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Tag: Europe

  • Roots of Corruption: the perils of free expression in Azerbaijan

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece Azerbaijani writer and dissident Emin Milli discusses the power – and corruption – of words and reflects on journalist Khadija Ismayilova’s recent experience of blackmail by the authorities

    In Azerbaijan, you often hear from all sorts of different people that words do not matter. Expressions like “bosh-bosh sozler” (empty-empty words) or “bosh-bosh danishir” (empty talking) are common. Our society is extremely sceptical about the power of words. This, in my opinion, has been the major victory and achievement of the autocracy in our country since 1993. But how is it possible to make the whole nation believe that words do not really matter, that they are empty and meaningless? How is it possible? Well, it is possible when people who present themselves or are presented to a society as masters of words, written or spoken, shapers of forms and meanings of the words, start to use the words as barriers behind which they hide their cowardice, venality and hypocrisy.To corrupt the whole of society the regime decided to corrupt words first, to deprive them of their true meaning. Corrupt authoritarianism needs words to lose their meaning. But the victory of corruption here is only temporary. It is temporary because we always have rebels who believe that words are not dead and who bring the words back to life by standing behind them and often suffering the consequences. These people are on the frontline of the struggle for the purity of words, they fight for words free from corruption and thus fight for a society free from corruption.These people have courage not to run away when the corrupt state wants them to pay a high price for reinstating words with their true meaning. One of those courageous people is Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova. She started to investigate and write about businesses owned by the family of the president in Azerbaijan and around the world. Of course, she had to be punished for writing the truth and exposing the regime. It was decided that her private life would be exposed in order to tarnish her reputation and to provoke “natural” attacks on her. The regime planted a hidden camera in her bedroom. Her relatives received the incriminating photos of her with her boyfriend. When she refused to be silenced, a video of her and her boyfriend was put online. The official newspaper of the ruling party started to accuse her of lax morals hinting at the video with its intimate content available online.Azerbaijan is a country where the majority of the population considers itself to be Muslim. It is fairly secular after 70 years of communist rule, but socially, it is still very conservative and increasingly more religious. To show a woman in this way is to invite her relatives to defend the honour of the family, to possibly kill her and to invite society to condemn her for her liberal lifestyle. Khadija is also an outspoken atheist who provokes religious circles and there was genuine fear that the masses might want to lynch her in the streets. That might have been “the grand plan” of the regime. But the opposite happened, something miraculous, deeply touching and human. The most conservative religious circles issued a statement in her support praising her courage in exposing the lies and corruption of the ruling elite. Everyone was appalled and even those who usually remain silent and live in fear, spoke up against such an immoral attack against a powerless woman. The government suddenly formally condemned “this crime” despite the prosecutor’s office ignoring Khadija’s officially lodged complaint for several days. The video was not shown on any television in Azerbaijan during prime time, something that had happened before with other journalists and unfortunately had silenced them.Questions keep going through my mind when I think about Khadija’s case. Why did the corrupt state with their billions of dollars and the absolute monopoly on violence fail to silence one woman and basically step back, why were religious and conservative circles on her side and not against her, why was a socially conservative society overwhelmingly on her side? Perhaps because everyone in our society started to feel in this particular case the power of true words and saw the courage of this woman who stands behind her words no matter what the consequences? She tried to fight the root of corruption in our society – the corruption of words. Only free words can liberate millions of hearts and minds from fear and corruption.Khadija today is the center of the Free Word in Azerbaijan. It is one of those cases when one person turns into an institution and becomes the symbol of struggle for freedom of expression. She made many people believe again that words are not empty, but can become powerful tools in the transformation of human conscience and social reality. There is still a long way to go for our society to declare independence from corruption, but her act of courage undoubtedly leads us in that direction.About the AuthorEmin Milli is a writer and dissident living in Azerbaijan. In 2009, he was imprisoned for two and a half years for his critical views about the government of Azerbaijan. Amnesty International considered that Emin Milli was a  prisoner of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression and association and campaigned for his release. He was conditionally released in November 2010, after serving 16 months of his sentence.

    Additional Information

    Khadija Ismayilova is an award-winning professional journalist based in Baku. Between 2008 and 2010 she served as Bureau Chief of RFE/RL which she left to host full-time apopular phone-in radio programme, ‘After Work’, on the Azerbaijani RFE service, Azadliq Radio. She has held editor positions with several Azerbaijani newspapers since 1997 and as a reporter for EurasiaNet and Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.”Taken from News Xchange You can read more about Khadija’s case here in Index on Censorship and here, in the Independent.

  • History and hysteria: The private libraries of dictators

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece from Gazmend Kapllani, we hear about the books that were damned and banned during the communist regime in Albania, only to resurface in some unlikely places…

    There are houses without libraries. There are houses with poor or small libraries and others with big and wonderful ones. There are also houses with burned and destroyed libraries – like those of the Jews of Thessaloniki during the Nazi occupation of the city. The private libraries of 20th
    century can tell a lot about its political history and hysteria, about its big dreams and big crimes.

    The “Age of Extremes” (as Eric Hobsbawm called the 20th
    Century) “found” me in Albania.  I grew up in a house with a tiny library; most of which I used to hate.  My fearful parents, persecuted by the regime in the past, made a huge effort to create a sort of “window-library” which would show their obedience to the regime, hoping this way to prevent more possible ordeals. As one knows, the library is the first thing a visitor  notices on entering the house.

