PT Data wrangler

Tag: Europe

  • Soldier No. 9

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Ukrainian by Amanda Love Daragh

    On 26 August, on the day when Petro Poroshenko met with Vladimir Putin in Minsk, the capital of Belarus,  Ukrainian forces captured an armoured personnel carrier and ten Russian paratroopers. The Russian government, which has been denying the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukrainian territory on a daily basis, was slow to respond but eventually came up with an explanation: they had taken a wrong turning. The paratroopers were captured 20 km from the Russian-Ukrainian border. In a televised interview the paratroopers themselves said that they had been given orders to advance 70 km into Ukraine territory, which is precisely what they were doing when they were apprehended by Ukrainian armed forces. These paratroopers are lucky, really. They are still alive.

    Other Russian paratroopers are being buried in secret – in the village of Vybuty near Pskov, in Bashkiria and in other towns and cities across the Russian Federation. No official information about these burials has been released, but Russian journalists arriving in Vybuty to find out more were met by men in civilian clothing, who attacked them and damaged their car. The journalists were told to leave the Pskov area immediately, or they would end up in one of the local marshes and their bodies would never be found.

    Russians are gradually coming to realise that it is not only local separatist rebels fighting in Donbass, but also a great many Russian citizens, including conscripts, who have been sent there by military command. The mothers of dead and missing Russian soldiers have compiled a list of 400 names and are demanding answers from the authorities regarding the whereabouts of their sons, who only joined the army in the first place because they had no choice.

    But while the Russian government is trying to find answers – or rather, choosing to remain silent – Ukrainian troops are finding more and more mass and unmarked individual graves in territory reclaimed from separatists. One of the latest burial sites was discovered by Ukrainian guardsmen in the middle of a field in the Luhansk Oblast. There were around twenty graves marked with little signs saying ‘Soldier No.7’, ‘Soldier No.9’ and so on. These signs bore no names, no dates of birth or death, because the Russian soldiers and officers lying in these graves are officially still alive and on active duty at various military bases within Russia. Nothing will be done to investigate these graves while the conflict is still ongoing, which means that those who are buried there might remain on the list of ‘missing’ residents of south-east Ukraine and Russia indefinitely. Incidentally, the list of missing Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers is also growing.

    Several days ago I went with my wife and children to our country house, in a village 90 km outside Kiev. We were filled in on the local news as soon as we arrived, and it was not good. A report had come through from the anti-terrorist operation zone that three local men had died after being drafted into the conflict zone, but only two bodies had been sent home for burial. The wife and relatives of the third dead man had simply been told that he had died during an artillery raid and his remains could not be moved.

    At the same time people there seem to somehow accept what is happening. My old friend Viktor, who used to be the local telephone engineer and lives on the street next to ours, said that he is expecting to be called up to fight any day now, so he wants to finish sorting out the heating at home. We have a cold winter ahead of us. Chances are that it will be a winter without Russian gas. Many people living in rural areas are converting their boilers to run on peat and firewood as well as gas. Viktor has already converted his boiler and is currently insulating his single-storey brick house with foam rubber. He would ideally like to brick up one of the windows before winter too, because it is particularly draughty. Viktor has two children, and his priority at the moment is to provide them and his wife with a decent environment in which to spend the winter.

    I heard from another neighbour that some villagers have already stocked up on antifreeze. Yet there is no sense of panic. Everyone is calm. People are digging up potatoes from their allotments, drying them out and storing them in their cellars. Everyone is thinking and talking about the immediate future, about winter, about the gas supply, which is bound to be cut off or at least severely restricted. Hardly anyone in the Ukrainian countryside even mentions Europe or the prospect of a European future for Ukraine. Right now the prospect of the coming winter is more tangible and significant.

