is: go for longhand. Go against the tendency to simplify or eliminate. Put in the effort, in whatever way suits you best, to emphasise nuance. Remind people (readers, students, pupils, friends, users of local libraries, reading groups, festival audiences, community groups, prison writing groups, courts, cultural organisations, policy makers, neighbours, everyone else) of the worth of abundance and openness. If you can, go beyond the page and into volunteering, lobbying, creating opportunities. Other languages and cultures have sustained us – there’s no better time to return the favour.

    Discover PEN-supported European writers on the World Bookshelf.

    Tickets are on sale for International Translation Day 2016, the biggest annual UK gathering of literary translators – taking place in London on Friday 30 September.

    Find out about London mayor Sadiq Khan’s post-Brexit #LondonIsOpen campaign.

    Read about English PEN’s work with multilingual young people in London: Brave New Voices.

  • The great replacement

    Translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone.

    No one can fail to notice that the way we get our news is changing. Print newspapers are dying; Facebook is now the biggest online platform for news. Although this might seem excitingly democratic, there is a big danger that we each retreat into our own little bubble. That we see only what we want to see. We build walls around our communities of interest. What does this mean for Europe? Well, in my case, I am privileged to know a group of young journalists who are fighting this kind of insularity in France.

    It all began with the Bondy Blog, an honest and ambitious initiative by a group of journalists from the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo.  After the international shock caused by the 2005 riots in the French ‘banlieues’ (migrant suburbs), the Hebdo journalists wanted to go and see what was really happening – out there, on the ground. They decided to be somewhere in that reality: that somewhere was Bondy (in Paris’s north-eastern suburbs), on an estate called the Cite Blanqui.

    In my view, the proper job of journalists is to make sure the public sees the reality of what’s happening, and this means that journalists need to dive in, rather than watching from afar. It sounds simple enough, but few journalists dare to do this, and fewer still take the time it requires.

    Today, nearly 12 years later, the blog is run by a local team of young journalists from multi-racial low-income neighbourhoods, and hosted by the website of the French daily newspaper Libération. Its televised format, The Bondy Blog Cafe, is broadcast on LCP (the parliamentary channel): this features a group of young people interviewing, with rare sensitivity, a different political personality each episode.

    This on-the-ground style of journalism is non-sensationalist; instead, it focuses on the ‘sensation’ of what it feels like to live in these neighbourhoods – all this makes a big difference.

    My first contact with Bondy Blog was when I met two (very) young members of the team, barely fifteen at the time: Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah. They had come to interview me following the publication of my second novel, Dreams from the Endz. And I’ll never forget their fresh and lively approach, the relevance of their questions and, above all, the way in which they understood my answers. Theirs was a deep understanding.

    Later on, I got to know Mohamed Hamidi, who edited the Blog for a while and who these days makes feature films, the most recent being La Vache, a poetic and unifiying family comedy which has been a popular hit.

    In 2009, I remember following the weekly column of another Faïza, Faïza Zeroulala: we didn’t just share the same name, but also the same sense of humour and the same taste for words.

    As I followed these young people’s output, over time, I felt that we were like-minded, especially in our desire to re-appropriate the subjects that spark public debate. We wanted to set the record straight, to make our truths heard, to tell the story differently, to make sure the public sees something else. For me, this happened in my novels, for them, in their articles.

    When I hooked back up with Mehdi and Badrou, they had a slot on the public radio station France  Inter as columnists on the programme of the excellent journalist, Pascale Clark, who had spotted them… on the Bondy Blog, of course.

    Mehdi and Badrou write with four hands and speak with one voice. I was a fan of everything they did.

    On the publication of my fourth novel, Men Don’t Cry, I was a guest on the programme, and I was very touched when they decided to dedicate their entire slot to me. That same day, I had the privilege of introducing them to Elisabeth Samama, my editor at the time, and she offered to publish their first novel, which appeared a year later: Burnt Out.  (This is the personal journey, behind the human interest story, of an unemployed Algerian man who immolated himself in front of his regional job centre after warning the centre’s directorate by email. In order to understand this desperate gesture, Mehdi and Badrou had to imagine everything, and the result is a magnificent novel).