    The shelves of this “window-library” were full of books written mostly by “Party leaders” and “leading minds” of Marxism – Leninism. Enver Hoxha, all by himself, used to occupy three shelves of the library with his eighty books, which were multiplying every year, till he died in 1985. The other shelves were reserved for “Party leaders” of “minor levels” – none of them would dare to write more books than Enver Hoxha, of course. There were also some foreign books, considered as “useful” or “harmless” by the regime. Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and next to it, his Magnum Opus, Das Kapital. One with a red cover and the other one with a black one. Some other books written by Stalin and Lenin, all of them in grey covers. One day, two books by Mao Tse Tung were added to the rest, but they disappeared relatively early, as soon as Enver Hoxha called Mao “a traitor to  real socialism”. The most interesting books of the library for me were those of foreign literature, like Gorky’s Mother and Cervantes’ Don Quixote (the only one that I really adored!).

    Close to my adolescence I made an impressive discovery concerning the existence of other books in my house. Apart from the “window-library”, my parents also used to keep “damned books”. They kept them secretly in their bedroom, enclosed carefully in two small black commodes. The “damned books” never crossed the door of their bedroom and were never found scattered by chance in different parts of the house, on the sofa or the table, like the other “normal” books. They were like terrible secrets and their existence was exclusively linked with darkness. Before allowing me to read some of them I had to swear to my parents that I would talk to no one. A promise that, unfortunately, I never kept.

    I should say that during that period of oppression and systematic paranoia in Albania we had a lot of free time to read books. But we couldn’t have the books we really wanted to read. Today, I can read whatever I like, but I have no time anymore. That’s why there are moments when I feel nostalgic about that terrible period, when reading of the “damned books” was akin to a ritual and my relationship with books was similar to the forbidden love…

    In 2009 I found myself again in Albania, doing some research on the lifestyle of the “Party leaders” during the communist regime. I was surprised to discover, among other things, that books and private libraries played an important role in Hoxha’s court. I was astonished by the fact that some of these guys, who systematically destroyed libraries and book collections, were also great readers and book collectors themselves. They even used to compete with each other, comparing the size of their private libraries. Enver Hoxha himself possessed an astonishing private library with almost 30,000 titles, mainly in French, as he had studied in France in the thirties. Some of these books were, literally, stolen from the private libraries of his enemies, who were killed or deported under his orders.

    The private library of Enver Hoxha doesn’t exist anymore. Many of the books of the old tyrant were stolen by those who came to power after his death and after the collapse of the communist regime. Some of the book thieves were former exponents of the old regime and from this perspective they were starting their post-communist career by stealing the books of their old master. The tyrant’s library was “dismantled” into thousands of pieces and totally disappeared.

    In the framework of my research I interviewed Ramiz Alia*, the successor of Enver Hoxha and one of his most obedient attendants. We met at his beautiful big flat, constructed by the Russians in the fifties, some hundred meters only from his previous villa. He used to live alone as his children had emigrated. We had a nice talk together. As we reached the end of our interview he insisted on showing me a particular beloved corner of the house: his private library.

    As I was looking, full of curiosity, at the books on the shelves, examining almost like a microbiologist their multilingual titles, he told me that many of the books he possessed once were stolen “in that period”: it meant the period when the regime collapsed and  Hoxha lost power. Ramiz Alia began telling me the titles of the books which were stolen. I remember him mentioning books by Nabokov, Baudelaire, Camus, Kafka… I interrupted him gently and asked: “Sorry, do you know that during your regime, if someone was caught with a book like the one you mentioned, they could go to jail for many years?”. He pretended not to hear my question and continued to talk with a nostalgic enthusiasm about his beloved writers and books. His approach only increased my insistence. I interrupted him again, not so gently this time: “Why were the books you are talking about on the list of the “damned books?”. He looked at me and smiled cynically. “Because the minds of the people were not ready for these books. It’s the same when a father wants to protect his child from evil” he answered. Twenty years since his fall from power he was still justifying his methods.

    We said goodbye and while I was going down the stairs of the Soviet style building I thought that tyrants never regret for their deeds. Were they to come to power again they would do exactly the same…

     *Ramiz Alia, died in 2011

    About the Author

    Gazmend Kapllani was born in 1967 in Lushnj, Albania. In January 1991 he crossed the border into Greece on foot to escape persecution by the communist secret services. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook and a kiosk attendant, while also studying at Athens Universityand completing a doctorate on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. He is now a successful writer, playwright, broadcaster and journalist.His best-selling first novel, A Short Border Handbook has been translated into four languages (English, Polish, Danish and French). A Short Border Handbook was published and by Portobello Books in 2009, and was translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.

     

  • Grammar and Glamour: On Translating Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar

    Following our previous PEN Atlas piece by Diego Marani, his English translator Judith Landry talks us through the strange music of Finnish and translation as walking a tight-rope

    Diego Marani, the author of ‘New Finnish Grammar’ which I have recently translated, adopts a blessedly laissez-faire attitude towards his translators: they know best. Such modesty and trust are surely unusual; many translators have their work criticized by authors who clearly do not know their language as well as they do. I had always dreamt of translating a living author whom I could consult if difficulties arose. But in this case none did (or so I am blithe enough to believe). It felt like an opportunity missed. When asked what it felt like to be ‘collaborating’ with Marani, I would reply that there was no collaboration. He wrote and I translated. But it was strange, and exciting, to set eyes on ‘my’ author; I only wished that I had some questions to ask him … At one point he and I had our photograph taken by a photographer specializing in ‘authors and their translators’. Now there’s a subject for you. The photographer asked us to sit nearer to one another on the sofa; I said we didn’t know each other very well.