    Another date has recently been occupying the attention of a large sector of the Ukrainian population: 1 September. Apart from updates on the military situation in Donbass and Russia’s latest incursions into Ukrainian territory, the subject most discussed on the radio lately has been the start of the new school year. Due to a combination of the military situation and the economic crisis, which has itself been exacerbated by the military situation, the cost of school uniforms, textbooks, exercise books and other school essentials has increased by as much as 30-50%. Salaries, however, remain the same and in some cases have even decreased. But the parents interviewed on the Ukrainian radio and television try not to complain about their predicament. It would be inappropriate to complain about personal problems when their country – Ukraine – is facing such serious problems of her own. Refugee families in towns and cities across Ukraine spent the month of August frantically filling in school paperwork, trying to secure places for their children. Seventeen new children have already joined School No.92 in Kiev. In total, over a thousand children from the Donbass region started school in Kiev on 1 September. Most are children of the regional elite, whose parents can afford the higher cost of living in the Ukrainian capital. Establishing relationships with their new classmates may present a particular challenge for Kiev’s schoolchildren, since many of the Donbass refugees hold Kiev and its inhabitants to blame for the tragedy currently unfolding in eastern Ukraine.

    The militarisation of life in any country also militarises the way people think, and this applies especially to children. The first lesson of the year in all Ukrainian schools was devoted to patriotism and the territorial integrity of the state . Which meant that the school day began on 1 September with a discussion about war, about a war that, for the immediate and foreseeable future, is going to be part of our lives, day and night.

    Ukraine Diaries by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Sam Taylor, is available to buy through our book partners Foyles.

    You can read more about the book at the Random House website.

  • 'You must keep feeding the lake'

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    The French-speaking Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz was born in Lausanne on 24 September 1878. Just five months earlier, in the bilingual city of Biel/Bienne, the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser was born. The two men came of age in their respective cities, and then both spent the turn of the century travelling between Switzerland and a great European city (Paris for Ramuz and Berlin for Walser) as their writing careers gathered momentum and their first full-length works were published. A different kind of essay could go on to point out the similarities and fascinating differences between these two writers – in their backgrounds, biographies, their style and focus. But I am more interested in the simple fact of their nearly perfect contemporary status. Born the same year and interested in literature from an early age, both men published a recognized oeuvre during their lifetimes and each left behind a marvellous archive. Ramuz died in 1947, followed by Walser in 1956, although Walser had gone into a different kind of public retreat as of 1933. Similar lifespans. Similar literary legacies. Similar status in Switzerland.

    A key difference remains. Walser is known outside of Switzerland, is a writer whose name has been often included alongside other canonical names of the Modernist period like Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot, and whose work is discussed and lauded by writers, academics and critics. When I came to Switzerland in 2005, Ramuz’s untranslated archive appeared to me like an unexpected but incredible gift. Here was this immensely famous individual, and nearly all of his work was just sitting there, waiting for an interested translator to casually drop his name to a publisher. Of course it is never this easy. Literary translation is still a small niche of publishing in English, and there will always be far too many deserving authors waiting in the wings. Still, Ramuz’s case intrigues me, mostly because of the existence of a peer like Walser.

    Despite a considerable amount of French-language interest in his work*, Ramuz is virtually unheard of outside of Switzerland. For an admirer of Modernist fiction, the reasons for the difference in English-language interest between Ramuz and Walser is a subject for amusing dinnertime speculation. Does it depend on early support for their work-in-translation? On the number of other writers of the time period who name-dropped each man? Differences in management of their literary estates? Stylistic variations in their work and its appeal to English-language readers? Differences in Swiss Arts Council funding in a country with a majority language and a minority language? The understandable romantic appeal of a mad genius, versus a stable one? There are myriad possibilities, and some inevitably overlap. But for a translator interested in helping to make Ramuz’s work available to a greater public, his lack of renown in the English-speaking world is a perplexing and frustrating challenge that can be hard to know exactly how to address.

    Everyone knows that translators can be key motivators for inspiring interest in a writer’s work. Especially for older works and dead writers. Translators can be the first person to make an introduction between literary estates and publishers. Translators can also write critical essays and reviews, champion their favourite writers on blogs or other social media, contact Arts Councils, work to create a ‘buzz’ about an author. This obviously takes a lot of time. More so for a translator still getting her feet wet.