    That’s what I mean by above and beyond, again and again – always.

    This year, in February, Bondy Blog ‘occupied’ the Pompidou Centre in Paris, for a week of programmed events specifically aimed at teenagers stuck in Paris during the holidays. I led a fiction-writing workshop.

    The Bondy Blog team’s can-do attitudes, vision and talents are all about wanting to play an active role in our era, through images, words, art and beauty, via an approach that’s grounded in reality and that offers a fresh vision.

    I am now involved in a new collaborative project called Teleramadan, which is reinventing what a magazine can be. Its creators are Mouloud Achour, producer, interviewer and director of Clique.tv, and Mehdi et Badrou (who’ve already had a heartfelt introduction from me).

    I’d urge you to download the magazine, and read its editorial on Teleramadan.fr. Today, more than ever, we continue to be actively engaged, despite a negative and hostile climate in which fear and pessimism have gained ground. It’s a matter of urgency that the public has the opportunity to see, to read and to understand – so that we don’t let ignorance and fear win. It is for that reason we’ve adopted the nauseating concept initiated by the extreme right in France, that of the ‘Great Replacement’, a contemporary theory about the barbarian invasions. Yes, we want to be the ‘great replacement’, but according to our own definition of what ‘great replacement’ means.

    “We are the present. We are the Great Replacement of an archaic system, which no longer speaks to us and has never considered us as its children. We are radical in our ideas: we will go to the ends of beauty. We will write when you want us to be quiet, and fight when you’ve decided it’s time for us to sleep. We will reclaim our place, which has been taken by those authorised to think for us. We only wish to speak in OUR name. About OUR tastes and OUR colours. We are the Great Replacement of a generation that is active online to counter the cheap shots. We are artists, manning the frontlines alone, ready to take on every battle. We are the rebels of a society that no longer knows how to look itself in the eye, or to listen to those beating hearts.”

    Visit the Bondy Blog.

    Read more about Dreams from the Endz and download a free reading guide to the book on the World Bookshelf.

  • Am I a European writer?

    I’m a Danish writer. I’m not a Danish writer.

    Two statements equally true. How can it be? I was born and grew up in Denmark, have a Danish passport, and write my books in Danish. So de facto in terms of national definitions: I’m a Danish writer. Yet I don’t feel Danish. My mother is Austrian, my father half-German. Language emerging from culture, my more dramatic Slavic temper has never resided well within the limits of Danish laid-back wordings. And since the age of 23 I’ve mainly resided outside of Denmark.

    As we didn’t speak German at home, I didn’t grow up bilingual. Rather than German, English became my second language, and when I was a teenager, through the books I read in their original language, through the films, the music, it became my emotional language. The lack of sensual breadth in the Danish usage of language pushed me to choose another. And though until recently I still wrote all my fiction in Danish, I’ve felt the Danish language to be a constant challenge for the hot-bloodedness of my heart. My pen has had to make sentence structure-loops and grammatical twists which would be correct in the eyes of no Danish teacher, but which were necessary to express the stories of my mind in this straightforward Scandinavian tongue, not fit for Alpine crevices and ravines.

    From early on I was continuously told by my editors that my books are ‘so un-Danish’ – something I’m not sure was meant as a compliment, but which a bit defiantly (or perhaps purely out of necessity) I decided to take as such. Not only did I write in a tempestuous language, my subjects were often far from the Danish mainstream agenda (genocide in the Balkans, or ethics in modern contemporary art and life), and even my characters had far-flung (from Danish) origins. Realizing that this ‘un-Danishness’ would always undermine any attempt I might make at being ‘a Danish writer’, I finally – after my fourth novel or so – accepted it.

    But then what identifying label should I use?