    On first reading this novel, I was not at all sure that I could do it justice, but as I proceeded things just seemed to fall into place (or so I am blithe enough …) There is a lot in it about sound, about breathing, about the way words are formed in Finnish, that strangest of languages – it often seems to me that writing in French and Italian, the two languages from which I translate, has more in it about sound than writing in English does; words about sounds are inevitably abstract, and I have sometime found this to be a problem; I’m not sure sound interests me all that much, though the loss is certainly mine.

    The title itself is bewitching, if in a sense meaningless. New Finnish Grammar? Not many novels have the word ‘grammar’ in the title, and no doubt it was as off-putting to some as it was intriguing to others, though I gather that the words ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ are somehow related, odd though this may seem. In any translation, there are always particularly appealing phrases or sentences in the original to which the translator simply cannot do justice, and all that he or she can hope for is to improve on the original at some other point, thereby evening things out after a fashion.

    There is much talk nowadays about the most apposite metaphor for translation. I go along with the tight-rope walker metaphor myself; it’s not quite like walking between the Twin Towers, but it does feel dangerous, you’re never sure quite how much of a safety-net you have or which phrase might cause you to lose your balance. In a way, perhaps, that long pole that tightrope walkers hold is your knowledge of your own language, and the safety-net is your knowledge of the other. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

    About the Author

    Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

    Her translations are: The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Prague Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.

    Her latest translation is The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, published in May 2012 by Dedalus.
     
    She won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for New Finnish Grammar in June 2012.  Find out more.

     

     

     

  • Translation as a Creative Process

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, award-winning Italian writer and European Commission official Diego Marani considers the role of the author in the translation process

    For any writer, being translated is always flattering. But it is also a delicate passage, because the translation implies a transformation of the text an author cannot control. Even with a good knowledge of the target language, no writer is able to express a pertinent judgement on the translation of his book and is in some way condemned to have a passive role in the process. Many writers are very jealous of their texts and cannot accept not to have any control on the translation. They often adopt an intrusive attitude towards the translator and pretend to interfere in his work, even when they have a very superficial knowledge of the language. They think in this way to preserve the authenticity of their text and to protect it from alterations. Alteration of the original: this is the obsession of all writers! They forget that their sacred original text is but one of the many possibilities they had, the compromise between what they felt and what they were able to say. The translation of a book should be seen in this light, as a mediation between the original and the target culture. There is no other translation possible. To translate is not to pour out from one language into another. It is a kind of chemical process where the text must be reduced to its essential components and reassembled into the target language.For my part, I tend to have a completely different approach when one of my books is translated. I consider the translator a “second author” of my book, engaged in a creative process as deep and delicate as mine. He too must decide which of the  many possible ways best  conveys my meaning into his own language. I am ready to place my trust in him. He will have a perception of my text which I cannot have, he will see similarities between my language and his own which I cannot see.I am very much aware that sometimes, in order to obtain the same effects and atmosphere of a text in the target language, you have to modify the original. The translator needs to recreate connections that would be lost with a rigid translation. He has to take into account the cultural background of both languages. He will be the only one, able to grasp the music of a text, and I expect him to recreate in his translation a rhythm as similar as possible to the original. We must not forget that languages are first of all spoken, only afterwards written. Even if we read in silence, there is a music in our page like in a musical stave. I attach great importance to what my page sounds like. I often recite my texts after having written them. I need to hear also the sound of the language: it must fit with the rest. The smoothness of the words, the way they stick together, the pace of narration are as important as the plot. They are one of the ingredients of my writing. What I can do in order to help the translator is not to check words in a language I do not know and presume meanings I cannot completely grasp, but rather give him the most exhaustive information on the spirit of the text, the ideas that lie behind it, my thoughts and my feelings on the matter. Then there has to be trust. Though in a different way, we are both artists. The creativity of the translator lies exactly in this, that he grasps what I mean and has the ability to extract it from my page and graft it in the living tissue of another language.

    About the Author

    Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He works as a senior linguist for the European Union in Brussels.Every week he writes a column for a Swiss newspaper about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus.In Italian he has published six novels, including the highly acclaimed New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs, published in the UK by Dedalus Books.English PEN’s Writers in Translation Programme supported Diego’s latest novel The Last of the Vostyachs in 2012Judith Landry, the translator of  New Finnish Grammar was awarded the Oxford- Weidenfeld Prize for Translation in May 2012.

  • Memories put in mothballs

    In his second despatch for the PEN Atlas, Athens’s based Gazmend Kapllani looks back to the Greek Civil War and considers what effect Civil War has had on the nation’s literature

    “In Greece, you can discuss anything – except the civil war,” a fellow student once told me during my early years in Greece. At the time, I was not yet aware of the Greek reality and history; I did not understand what my fellow student meant.

    Since its creation,the modern Greek nation-state suffered from bloody clashes between various groups and powerful clans wanting to gain control of power. A noteworthy point is the fact that the first Greek Civil War (1823-1825) took place during the Greek Revolution, when the Greek state was still a work in progress….