    With permission from Ramuz’s grandson, Guido Olivieri, I began working on as many of the short stories as I could as well as on two of the novels. I wrote about Ramuz on a variety of social media platforms, testing whatever small reach I had. Over the next few years, several of the stories were published in English, a few mentions of him appeared here and there, and eventually, the small but excellent Onesuch Press (whose mission is to publish overlooked Modernists) took on one of Ramuz’s greatest books, La Beauté sur la Terre, and the English translation – Beauty on Earth – came out in the fall of 2013. Put this together with the 2008 translation of The Young Man from Savoy (Host Publications) by Blake Robinson, and we have a small start.

    Over the first week-end of September (5-7) this year, one of Switzerland’s biggest annual literary festivals will take place: Le Livre sur les Quais. This year Literary Translation will be a main event as the Centre de Traduction Littéraire at the University of Lausanne is celebrating its 25th 
    year. In a country with four national languages, a handful of other strong minority languages as well as a large Anglophone population, translation is a huge and important element of its publishing universe. I’ll be at the festival talking about Ramuz as a part of its growing Anglophone program. This is another small step forward, but the challenge remains: how to go about inspiring interest in his work.

    Ramuz’s work is exquisite – complicated, meticulously crafted, historically relevant, and challenging (for both reader and translator) – and so there is no choice but to keep going, keep writing about his work, keep translating, keep contacting publishers, keep crossing my fingers that the Swiss Arts council will get involved or another funder suddenly show up, keep hoping that publishing literature-in-translation will miraculously become so profitable that publishers will no longer need any financial help to get a translated book to the public. Yes, keep dreaming.

    There is a great quote by Jean Rhys in which she calls literature a ‘huge lake’ and that, whether tributary or small stream, writers ‘…must keep feeding the lake.’ She was talking about her relative insignificance to other writers but I think this quote applies perfectly to translation. There are so many rivers and streams that cannot reach the lake, stopped up behind dams of language and culture and issues of interest and funding. A translator’s vocation, from any language and into any language, is to help destroy that dam… even if there are days it can feel like sitting at the top of a huge cement wall, hacking away with a toothpick.

    You can buy Beauty on Earth via our bookseller partner Foyles.

    Read more about Charles Ferdinand Ramuz at the Onesuch Press site.

    For more information about the Le Livre sur les Quais festival, please see their official site.

  • ‘You must keep feeding the lake’

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    The French-speaking Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz was born in Lausanne on 24 September 1878. Just five months earlier, in the bilingual city of Biel/Bienne, the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser was born. The two men came of age in their respective cities, and then both spent the turn of the century travelling between Switzerland and a great European city (Paris for Ramuz and Berlin for Walser) as their writing careers gathered momentum and their first full-length works were published. A different kind of essay could go on to point out the similarities and fascinating differences between these two writers – in their backgrounds, biographies, their style and focus. But I am more interested in the simple fact of their nearly perfect contemporary status. Born the same year and interested in literature from an early age, both men published a recognized oeuvre during their lifetimes and each left behind a marvellous archive. Ramuz died in 1947, followed by Walser in 1956, although Walser had gone into a different kind of public retreat as of 1933. Similar lifespans. Similar literary legacies. Similar status in Switzerland.

    A key difference remains. Walser is known outside of Switzerland, is a writer whose name has been often included alongside other canonical names of the Modernist period like Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot, and whose work is discussed and lauded by writers, academics and critics. When I came to Switzerland in 2005, Ramuz’s untranslated archive appeared to me like an unexpected but incredible gift. Here was this immensely famous individual, and nearly all of his work was just sitting there, waiting for an interested translator to casually drop his name to a publisher. Of course it is never this easy. Literary translation is still a small niche of publishing in English, and there will always be far too many deserving authors waiting in the wings. Still, Ramuz’s case intrigues me, mostly because of the existence of a peer like Walser.