    Originally educated a macro-economist, I became a full-time writer in 1995. I have worked for the EU and United Nations across the globe, from Dar es Salaam, Maputo and Dhaka to Brussels, Milan and New York. Thus, I would prefer to say simply ‘writer’, with ‘citizen of the world’ implicitly understood. But for those who wish to put my books on a regional shelf, ‘European’ at least feels much less wrong than Danish. After all, the conglomerate that is Europe today carries an almost endless range within it.

    The literature which has formed me is no more Danish than I am: my inspirations come from as far afield as Faulkner and Gogol, Achebe and Laxness, Cortazar and Hamsun, from Cervantes to Camus, Mahfouz to Woolf. I have taken advantage of the writer’s privilege of choosing my favourite teachers across the centuries, spanning Shakespeare and Dickinson, over Hardy to Jeannette Winterson, Dante over Canetti to Calvino.

    To the question ‘What is my Heimat?’ I have no answer. New York is my favourite city, that most multicultural place of all, with room for everyone. Yet, the Atlantic being too wide for comfortable commutes, I’ve recently moved back to Europe, this time choosing an all new home-base in Elsinore, at the edge of Scandinavia where the North Sea meets the Sound headed for the Baltic Sea. A corner of Denmark that breathes the very universe, echoing the secret truth which is that the contents of my bookcases are probably my true Heimat.

    Having always worked closely with all my translators, and occasionally making culture- and language-specific adjustments, it’s perhaps no surprise that a few years ago I started a process which would become a major ongoing work: fully adapting one of my books to the history, culture and geographic specifics of each country where it is published. War – what if it were here tells an imagined reversal of the refugee crisis (centred on a family fleeing their war-torn European country), and depends upon its readers being able to identify with the characters. When the book had its first translation in 2011, into German, I knew an entire rewrite would be required; I’ve now done 12 country-specific adaptations with more to come. Some of my editors have told me that this has never before been done in the history of literature. Yet, I simply did it because it felt right, because the story demanded this level of adaptation, of empathy. Perhaps it is also a reflection of the fact which is the essence of being multicultural: to be understood you have to always be ready to adapt yourself to whatever culture you navigate within at any given moment. You are, always and everywhere, your own interpreter.

    By now we are so many millions who have more than one culture – bi-, tri, quatro-or more – that it feels increasingly nonsensical to use the limited national labels of human identity. This is particularly true in a field such as literature, where all writers in their souls essentially belong to universal humanity over and above any nationality. Yet, it’s how the world of literature is still organized: how bookshelves are categorized in the bookshops, how prizes and awards are given, how invitations to panels at book festivals are classified. How you will find us listed in the encyclopaedias, the Wikipedias.

    Danish being an incongruity for me, even an impossibility – I do embrace the wider river of the regional. I am a European. I am a writer.

    Am I a European writer?

    You be the judge.

    Janne Teller CREDIT Anita Schiffer-FuchsJanne Teller is a critically acclaimed and best-selling Danish novelist and essayist of Austrian-German family background. She has received numerous literary grants and awards, including the prestigious American Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Literary excellency. Her literature, that circles around existential questions of life and civilization and often sparks controversial debate, is today translated into more than 25 languages. Janne Teller has published six novels, including the existential Nothing that, after initially being banned, is today considered a new classic by many critics. Janne Teller is also a human rights activist, and was one of the initiators of the 2013 Writers Against Mass Surveillance campaign. She is a member of the Jury of the German Peace Prize.

    Photo credit: Anita Schiffer-Fuchs

  • Letter to Britain

    Dear Britons,

    You almost killed my father. He was a boy of nine years. He was sitting in a bunker with his mom in Hamburg, during Operation Gomorrha, and while the city above them vanished in a fire storm so hot that the people outside the bunker doors merged with the melting tar they were standing on, underneath the streets the water pipes burst and my late grandmother and my dad had to swim up to the dim light of the glowing ashes of what they had come to know as their world.