    However, when modern Greeks talk about the “Civil War” they are referring solely to the war which broke out after the liberation of Greece from the Nazis. The Cold War in Europe was “inaugurated” by a civil war in Greece, in other words, it started in 1946 in the Balkans; and was “concluded” with another civil war in the Balkans: in Yugoslavia. The Balkans often acted as a mirror which reflected and magnified the nightmares of Europe.

    The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) was a relentless and bloody clash between communists (mainly) and the official Greek state – which was supported by the West, especially the British and the Americans. The communists and the left were defeated. I don’t know what Greece would be like if they had been victorious. But, having lived in a country where communists won, in Albania, I can imagine, I guess. Years later, when some of the defeated communists saw how things had developed in the “popular democracies” of Eastern Europe, they uttered the tragic words “fortunately, we were defeated!”.

    The so called “poetry of defeat” was the most sincere and human reflection of the consequences and traumas of the Civil War. Before reading about the history of that time, I used to read poets like Manolis Angnostakis and Tasos Livadeitis – both had experienced the Civil War and were among the defeated. I was literally won over by their poetry and used to learn by heart bitter verses like these: “The misery makes you delay always – the life was gone. My friends were lost. And the enemies were so ungenerous that you can’t even feed on their hatred” (Libadeitis).

     It is rather interesting that the Greek Civil War was not mirrored in epic narratives. Novels on this subject, in their majority, reproduced the propaganda of either the winner or the defeated. The novels which didn’t follow this rule were very rare. In these conditions of political asphyxia poetry worked like a metaphorical catharsis, painful therapy or like a mirror, especially for those who were defeated during the Civil War. Poetry was a way of telling a traumaticstory that few in the country were willing or permitted to hear. 

    We know what Greece after the Civil War was like. It was a country divided, crushed, ruined; a country of paranoid nationalists and anti-communists; with prisons, informers, paramilitary groups and with merciless persecutions of communists and others, all labeled as “traitors of the nation”. Only after 1974 – after the fall of the military junta in Greece – did a process of “national reconciliation” commence. However, the Civil War remained a ghost which continued to haunt modern-day Greeks. It also remained a taboo. In school, children practically passed over it, as if it never existed. Only during the past ten years has a public, documented and real dialogue begun.

    A new generation of historians, gradually more interested in the dark past, began to search archives and use scientific facts and records to support their claims.  Eventually, growing prosperity and time allowed Greeks to gain enough self-confidence to examine that period.  Many of the books which dealt with the subject of the Civil War began to be published and to appear on best seller lists. Recently, I had the opportunity to read two such books.

    The Avenging Hand of the People – a historical book written by the twenty-eightyear-old Jason Handrinos  – allowed me to visit the Athens of 1942-1944, from the time of the German Occupation to the Liberation – which by a tragic irony of History marked the beginning of the Greek Civil War. I “witnessed” the Nazis’ destruction of Greece and their monstrous crimes on civilians. I “saw” the tragic images of Athenians dying of hunger by the thousands; Greek collaborators who worked with the Nazis to create “Security Units” in order to fight against the communists. I “saw”  the communists who organized the resistance in the poor neighborhoods of Athens; secret communist organizations (based on the model of terrorist organizations) which executed Greek collaborators, those who disagreed with the Communist Party’s ideology, Trotskyists, and many others who just disagreed with them. Sometimes, in the name of “collective responsibility” they  murdered the relatives of their enemies too. Athens under Nazi occupation was a city plunged into violence and hunger. It was also the scene of a peculiar civil war – of Greeks who resisted the Nazis, against other Greeks who collaborated with the Nazis.

    Reading the second book – German Uniform Put in Mothballs, written by Stratos Dordanas – one begins to understand one of the main reasons the Greek Civil War continues to be taboo: most Greeks who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War were never convicted. Greece, of course, is not the “European exception.” In many western European countries, in the name of “communist threat,” a velvet curtain was “created” – behind this curtain the followers of Nazi ideology and Nazi collaborators were either forgotten or declared innocent. However in Greece, because of the Civil War, not only were the supporters of national-socialism not convicted, but in many cases they were rewarded. They became members of parliament, university deans, senior managers and were put in key governmental positions.  At the same time, they also created a powerful para-state network which was the main support of the Military Junta (1967-1974).  After 1974, with the fall of the Junta, these people were “put in mothballs”.

    Every time Greece experiences a serious crisis, the ghost of the Civil War returns. Today, the words “civil war” can be heard in people’s whisperings and are synonymous with the Ultimate Evil which hangs like a threat above the Greek nation. Currently, because of the severe economic crisis and the social unrest, writers and journalists, politicians and ordinary people are beginning to publicly mention the “threat of civil war” again. The reinforcement of extremist political rhetoric in Greece, and particularly the entry of the neo-Nazi party (Golden Dawn), to the Greek Parliament with an impressive 7% of the vote, once again brings the ghost of the Civil War to the forefront.

    The spiritual descendants of the Greek national-socialists, for the time being, have focused on other “internal enemies”:  immigrants – who are beaten up, stabbed, killed and made to disappear. 

    The neo-Nazi’s recent resurgence has been, sometimes,tolerated by the police and “wrapped” into the silence of the Media – until the day one of their MP’s assaulted two female Greek politicians live onTV. At that moment the Greek Media detected the “Monster”. As for the police, it’s not so much of a political coincidence, I guess…. In the recent elections one in two policemen voted for Golden Dawn (according to the Greek newspapers To Vima – 11/05/2012).