    Despite a considerable amount of French-language interest in his work*, Ramuz is virtually unheard of outside of Switzerland. For an admirer of Modernist fiction, the reasons for the difference in English-language interest between Ramuz and Walser is a subject for amusing dinnertime speculation. Does it depend on early support for their work-in-translation? On the number of other writers of the time period who name-dropped each man? Differences in management of their literary estates? Stylistic variations in their work and its appeal to English-language readers? Differences in Swiss Arts Council funding in a country with a majority language and a minority language? The understandable romantic appeal of a mad genius, versus a stable one? There are myriad possibilities, and some inevitably overlap. But for a translator interested in helping to make Ramuz’s work available to a greater public, his lack of renown in the English-speaking world is a perplexing and frustrating challenge that can be hard to know exactly how to address.

    Everyone knows that translators can be key motivators for inspiring interest in a writer’s work. Especially for older works and dead writers. Translators can be the first person to make an introduction between literary estates and publishers. Translators can also write critical essays and reviews, champion their favourite writers on blogs or other social media, contact Arts Councils, work to create a ‘buzz’ about an author. This obviously takes a lot of time. More so for a translator still getting her feet wet.

    With permission from Ramuz’s grandson, Guido Olivieri, I began working on as many of the short stories as I could as well as on two of the novels. I wrote about Ramuz on a variety of social media platforms, testing whatever small reach I had. Over the next few years, several of the stories were published in English, a few mentions of him appeared here and there, and eventually, the small but excellent Onesuch Press (whose mission is to publish overlooked Modernists) took on one of Ramuz’s greatest books, La Beauté sur la Terre, and the English translation – Beauty on Earth – came out in the fall of 2013. Put this together with the 2008 translation of The Young Man from Savoy (Host Publications) by Blake Robinson, and we have a small start.

    Over the first week-end of September (5-7) this year, one of Switzerland’s biggest annual literary festivals will take place: Le Livre sur les Quais. This year Literary Translation will be a main event as the Centre de Traduction Littéraire at the University of Lausanne is celebrating its 25th 
    year. In a country with four national languages, a handful of other strong minority languages as well as a large Anglophone population, translation is a huge and important element of its publishing universe. I’ll be at the festival talking about Ramuz as a part of its growing Anglophone program. This is another small step forward, but the challenge remains: how to go about inspiring interest in his work.

    Ramuz’s work is exquisite – complicated, meticulously crafted, historically relevant, and challenging (for both reader and translator) – and so there is no choice but to keep going, keep writing about his work, keep translating, keep contacting publishers, keep crossing my fingers that the Swiss Arts council will get involved or another funder suddenly show up, keep hoping that publishing literature-in-translation will miraculously become so profitable that publishers will no longer need any financial help to get a translated book to the public. Yes, keep dreaming.

    There is a great quote by Jean Rhys in which she calls literature a ‘huge lake’ and that, whether tributary or small stream, writers ‘…must keep feeding the lake.’ She was talking about her relative insignificance to other writers but I think this quote applies perfectly to translation. There are so many rivers and streams that cannot reach the lake, stopped up behind dams of language and culture and issues of interest and funding. A translator’s vocation, from any language and into any language, is to help destroy that dam… even if there are days it can feel like sitting at the top of a huge cement wall, hacking away with a toothpick.

    You can buy Beauty on Earth via our bookseller partner Foyles.

    Read more about Charles Ferdinand Ramuz at the Onesuch Press site.

    For more information about the Le Livre sur les Quais festival, please see their official site.

  • 'While the Gods Were Sleeping'

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    The Great War is, at least in Belgian literature, a strangely forgotten war.  While our landscape still bears physical witness to the scale of the tragedy – strewn with war cemeteries and scarred by old craters and trenches –  echoes of the Great War in our prose or poetry are rare. Belgium saw no great novels written during and after 1914-1918. There’s a mass of private memoirs, letters, journalistic impressions and the like that are certainly interesting, sometimes even brilliant, yet in a country that, since the second half of the 19th century, could boast a lively, internationally-acclaimed literature, perhaps it is a little meagre when compared to the abundance of French, German and British masterpieces that have sprung from the all too iconic ‘mud of Flanders.’