    Later, my dad became a scientist. He is on Facebook. You should connect, he is a cool guy. And you know what? You could easily connect with him, because being a scientist nowadays means that he publishes in your language. His English is quite good. And not only his.

    When I was on a literature festival in Budapest last year, I met writers from Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria. We were sitting at a large square of tables discussing various aspects of working with language, and it took two hours until I realized the irony in this setting: we were all speaking English, even the French guy, but there was not a single person from an English-speaking country present.

    I don‘t know if you are aware of this: the whole continent speaks your language. You can go anywhere on this landmass inhabited by 500 million people and ask for directions, or beer, or the next English pub (they are everywhere) and you will be understood.

    Everybody loves your national sport. We all know the name of your head of state and the melody of your national anthem, and, for some reason I do not get, when your princess gives birth it is a headline in all our news outlets.

    And you are seriously considering leaving us? I cannot understand this.

    I mean, I don‘t care much about your princess, or her baby. I do not really like your food. And, being born in Munich, I can never forgive Manchester United for Barcelona 1999. Or for Schweinsteiger 2015.

    But there is one feeling that is stronger than all this. I am not sure how to describe it, but I think it has something to do with what my father said one day, when I was 12 years old and came home from school where I had just heard about Hamburg 1943, and my maths was already good enough to realize that 1943 is after 1934, the year of my father‘s birth, and I said, dad, how could they do this, and he said they had to. For you.

    It took me many years to understand what he meant. But I do now. I am grateful for the democracy, the solidarity and the freedom you brought us 70 years ago, and which the German people is so used to that we tend to forget where they came from.

    Today, these values are threatened again, in Germany and everywhere else on the continent. But this time it will be much easier to defend them. If we fight together.

    Yours,

    Heinz Helle

    AppleMark
    Heinz Helle was born in 1978. He studied philosophy in Munich and New York. He has worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies, and is a graduate of the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. His debut novel Superabundance is published on 25 February 2016.

  • The European Mohammed and the Ignorance of the Educated

    Translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright.

    Most Europeans hide behind a façade of fine education when they have to deal with the question of migrants, especially those coming from war zones, where life is torment and education is in ruins. This great European education, which in many cases is laden with arrogance and egotism, prevents many of them from understanding the reality of what is happening in the world around Europe. Europe today reads only itself, although it is living in what it calls the age of information and knowledge. Europe has created its own iconic array of writers, artists, musicians, theorists and philosophers and has locked itself in its temple to practise its rituals of democracy. When Europe wants to read the world, it reads it through the lenses of stereotype. These lenses were invented and reproduced in Europe throughout a long history of Eurocentrism practised since the days of colonialism up to the colonialism of capitalism today. This introverted European education produces what I call the ‘ignorance of the educated’.

    This European ignorance imposes, among other things, an obligatory identity on migrants from North Africa, the Middle East and some Asian countries: the identity of Islam. When defining themselves in Europe, most migrants do not consider their primary identity to be Muslim. They see themselves as Iraqis, for example, or Moroccans or Iranians, and they are surprised when educated Europeans treat them as a single group. This is a Western tradition with roots going back centuries, and it is useful in this context to refer to studies and books on Orientalism. Educated Europeans ignore the fact that the countries of what is called the Islamic world are diverse and heterogeneous, and that they have vast cultural traditions quite apart from religion. This deliberate oversight is evident in the behaviour of Europeans when they focus only on the religious identity of migrants, just as Western tradition throughout history has ignored the East’s entire legacy of literature, art, music, sciences and civilisation-building, and pinned an Islamic identity on a vast and varied world.