    In the new elections held in Greece on the 17th June, the neo-Nazi  party, Golden Dawn, won again 7% of the votes. According to the reports from Greek newspapers, 50% of the Greek policemen voted for them again. (To Vima – 19/06/2012).

    European leaders, though, considered the results as a positive step for the future of the Eurozone. In the meantime, young Greeks are immigrating in large numbers, unemployment continue its impressive rise, violence and crime are thriving and foreign immigrants are being attacked by neo-Nazis almost every day in the streets of Athens.  

    However the Greece of today is not the Greece of 1946. Just as today’s Europe is not the Europe of 1944. Perhaps Greece and Europe have learned some lessons from their dark past. The question is, have they learned enough so as not to repeat it – either as a tragedy or a farce….

    About the Author

    GazmendKapllani was born in 1967 in Lushnjë, Albania. In January 1991 he crossed the border into Greece on foot to escape persecution by the communist secret services. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook and a kiosk attendant, while also studying at Athens University and completing a doctorate on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. He is now a successful writer, playwright, broadcaster and journalist. His best-selling first novel, A Short Border Handbook has been translated into four languages (English, Polish, Danish and French). A Short Border Handbook was published and by Portobello Books in 2009, and was translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.

    Additional Information

    Dordanas, Stratos. German Uniform Put in Mothballs. Estia, 2011. (in Greek)

    Handrinos, Jason. The Avenging Hand of the People.Themelio Publishing, 2012. (in Greek)

     

     

     

  • How international is poetry?

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Michele Hutchison reports from the 43rd Poetry International festival in Rotterdam, investigating why it is certain poems are more likely to be translated

    When the projection fails during the Finnish poet Olli Heikkonen’s reading and the slides with parallel Dutch and English translations disappear from the stage, poetry suddenly doesn’t seem that international anymore. A cycle of nature poems told from the perspective of an elk become a jumble of unfamiliar sounds delivered in rather a threatening way. Poetry has become what its critics accuse it of – hermetic, and I realise just how crucial translation is to the experience of ‘international poetry’. Director Bas Kwakman already made this point earlier in the day at the 2nd
    annual translation symposium, a festival programme dedicated to the translator’s role as intermediary. ‘Without translation, this festival would not be possible,’ he said. Twenty poets from eighteen countries and five continents, representing between them fourteen languages, will perform over the course of the week. The audience will experience their works through sound, visual clues such as body language, and projected simultaneous translations.

    PEN editor Tasja Dorkofikis asked me to consider how international poetry is and over the past days I’ve been thinking about this. If international is taken to mean universal and accessible to all, there are a few stumbling blocks. A haiku is not the same as a sonnet is not the same as badi, but cultural context is just as complex as form. The accomplished poet K. Satchidanandan, one of the festival’s big names this year, writes in Malayalam and weaves elements from classical Indian mythology and verse form into his work, while retaining a modern style. How will a European audience respond to this? The reader/listener’s knowledge or ignorance of a foreign culture is just as limiting to the transmission of literature as a translator’s inability to pick up and carry across all of the layers of meaning, without footnotes.

    During the course of the symposium, I learn that K. Satchidanandan has translated his own work into beautiful English and in doing so, he has opted to cut out cultural references which might disturb the Western reading process, for example, ‘rain from the Hindu Treta Yuga period’ has become ‘rain from a bygone age’. Is this globalisation that Tim Parks keeps writing about on the NYR blog at work? Have the poets been invited precisely because they write the kind of neutral, non-culturally specific poetry that translates and travels easily? I decide to ask festival programmer Correen Dekker about this. Where does the festival find its poets? What does the selection process involve?

    Well, she tells me, she reads a lot – individual collections which are sent in, anthologies, multilingual magazines, she visits festivals (most recently St Andrews and Berlin), talks to PI Web magazine’s international editors and studies festival lists worldwide. She laments the fact that what she looks at is limited to what is translated into English or German and would love to consider new poets off the beaten track. She also consciously tries to avoid being limited by the festival circuit which works like a kind of international fellowship programme. In response to my question as to whether she would give preference to ‘more easily translatable’ poets, she agrees; what’s more, translators are more willing to work on texts which allow for a successful end product. The festival’s selection aims to be as broad as possible, to cater to all tastes, and the opening programme in the form of a pageant gives me the chance to sample this.

    There is Brazilian performance poet Márcio-Andé whose radical digital poetry is made up of a few very basic words (stone, water, diamond) recited over and over again and the poet himself playing an electric violin. For me the experience has more in common with music and art and only seems to operate on the very boundaries of linguistic expression. Headliner Ron Silliman, one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, reads work that is playful and incomprehensible. Does he get away with this because he writes in English and refers to the dominant culture? He doesn’t have to be translated to be considered. British Pakistani poet Sascha Aurora Aktar’selusive, associative work, also written in English would support this theory too. Are the most complex and impenetrable poets here the ones who write in English?

    The same point actually came up earlier in the day during the translation symposium when the wonderful Dutch writer and translator J. Bernlef explained how Tomas Tranströmer’s use of the ‘objective correlative’ meant his work leant itself to translation. His images and metaphors would produce an emotional reaction in any language. Poets whose work experimented with register or language or cultural narratives would not. But still, although the selection of poets here is limited to what is available in English or German, and caters to Western tastes, there is enough diversity for the festival to offer a revelatory experience: from the eloquent young Australian L.K. Holt at her first foreign festival,tothesurprisingand fascinating Armenian talent Vahe Arsen, orPalestinian Najwan Darwish, whose familiar political agenda is presented in alluring new clothes.