    Even our historiography remained silent about the war for quite a long time, with the first comprehensive history of the Great War in Belgium being published as recently as 1997. It seems the events unfolding in 1914, the brutal invasion of the country and the extremely harsh conditions under the German occupation, proved to be almost too traumatic for our collective memory and artistic imagination.

    The war also meant the abrupt birth of modernity in my fatherland, or rather; once the war was over the middle and upper classes, who had been celebrating their ‘Belle Époque’, their Golden Age, could no longer ignore the underlying social and political injustices on which their wealth and privilege were founded. Belgium was the first industrialised nation on the continent, despite its modest size, and an economic giant. At the outbreak of the war it was the fourth largest trading nation in the world, and the most densely populated region on earth with Antwerp boasting the second largest port. The country was still utterly 19th
     century in its outlook, however, and in some respects it seemed even feudal. All this came to an end when, in 1918, the Germans left a country they had thoroughly looted, its economic infrastructure destroyed, its standard of living literally bombed back to the level of the 18th century.

    Amid this destruction a new nation was forged. Barely two weeks after the Armistice, the king signed laws granting the Belgians universal suffrage, which finally, after decades of struggle, allowed the labour movement to translate its vast popular support into real political power (women I should add, sadly had to wait for another war to be given the right to vote), changing the country forever.

    So people perhaps simply preferred to look forward, to hope and work for the future rather than to despair at the horrors of the past war, and this is reflected in our arts and literature. The process of rebuilding the nation also meant that the immensely rich and diverse artistic legacy of the Belle Époque gradually became forgotten. The aftermath of the Great War thus created a double void, if you wish, in our national memory – and of course twenty years later another war brought new suffering and trauma.

    My novel, While the Gods were Sleeping, therefore, could never be just another ‘novel of the Great War,’ as Belgium lacks this particular tradition. The book is, in a way, an attempt to write the novel that should or could have been written in the decades directly after the Great War. It pays tribute, even down to the level of syntax and vocabulary, rhythm and metaphor, to the unjustly forgotten literature in our national archives and libraries – the splendid legacy of the Belle Époque in all its glamour and its darkness.  The narrative, however, remains aware that it is written in the 21st century, in a world that is, for better and for worse, the product of the forces which Europe was about to unleash in the summer of 1914.

    I’m glad, of course, that when the book was published in the summer of 2008 it was immediately hailed as a modern classic, but above all I’m grateful to the many texts and stories on which it rests; the legacy from which it could breathe its inspiration, allowing me to give voice to a period that had been shrouded –  both in our history and our literature – in silence for all too long.

    While the Gods Were Sleeping is available from our partner Foyles. The book is translated by Paul Vincent and published by Puskin Press in July.

    You can write a letter as part of the project, ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, with our friends at the Free Word Centre.

  • ‘While the Gods Were Sleeping’

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    The Great War is, at least in Belgian literature, a strangely forgotten war.  While our landscape still bears physical witness to the scale of the tragedy – strewn with war cemeteries and scarred by old craters and trenches –  echoes of the Great War in our prose or poetry are rare. Belgium saw no great novels written during and after 1914-1918. There’s a mass of private memoirs, letters, journalistic impressions and the like that are certainly interesting, sometimes even brilliant, yet in a country that, since the second half of the 19th century, could boast a lively, internationally-acclaimed literature, perhaps it is a little meagre when compared to the abundance of French, German and British masterpieces that have sprung from the all too iconic ‘mud of Flanders.’

    Even our historiography remained silent about the war for quite a long time, with the first comprehensive history of the Great War in Belgium being published as recently as 1997. It seems the events unfolding in 1914, the brutal invasion of the country and the extremely harsh conditions under the German occupation, proved to be almost too traumatic for our collective memory and artistic imagination.