    Educated Europe today ignores the culture of all the European Mohammeds, who are born to immigrant families in free Europe but in a cage with bars put in place by free Europe. These Mohammeds grow up in Europe, and in European schools they learn about its icons and traditions. Nonetheless the distorted label of  ‘Muslim’ is attached to them through the media and the channels of education of European society, and their whole mother culture is stripped of its content, leaving only the image of the evil Muslim who wakes up and goes to bed dreaming of destroying free Europe! So the European Mohammeds are besieged from both sides: by the ignorance of the educated European and by the ignorance of the uneducated, in this case their families, whose lives have been destroyed by wars and dictatorial regimes and who have not received the right education to be able to support the European Mohammeds in the face of the flood of distorted images invented by educated Europeans.

    Mohammed must be given a chance outside the cage. Europe claims, for example, that it has a duty to let immigrants build mosques to pray in, while the European media and extreme right-wing parties continue to propagate a distorted and stereotypical version of Islam. It’s as if we were telling the European Mohammeds, ‘You were born here in Europe, which has all the beauty, knowledge, literature and arts, while you are from a background which has only evil Islam.’ Cultural diversity, as we know, doesn’t just mean letting the Other perform his religious rites. No, the Mohammeds, and educated Europeans too, have to breathe the culture of the East, which is rich in poetry, music, art, literature, myths, and a vast and varied heritage of traditions, so that immigrants don’t feel weak and powerless and therefore angry.

    The European Mohammeds do get angry sometimes. But they don’t get angry on behalf of the historical Mohammed. That’s just a pretext that they hide behind when they are really angry about the way they themselves are portrayed, the way educated Europeans have portrayed them.

    Are European humanitarian values now drowning in Europe’s selfishness, while migrants drown at Europe’s locked gates? Is Europe drowning in a deliberate ignorance that derives its disguises from a world that is materialistic, profit-based and cruel, built on contempt for, indifference towards and misunderstanding of other societies?

  • Lost and Found: Shortlisting for the European Literature Night Translation Pitch 2015

    Rajendra Chitnis writes:

    By any standards, the 2015 European Literature Night Translation Pitch has proven a remarkable success. 59 entries were received from 21 national literatures, from the Atlantic to the Baltic and the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and the shortlisting judges – Louise Swan, Rosalind Harvey and I – faced the impossible task of choosing our favourite eight to go through to the public final at the Free Word Centre on 4 June.

    Judging by this chance cross-section, anyone who fears that European literature may be flagging can breathe easy. The range of themes explored and styles deployed, in extracts taken from novels, short stories, verse, essay, biography, memoir and much in between, was more bracing than soothing, evidence that neither life nor art in Europe has lost its edge. Marginal voices featured prominently, whether ethnic-minority or mixed-ethnicity authors and narrators or juvenile characters, often female adolescents or socio-economic ‘drop-outs’. The theme of ‘lost and found’ – of a recovery of meaning and purpose through unusual friendships, love or the discovery of a new way of living – recurred, sometimes linked to homelessness and wandering or youthful ‘backpacking’ outside Europe. We repeatedly met the Europe of not only economic crisis, but also of the Cold War and post-Communist transition. European writers continue to evoke the darkest episodes in the continent’s recent history, notably Italian and Slovene reflections on Srebrenica, but they also find inspiration in medieval crusades (the Estonian Tiit Aleksejev) and ancient Egypt (the Italian Claudia Musio). In these, as in various fantasy texts, authors seem to hesitate between escape from and allegory of the contemporary human situation. In contrast to these grand landscapes, however, we also confronted the dissection of the everyday, most extraordinarily in JJ Voskuil’s huge fictionalised memoir of his career at a Dutch research institute. Overall, it seems possible to argue that, whether puzzled or enchanted children, wronged or disaffected intellectuals, migrants or the suddenly impoverished, the characters of contemporary European literature are marked less by exhaustion or defeatism, and more by resilience and often inarticulate defiance.