    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

    43rd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam – Official Website

     

     

     

     

     

  • Endangered Species

    This week’s PEN Atlas despatch is from Dubravka Ugresic, who considers a specific human species and its survival: the writer.  This piece is translated from the Croatian by David Williams.

    Lately all the talk has been about the decline of independent bookshops, the once powerful chains, and indeed bookshops full stop. Everyone’s talking about the squeeze on publishers, editors losing their jobs, library closures, the death of literary magazines, and very occasionally, the small army of those with doctorates in literature who can’t get a job. There are plenty of spokespeople for the two main views: on the one hand, “the pessimists” furiously attack the aggressive “trash” polluting our cultural habitat and depriving it of oxygen, and on the other, “the optimists” furiously defend the laws of the literary marketplace—often the same people happy to accuse The Muppets of spreading anticapitalist propaganda. Whatever the case, amid the general clamour no one, really no one, is talking about writers. This means that the direct producers (the workers, i.e. writers) have become a totally marginal element in the chain of production. The contemporary book world is reminiscent of the old Robert Altman film, The Player. An unscrupulous Hollywood mogul murders a screenwriter with impunity, marries his girlfriend, and then cynically claims that in the film business writers just get in the way. For my part I can confirm that I’ve never met so many writer colleagues driving taxis as I have done lately.

    Historically speaking, writers have always fallen into the category of “fragile” human material, but somehow they’ve hung on, surviving hostile epochs, the reigns of kings, czars, and dictators, seasons of book burnings and censorship. Today, lo and behold, some earn fabulous money and turn up on Forbes’ lists of richest “content providers.” Others tour the world like royalty, surrounded by clubs of their devoted subjects. Today the writerly profession is thought desirable and profitable; many countries still erect public statues honouring their writers, and the odd writer even becomes part of the tourist package, like Joyce in Ireland, Proust in France, J.K. Rowling in Edinburgh.

    But roses only bloom for the few. As a specific human species, the majority of writers are facing extinction. Whether writers fall into the critically endangered group like Sumatran orangutans, the endangered group like Malaysian tigers, the vulnerable group like African elephants, the near threatened group together with the jaguar, or in the least concern group with the giraffe—let’s leave that to the experts.

    On the other hand though, observing the status improvement of animals at the Zagreb Zoo over the past twenty years, it seems to me there’s some hope for writers. Ever since a small number of Croatian citizens got rich quick and public services were pauperized even quicker, the fortunes of animals at the Zagreb Zoo have been on the up. Wealthy Croats have taken the protection of animals upon themselves, and thus the owner of a well-reputed Zagreb restaurant has been feeding the tiger, the tapir is protected by a well-known Croatian war criminal, while the crocodile is under the wing of a Croatian tycoon. Wealthy Croats amuse themselves no end with conversations like: How’s your ostrich? Good thanks, last month we nursed his sore throat back to health. And how’s your tapir? I gave him up, now I’m looking after a hippopotamus. That basketball player took the tapir on… somehow suits him better.

    Citing the example of the Zagreb Zoo I naturally don’t want to suggest that endangered writers should be put in zoos. But I don’t see the problem with luxury resorts, theme parks and writers’ villages. I mean, those kinds of villages and their romantic little wooden cottages existed in Soviet times.

    While we’re on the subject of Russians, let’s put it out there that the Russians have always had more respect for literature than other nations. When you tally things up, no one, out of fear of the literary word—that is, respect for the literary word—has killed more writers than the Russians. That’s why it’s somehow understandable that a Russian oligarch has bought Waterstones, another The Independent, and a third set up a foundation for the translation of Russian writers into foreign languages (the same guy who paid Amy Winehouse a million pounds to sing one night). Inspired by these examples, perhaps Madonna might swoop down to offer lifelong protection to a potential African Nobel laureate, or Bill Gates spend the rest of his days dedicated to the promotion of Malaysian literature.

    So it’s not all glum, you just need a little imagination. I really don’t know why I’m so worried about writers. Being a writer is still predominantly a job for the boys. It’s a proven fact that male writers never or seldom read books by their female colleagues. The assumption that things will be better for me if I’m my male colleagues’ keeper is wrong: for them, my male colleagues, things will always be better. So why am I worrying then? In an ocean of general despair, it’s like worrying about the last European leper colony on the Romanian side of the Danube. I don’t know, it must because I’m doing okay. I just passed my taxi driver training.

     

    About the Author

    Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain, and several essay collections, most recently Thank You for Not Reading. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugresic took a firm anti-nationalistic stand and was exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. As a result, she left Croatia in 1993 and currently lives in Amsterdam. Her latest collection of essays Karaoke Culture is published by Open Letter in the US. 

     

    About the Translator

    David Williams is the main translator of Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic (Open Letter, 2011), and the translator of Mama Leone by Miljenko Jergovic (Archipelago, forthcoming 2012). He recently completed his doctoral thesis in Comparative Literature (University of Auckland) on Ugresic’s post-Yugoslav writings and the broader idea of a post-1989 “literature of the east European ruins.”

    Additional Information

    Dubravka Ugresic’s website can be found online here.