    The war also meant the abrupt birth of modernity in my fatherland, or rather; once the war was over the middle and upper classes, who had been celebrating their ‘Belle Époque’, their Golden Age, could no longer ignore the underlying social and political injustices on which their wealth and privilege were founded. Belgium was the first industrialised nation on the continent, despite its modest size, and an economic giant. At the outbreak of the war it was the fourth largest trading nation in the world, and the most densely populated region on earth with Antwerp boasting the second largest port. The country was still utterly 19th
     century in its outlook, however, and in some respects it seemed even feudal. All this came to an end when, in 1918, the Germans left a country they had thoroughly looted, its economic infrastructure destroyed, its standard of living literally bombed back to the level of the 18th century.

    Amid this destruction a new nation was forged. Barely two weeks after the Armistice, the king signed laws granting the Belgians universal suffrage, which finally, after decades of struggle, allowed the labour movement to translate its vast popular support into real political power (women I should add, sadly had to wait for another war to be given the right to vote), changing the country forever.

    So people perhaps simply preferred to look forward, to hope and work for the future rather than to despair at the horrors of the past war, and this is reflected in our arts and literature. The process of rebuilding the nation also meant that the immensely rich and diverse artistic legacy of the Belle Époque gradually became forgotten. The aftermath of the Great War thus created a double void, if you wish, in our national memory – and of course twenty years later another war brought new suffering and trauma.

    My novel, While the Gods were Sleeping, therefore, could never be just another ‘novel of the Great War,’ as Belgium lacks this particular tradition. The book is, in a way, an attempt to write the novel that should or could have been written in the decades directly after the Great War. It pays tribute, even down to the level of syntax and vocabulary, rhythm and metaphor, to the unjustly forgotten literature in our national archives and libraries – the splendid legacy of the Belle Époque in all its glamour and its darkness.  The narrative, however, remains aware that it is written in the 21st century, in a world that is, for better and for worse, the product of the forces which Europe was about to unleash in the summer of 1914.

    I’m glad, of course, that when the book was published in the summer of 2008 it was immediately hailed as a modern classic, but above all I’m grateful to the many texts and stories on which it rests; the legacy from which it could breathe its inspiration, allowing me to give voice to a period that had been shrouded –  both in our history and our literature – in silence for all too long.

    While the Gods Were Sleeping is available from our partner Foyles. The book is translated by Paul Vincent and published by Puskin Press in July.

    You can write a letter as part of the project, ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, with our friends at the Free Word Centre.

  • When my cat tried to have breakfast at Tiffany's

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Greek by Georgia Panteli

    When Zooey was brought to me, and I was pressed to adopt him, he was both lucky and unlucky at the same time. He was unlucky because when I was ten years old I decided that all I’d do in life is read, write and travel all over the world. There was so much beauty out there waiting for me to discover, which meant no children, no dogs and no cats. Nothing would stand between me and the world. Yet he was lucky, too, as the night before I had watched ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ again at the Truman Capote festival and Zooey looked exactly like Holly Golightly’s Cat, only smaller: ginger, smart, nippy. So maybe we could live together like those two, like two good friends, without too much devotion and whining miaows and ‘What will I ever do without you?’ We could live together without belonging to each other.

    I let him stay with me just to try it out. As if he had read my mind, he moved quietly under the armchair and left me to do my work undisturbed. I am not going to name him, I decided. I’ll call him ‘Cat’; Holly knew better. If you give him a name, he’ll ask for more. If he asks, you’ll give. If you give, he’ll give and if he gives, he’ll bind you with invisible strings, the strongest kind. So, no name then. ‘Goodnight, Cat,’ I said and switched off the light.