    As judges, we were led above all by the style. We faced a challenging balance between the epic and the lyrical, convention and experiment, black humour and pathos. Texts did not obviously conform to national stereotypes, and we were mostly persuaded by translators’ arguments about the universality of a work’s concerns. We were struck afresh by the creative subtlety of the individual imagination, and admired the translators who had set themselves the task of re-rendering that striking vision in English. Memorable examples included Charles Lee and Manon Manavit’s work on Maguy Vautier’s evocation of Touareg mythology in verse, Denise Muir’s on Manuela Salvi’s censored Italian graphic novel for teenagers and Ana Makuc and Cyprian Laskowski’s on the Slovene Bojan Meserko’s unpaginated, rearrangeable ‘infinite’ novel.

    Amazingly, our preferences in fact proved similar, and little haggling was needed to produce our shortlist. Our discussion was not guided by any particular priorities (gender, range of national literatures, type of writing, type of audience), but we were delighted to find that, in these and other areas, our list offered a fair reflection of what we had to choose from (though poetry and essays are unrepresented). Alongside the literary languages most frequently translated into English – French and German – we find Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Flemish and Hungarian. There are two genuine cycles of short stories – Pierre Autin-Grenier´s That´s Just How It Is, translated by Andrea Reece, and Krisztina Tóth´s Pixel, translated by Owen Good – a novel for young adults about a high-school shooting – Jesper Wung-Sung´s Proper Fractions, translated by Lindy Falk van Rooyen – two short satirical novels – Vonne von der Meer´s Take 7, translated by Laura Vroomen, and Jan Van Loy´s Scraps, translated by Anna Asbury – and three long, differently ambitious novels – Jan Němec’s biographical A History of Light, translated by Melvyn Clarke, Verena Rossbacher´s metafictional Small Talk and Slaughter, translated by Anne Posten, and Vladimir Zarev´s contemporary historical Ruin, translated by Angela Rodel. We hope the distinguished panel of judges charged with choosing a winner do not curse us, and we wish them good luck with their deliberations!

     

    Rosalind Harvey adds:

    We ended up with five male and three female authors, and six female and two male translators: there are undoubtedly more women in literary translation than men (arguably because it is a low-paid profession, and all low-paid professions – nurses, cleaners, carers – tend to have disproportionate numbers of women practising them, due to structural misogyny), but I was disappointed, although not surprised, to note the relative lack of women writers. This is not a new problem, and nor is it one that has been ignored: my colleague Katy Derbyshire, the translator from German, for instance, has spoken about this recently on a panel at the London Book Fair, and is planning on establishing a prize for women writers in translation to address this very issue. We tried to ensure that the disparity in literary translation out in the world was addressed to at least some extent in our shortlist, without, of course, compromising on quality. The selection process for ELN in a way functioned as a microcosm of the publishing industry at large; it was hard for us to end up with equal numbers of men and women on the shortlist (or even – shock horror! – with more women than men), simply because fewer women writers were pitched to us. This is a topic worthy of its own blog post.

    From my perspective as chair and co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network, I was particularly alert to who was pitching works and at what stage their careers were at. Many of the pitchers were known to me through the network, and as such I am aware of how hard they work and how passionately they champion the authors they believe deserve to be in English. In the end, though, the quality of the translations, tempered a little with the awareness in the back of all of our minds that diversity was crucial, was what had to take precedence.

    On the whole the process was a very heartening process – there is a wealth of interesting, challenging and fun-sounding literature coming out of Europe, and a wealth of translators ready to champion and translate it. Not all of it will end up in English, because there’s simply not enough money or space in the UK publishing scene. But some of it will, and should. All that remains is a willingness from publishers, readers and booksellers to trust these translators and believe in the quality of the work. Given the number of heartfelt submissions here, combined with the increase in literary translation in the UK in general, I think that this trust and belief has no choice but to grow.

    rajendra-chitnisRajendra Chitnis is a senior lecturer in Czech and Russian at the University of Bristol. He writes mainly on Czech, Russian and Slovak fiction from the twentieth-century to the present. He is currently principal investigator on an AHRC-funded project, Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations, which is exploring how, through translation, less well known European literatures gain the attention of the cultural mainstream.