    Dubravka Ugresic was one of the very first authors supported through English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme for her acclaimed novel, The Ministry of Pain.  The Ministry of Pain was Saqi and Telegram Books. 

    Dubravka’s latest book, Karaoke Culture, was published in 2011 by Open Letter Press.

     

  • Great Flemish Voices: Louis Paul Boon and Beyond

    In this week’s PEN Atlas despatch editor and translator Michele Hutchison introduces some of the greatest Flemish writers…

    Book lovers in the Netherlands and Flanders will not have been able to escape the centenary of Louis Paul Boon’s birth this year (1912-1979) though farther afield the writer has yet to become an obvious inclusion in the canon of twentieth century European literature where he could sit comfortably alongside Samuel Beckett, James Joyce or Céline. Here, the centenary is being celebrated in style with a whole series of literary events, massive press coverage, a website and an exhibition in Antwerp. Perhaps it will have some impact abroad.

    © Jo Boon, Erembodegem
    © Jo Boon, Erembodegem

    Louis Paul Boon is considered one of three great Flemish writers: the other two being Hugo Claus and Willem Elsschot. Born to a working class family in the factory town of Aalst, west of Brussels, Boon evolved into one of the leading modernist writers of the period. Pinnacles of literary achievement are the complex novels Chapel Road (1953) which I read in English when I first arrived in Holland, and its sequel Summer in Ter Muren (1956). His oeuvre is diverse and also includes historical adventure novels about medieval bandits, autobiographical works and a dated and somewhat questionable collection of annotated erotic photographs. 

    A hundred years after his birth, very little of Boon’s work has been translated into English but the Dalkey Archive Press are making some headway. Paul Vincent’s translation of their third Boon novel, an accessible title My Little War, was recently awarded the 2011 Vondel Prize. In other languages he has fared better with reissues or new translations a frequent occurrence; the most recent were in Turkey and Germany. Greet Ramael of the Flemish Literary Foundation tells me that foreign interest in his books remains lively. 

    Praised primarily for his social and political engagement but also for his innovative style, Louis Paul Boon broke free of the conventions of the novel, sampling text mediums, experimenting with form and voice. Belgian Dutch was an excellent conduit with its wide range of dialects and registers, a much more diverse form of the language than standard Dutch.

    The linguistic richness of Belgian Dutch is something which makes Flemish literature stand out today. Of course not all Flemish writers make use of it, some like Peter Terrin (The Guard, MacLehose Press) are pupils of Elsschot and prefer a classical pared-down style without dialect. Others, such as Dimitri Verhulst are clear proponents of Boon’s ‘volks Vlaams’ – working class Flemish. Verhulst is a fellow Aalstian and Boon’s influence can be seen across his oeuvre – from a tongue-in-cheek homage in a chapter of Problemski Hotel to the social critique in Godverdomse dagen op een godverdamse bol or the verve and setting of his most recently released novel in translation, The Misfortunates. His translator, David Colmer, agrees that the influence of Boon is visible in his work but also sees a crucial difference, ‘Verhulst aims to please his reader, to entertain.’

    Verhulst himself is quick to acknowledge his debt to Boon but the Belgian press has also picked up on Geertrui Daem and Joost Vandecasteele as possible heirs. Geertrui Daem was also born in Aalst and is a generation older than Verhulst so she has already amassed quite a body of work. I have only read her most recent novel, De bedlegerige (De Bezige Bij Antwerpen, 2011); set in 1957 in a working class community, the highly strung son of a domineering mother takes to his bed. Keenly observed and in places acutely funny, it is portrait of a time and place not only in its action but also in its language, a challenge for any translator.

    Boon was terrified of urban expansion and industrialisation, and these formed recurring themes in his work. Young writer and stand-up comedian Joost Vandecasteele has been pegged as a Boonian because of the social analysis inherent in his fiction. Aline Lapeire, editor at De Bezige Bij Antwerpen where his second novel Massa has just been published, says, ‘like Boon, he paints a picture of contemporary society and captures the zeitgeist in a unique individual style’. Massa has one foot in the real world and the other in a future technological dystopia; his debut Opnieuw en opnieuw en opnieuw was notable in its references to other narrative forms such as computer games and the graphic novel – like Boon he refers to the media around him.

    There was another side to Boon I learn at Flemish publishing house, Uitgeverij Vrijdag. Director Rudy Vanschoonbeek tells me that Boon was ‘a precursor of the current mediatised era where authors become popular through appearing on chat shows’. Working class hero turned 1960s socialite, Boon wrote the society column in newspaper De Vooruit and went on to host a TV quiz show. None of Vrijdag’s stable of authors are real Boonians in style, though I do hear an interesting anecdote in which Geertrui Daem’s experiences of being edited in the Netherlands are compared to those of Louis Paul Boon when he moved to Dutch house De Arbeiderspers with Chapel Road. Apparently the working class Flemish character of the writing was (partly) edited out, ‘or made more readable as is an editor’s task’ Vanschoonbeek hastily adds.

    Though there are some excellent Flemish publishing houses, many authors opt to be published by the more powerful Dutch houses who distribute across both territories. That Flemish writers sometimes claim their work is ‘censored’ by Dutch editors points to the tensions and differences between users of standard Dutch with its Calvinist genes and its flamboyant Catholic working class cousin. 

    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

    For more on Boon’s life visit LP Boon exhibition ‘Villa Isengrimus’ at the Letterenhuis in Antwerp (ends 4th
     November) 2012.