    It was a stormy night in January. It had been raining all day and suddenly at midnight, with a flash of lightning, the bedroom became as bright as the noon day. I woke up startled. Water was flooding the balcony and was seeping into the room through the balcony door. Thunderbolts fell like bombs out of the sky. With a sudden zap, the power went out in the entire building. I fumbled desperately under the covers to find my glasses and instead touched a furry little ball curled next to my legs. ‘What are you doing here, Cat?’ I asked, frightened. (I never had kept an animal. I had never slept next to an animal before. Their hair disgusted me. Their germs scared me. I didn’t want them on my bed.)

    He was playing possum. ‘Ha, you sly trickster, I’ll show you,’ I mumbled to the supposedly sleeping fluffball. I took him in my hand – he fit exactly in my palm – and placed him on the rug by my bed. Neither too far nor too close: the exact distance one needs to breathe. We shouldn’t get in each other’s face.

    As soon as I put him down, I saw him in a flash of lightning opening his huge green eyes and then Cat, the hypocrite, started crying with all the might his tiny little lungs could afford. My heart broke. Yet I decided to play my cards right. I knew that in relationships cards get dealt early on. Whatever you do, you tread a path from which there’s no turning back. I got up feigning indifference; blindly, I grabbed a bowl of cherries from the fridge and started eating, deaf to his cries, worrying about the room getting flooded. But in the end I made a really stupid mistake: I underestimated my opponent. He was only four inches long, but he was a fighter! For a quarter of an hour he was howling as if there was no tomorrow. He filled his lungs with air and let it out as desperate sighs. Then his wailing dropped to a heartbreaking whimper, which you could barely hear, as though his soul was about to leave his body. His performance was rivalled only by the National Theatre.

    Seventeen minutes later I admitted my defeat. I took him in my hand, put him in front of me and started lecturing him, looking straight into his eyes that were glowing in the dark:

    ’Why are you so stubborn, Cat? What do you want from me? Didn’t we already agree about this? You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you. We’ll live like Holly and her Cat, flatmates and buddies, until we find out exactly what we want to do with our lives. I’ll feed you the best delicacies, I swear. And you can wake me up in the morning if I don’t hear the alarm. But we can’t sleep together. We’ll come and go as we please. No complaints, no whining, no “Please don’t leave me alone”, all right? Are we clear? And I swear to you that after I go all over the world and decide where I want to settle down, I’ll take you with me and give you a name. I think I’ll call you Zooey, like my favourite Salinger character. Do you like the name Zooey? Or maybe Truman to honour Holly? And if I get rich and move to New York, I’ll buy you a collar from Tiffany’s.’

    He was listening to me attentively without moving an inch. After I finished talking I took him in my hand and put him back on the little rug. That exact moment there was a loud crack of thunder and a flash of lightning lit the room once again. The kitten ran towards the balcony, from where the water was still coming in.

    ‘Please don’t go, Zooey, I’m scared’, I shouted. He stopped, turned and looked at me with his glowing eyes. Then he turned back, slowly climbed up on the bed and ensconced himself behind my knees. He never left my bed again. And we had breakfast together in the kitchenette; we didn’t give a damn about Tiffany’s.

    Lena Divani was born in Volos, Greece. She is the author of novels, short stories, and plays. Seven Lives and One Great Love is her first novel to appear in English.

    ​ Her novel, ​Seven Lives and One Great Love: The Memoirs of a Cat from Europa Editions was published in May 2014, and is available through our partner Foyles.

  • When my cat tried to have breakfast at Tiffany’s

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Greek by Georgia Panteli

    When Zooey was brought to me, and I was pressed to adopt him, he was both lucky and unlucky at the same time. He was unlucky because when I was ten years old I decided that all I’d do in life is read, write and travel all over the world. There was so much beauty out there waiting for me to discover, which meant no children, no dogs and no cats. Nothing would stand between me and the world. Yet he was lucky, too, as the night before I had watched ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ again at the Truman Capote festival and Zooey looked exactly like Holly Golightly’s Cat, only smaller: ginger, smart, nippy. So maybe we could live together like those two, like two good friends, without too much devotion and whining miaows and ‘What will I ever do without you?’ We could live together without belonging to each other.