    RosalindHarvey_Pro-picRosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her translation of Down the Rabbit Hole by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. She was one of Free Word Centre‘s first ever translators-in-residence.

  • The Red Terror and Maximilian Voloshin

    Maximilian Voloshin was for many decades seen as a rather minor poet. During the last twenty years, however, his reputation has been steadily growing. And the Russian annexation of the Crimea, a region with which Voloshin is closely identified, has made his poetry seem startlingly relevant to the present day. Voloshin’s concern with questions of Russia’s historical destiny, together with his own political ambivalence, makes his poetry appealing to liberals and to Russian nationalists alike. Some elements of this appeal, such as the faith he often professes in Russia’s purification through suffering, can seem facile, but we should not allow this to obscure his real greatness, both as a poet and as a defender of freedom.

    Part of Voloshin’s appeal lies in his steadfast refusal to accept any ideology as absolute truth. One of the slogans most often repeated by Putinites today is ‘Whoever is not with us is against us’. Such thinking was anathema to Voloshin. A famous poem titled ‘Civil War’ ends:

    And from the ranks of both armies
    I hear one and the same voice:
    ‘He who is not with us is against us.
    You must take sides. Justice is ours.’

    And I stand alone in the midst of them,
    amidst the roar of fire and smoke,
    and pray with all my strength for those
    who fight on this side, and on that side.

    Born in Kiev, Voloshin spent much of his childhood in the Crimea.  In the early 1900s he moved between Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, but from 1907 he again spent much of his time in the Crimea, finally settling there in 1916. For over a decade his large house in Koktebel, where he both wrote and painted, was a refuge for writers and artists of all political and artistic persuasions. Among his hundreds of guests were Maxim Gorky, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1924 the house became a ‘House of Creativity’ for Soviet writers, the first of the many such closed-access hotels that became a central part of the Soviet cultural world.

    Voloshin published five books of poems. The last, Poems on the Terror (1923), was published only in Berlin, but these and other post-1917 poems circulated widely in hand-typed copies, loved by both the Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, within and outside Russia’s borders.  The poems are uneven, but there is much that is incisive and moving.

    Nadezhda Teffi’s Memories (an account of her last journey across Russia, before emigrating) includes this portrait of Voloshin in Odessa in 1919: ‘Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers and gaiters. Reciting his poems, he was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors – and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry  and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, ooh-ing and ah-ing; in blissful horror they would let out little nasal squeals. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys – Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. The dense, even hum of bardic declamation would then start up again, audible even through the closed door.’

    After an account of Voloshin saving a woman poet from execution, Teffi ends: ‘In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum – or boom – of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.’

    During the Red Terror following the evacuation of the White Army from the Crimea, Voloshin showed still greater courage. His belief in the power of his words – what Marianna Landa, in her article ‘Symbolism and Revolution: on Contradictions in Voloshin’s Poems on Russia and Terror in the Crimea (1917–1920s)’ (SEEJ, Summer 2014), refers to as ‘his Dostoevskian faith in the divine spark in the soul of the abominable criminal, and his Symbolist belief in the magic of the poetic word’ – seems to have been unshakeable; his personal appeals to Red and White officials and commanders, on behalf of individuals, and his verse-prayers addressed to God, on behalf of his country, have much in common. Voloshin believed he could affect the course of events – and sometimes he did. That he escaped arrest and execution is astonishing.

     

    Terror

    The working day started at night.
    Denunciations, papers, certificates.
    Death sentences signed in a hurry.
    Yawning, drinking of wine.

    Vodka, all day, for the soldiers.
    Come evening, by candlelight,
    time to read out lists, herd
    men and women into a dark yard,

    remove shoes, clothes, underwear,
    tie the stuff in bundles, pile
    it up in carts, take the carts away,
    share out rings and watches.

    Nightfall, men and women forced
    barefoot, naked, over ice-covered stones,
    into waste ground outside town,
    in wind from the north east.