    Boon 2012 centenary website (in Dutch)  

    Dalkey Archive Press, LP Boon in translation

    The Flemish Literary Foundation 

    Dimitri Verhulst at Portobello Books 

    Peter Terrin at MacLehose Press

    Flemish publishing house Uitgeverij Vrijdag

    Joost Vandecasteele at De Bezige Bij Antwerpen

  • Writing In A City That’s Collapsing

    English PEN Launches the PEN Atlas with this piece by Athens based writer Gazmend Kapllani.

    What does an author do in a city that is collapsing? Like all the other non-authors, he tries not to collapse. He hopes that the worst is over, and yet he fears that perhaps the worst is yet to come. He observes the falling snow and for a moment he thinks about the homeless who have filled the streets of Athens. To them, snow means death. Perhaps this makes a certain book come to mind – 

    A Sun for the Dying by Jean-Claude Izzo.

    If he uses the metro often, he’ll observe that since the economic crisis began, the number of people reading books on the train has increased. Unfortunately the number of beggars who move from one train to another with their hand outstretched, has increased even more. In any case, the metro is the only place in Athens where the crisis, with all of its hazardous force, has not yet been entirely felt. Every time I descend into the station, it’s as if I am in a shelter which protects me from the prevailing feeling of melancholy which persists above ground. The people waiting on the clean platforms have more relaxed expressions on their faces. It’s as if they’ve put on a temporary mask. Once you ascend to the surface, the mask falls.

    You walk along the streets of Athens, “collecting” various images – broken storefronts, glum faces, burnt buildings and homeless people who are like sad witnesses standing across from burned-out buildings. The ruined buildings are some of the most beautiful in Athens. They are victims of violence at the hands of “neo-barbarians” who are “children” of an “eternal present” – with no recollection, without a past and without a vision for the future besides their only slogan: “a burning city is a blossoming flower.”

    One of the buildings destroyed by fire is the Attikon cinema, one of the city’s oldest. It was at this cinema, in February 1991, where I watched my first film in Athens – An Angel at my Table – a movie which tells the dramatic life story of New Zealand author Janet Paterson Frame. Back then I was a recent immigrant, in Athens for only two months, without residency papers and knowing very little Greek. I can still recall some scenes from that movie. Janet Frame was horribly stigmatized and suffered a great deal but in the end she made it. Standing in front of this burned cinema in Athens, I hope that Greece will follow the same fate of this famous writer, coming out of its scary present stronger.Putting my memories aside, I continue a little further down the street. Near the cinema I notice an open-air stall selling used books. Five euros per book. Used books, especially during these times of crisis, are sold for pennies in Monastiraki, an area below the Acropolis in the center of Athens. So how do these books end up for sale at the bookseller’s stall for five euros? If you follow their trail perhaps you will understand something about how Greece’s economy works. Since the crisis began, the number of readers in Greece has dramatically decreased. The price of books, however, used or new, has not decreased and in some cases, the prices have even gone up.

    How can one find the nerve to write in a city that is collapsing? In my conversations with authors, new authors and well-established authors alike tend to feel despondent. They say the market for books is collapsing as well. Rumors about publishing companies are circulating: some are not paying authors, others are in danger of closing their doors, while bookstores are closing down one after another. People have other things to worry about and reading was never their strong point. “Author” was always a risky and extravagant “profession.” In a city that’s collapsing, however, being an author is like jumping into a void.

    I take a look at the best-seller lists in the newspapers. In fiction, mostly romantic novels and crime fiction are popular. Best-selling essays are those trying to explain the economic crisis and criticize ruthless capitalism. I talk with owners of bookstores who have shops in wealthy Athenian neighborhoods. They have not shut down yet, like hundreds of other bookstores in poorer neighborhoods which have had to close. They tell me that the “quality readers” are those who have been hardest hit by the crisis. And that many readers ask for books that will make them forget and not think about what is happening around them.  

    In a city that is collapsing, what can an author write about? And in the final analysis, who will read what you write? But if you don’t write when everything around you is tottering and changing, then when will you write? I recall something that Dino Buzzati wrote in one of his books: “Please write. At least two lines, even if your soul is restless and your nerves are gone. Every day, write.” Writing is a shield and therapy; it is an escape, an analysis, a reminiscence and it is imagination. You write because you have the illusion that you can translate the incomprehensible into a story. To borrow a phrase from Sepulveda, to write means to endure. Especially, to withstand one’s own fear, one’s own misery and melancholy. Through writing, you discover how unforgiving time is. And how every so often, hope springs from despair….

    Athens, February 2012

    About the Author

    GazmendKapllani was born in 1967 in Lushnjë, Albania. In January 1991 he crossed the border into Greece on foot to escape persecution by the communist secret services. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook and a kiosk attendant, while also studying at Athens University and completing a doctorate on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. He is now a successful writer, playwright, broadcaster and journalist. His best-selling first novel, A Short Border Handbook has been translated into four languages (English, Polish, Danish and French). A Short Border Handbook was published and by Portobello Books in 2009, and was translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.

    Additional Information

    Jean Claude Izzo (1945-2000) French writer – Sun for the Dying (1999) published by Europa Books, 2008. 

    Dino Buzzati-Traverso (1906 – 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe, 1939. Available in Canongate edition. 

    Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489–1573) was a Spanish humanist, philosopher and theologian