    Rifle-butted to the edge of a gully.
    The lantern light wavering.
    Machine-gunned for half a minute;
    finished off with bayonets.

    Into a pit, some not quite dead.
    A covering of soil, in a hurry.
    And, with a broad-flowing Russian song –
    back into town, back home.

    At dawn wives; mothers; dogs
    made their way to the same gullies;
    dug the ground; fought over bones;
    kissed the flesh they held dear.

    (26 April 1921, Simferopol)
    tr. Robert Chandler

  • You speak such good German

    Alina Bronsky, Russian-born but writing in German, charts the challenges and opportunities faced by the multilingual author, and how well-meaning condescension can get in the way of literary appraisal.

    Translated from the German by Tim Mohr

    It’s not exactly the height of elegance to quote from your own book. But I will do it here anyway.

    ‘You speak such good German,’ said a boy to Sascha, the heroine of my first novel, Broken Glass Park, whom he had just met. ‘Thanks,’ she answered angrily, ‘so do you.’ She was born in Russia and lives in a Russian ghetto in a German city. The boy she’s talking to is German by birth and lives in a fancy villa; he’s actually trying to say something nice to her.

    This little exchange isn’t made up. It happened to me in reality on many occasions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like my protagonist I moved from Russia to Germany at thirteen. Ever since I was fourteen I’ve been congratulated on my German. I can no longer remember the moment when I stopped feeling pleased by the compliments.

    I belong to the subset of authors who write books in a language that is not their native tongue.  Not long ago that still made me quite exotic in Germany. Now it is hearteningly common – every year you read about gifted debut authors who were born abroad, emigrated as young children or teens, and who published in the language of their new country and are already dusting off all their literary prizes. And yet, the compliments about how well I speak German are still the first thing I hear from audiences at my readings. At 36, I’m still treated as some kind of language wunderkind.

    Unfortunately I’m not one, and never have been. I’m not even particularly good at languages. It’s just that I, like hundreds of thousands of others, emigrated with my family at an age when the infamous ‘language window’ had yet to close. Which is why I sound like a native speaker – with the exception of the occasional linguistic slip-up that only very alert listeners notice, and which those people like to point out to me. The assumption that I must be exceptionally musical – as a result of how well I speak German – is also not true. And how I would love to be able to speak better English than I do, not to mention French and Italian.

    I don’t want my books to be assessed like compositions in a foreign language class. It makes me feel like a dancer with a wooden leg: as if the applauding room isn’t captivated by the show of artistic prowess but rather by the supposed handicap. So I ask you, dear readers and reviewers, please judge the contents and the word choices, the plot and characters, the metaphors and punch-lines. Complain about inconsistencies and slips of the pen that escaped the eyes of the editor and proofreader. But please don’t be any more merciful in those judgments and complaints with an immigrant author than you would be with an author writing in his or her native language. You’re not really anyway, and we wouldn’t have deserved the leniency.

    No reader falls in love with a book out of political correctness or as a sop to a linguistic minority. I’m happy about that. If something in one of my novels doesn’t look right to you, then you can in good conscience toss it in the corner. And if on the other hand my writing intrigues you, it has nothing to do with the fact that I learned the Cyrillic alphabet before I learned the Latin alphabet. All authors want to be valued based on their imagination, their talent, and their perseverance, not because of school vocabulary lessons from some distant past.

    After more than twenty years, I can say that German has become my natural writing language. Even though I love my native language of Russian, I speak a version that’s probably already somewhat outdated and anachronistic. I’m asked time and time again whether I also write in Russian. No, I don’t, at least not beyond emails. I don’t translate my own books, either. I’d prefer to write new ones – in German.

     

     

    Alina Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and just published Just Call me Superhero.  The Daily Beast calls Bronsky ‘an exciting new voice in the literary world.’

    Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

    You can buy Alina Bronsky’s Just Call Me Superhero via our book partner Foyles.

    Read more about Alina Bronsky at her author profile at Europa Editions.