    I let him stay with me just to try it out. As if he had read my mind, he moved quietly under the armchair and left me to do my work undisturbed. I am not going to name him, I decided. I’ll call him ‘Cat’; Holly knew better. If you give him a name, he’ll ask for more. If he asks, you’ll give. If you give, he’ll give and if he gives, he’ll bind you with invisible strings, the strongest kind. So, no name then. ‘Goodnight, Cat,’ I said and switched off the light.

    It was a stormy night in January. It had been raining all day and suddenly at midnight, with a flash of lightning, the bedroom became as bright as the noon day. I woke up startled. Water was flooding the balcony and was seeping into the room through the balcony door. Thunderbolts fell like bombs out of the sky. With a sudden zap, the power went out in the entire building. I fumbled desperately under the covers to find my glasses and instead touched a furry little ball curled next to my legs. ‘What are you doing here, Cat?’ I asked, frightened. (I never had kept an animal. I had never slept next to an animal before. Their hair disgusted me. Their germs scared me. I didn’t want them on my bed.)

    He was playing possum. ‘Ha, you sly trickster, I’ll show you,’ I mumbled to the supposedly sleeping fluffball. I took him in my hand – he fit exactly in my palm – and placed him on the rug by my bed. Neither too far nor too close: the exact distance one needs to breathe. We shouldn’t get in each other’s face.

    As soon as I put him down, I saw him in a flash of lightning opening his huge green eyes and then Cat, the hypocrite, started crying with all the might his tiny little lungs could afford. My heart broke. Yet I decided to play my cards right. I knew that in relationships cards get dealt early on. Whatever you do, you tread a path from which there’s no turning back. I got up feigning indifference; blindly, I grabbed a bowl of cherries from the fridge and started eating, deaf to his cries, worrying about the room getting flooded. But in the end I made a really stupid mistake: I underestimated my opponent. He was only four inches long, but he was a fighter! For a quarter of an hour he was howling as if there was no tomorrow. He filled his lungs with air and let it out as desperate sighs. Then his wailing dropped to a heartbreaking whimper, which you could barely hear, as though his soul was about to leave his body. His performance was rivalled only by the National Theatre.

    Seventeen minutes later I admitted my defeat. I took him in my hand, put him in front of me and started lecturing him, looking straight into his eyes that were glowing in the dark:

    ’Why are you so stubborn, Cat? What do you want from me? Didn’t we already agree about this? You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you. We’ll live like Holly and her Cat, flatmates and buddies, until we find out exactly what we want to do with our lives. I’ll feed you the best delicacies, I swear. And you can wake me up in the morning if I don’t hear the alarm. But we can’t sleep together. We’ll come and go as we please. No complaints, no whining, no “Please don’t leave me alone”, all right? Are we clear? And I swear to you that after I go all over the world and decide where I want to settle down, I’ll take you with me and give you a name. I think I’ll call you Zooey, like my favourite Salinger character. Do you like the name Zooey? Or maybe Truman to honour Holly? And if I get rich and move to New York, I’ll buy you a collar from Tiffany’s.’

    He was listening to me attentively without moving an inch. After I finished talking I took him in my hand and put him back on the little rug. That exact moment there was a loud crack of thunder and a flash of lightning lit the room once again. The kitten ran towards the balcony, from where the water was still coming in.

    ‘Please don’t go, Zooey, I’m scared’, I shouted. He stopped, turned and looked at me with his glowing eyes. Then he turned back, slowly climbed up on the bed and ensconced himself behind my knees. He never left my bed again. And we had breakfast together in the kitchenette; we didn’t give a damn about Tiffany’s.

    Lena Divani was born in Volos, Greece. She is the author of novels, short stories, and plays. Seven Lives and One Great Love is her first novel to appear in English.

    ​ Her novel, ​Seven Lives and One Great Love: The Memoirs of a Cat from Europa Editions was published in May 2014, and is available through our partner Foyles.

  • Horror and words  

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

    Few things are as intense as a nightmare, and few things as tedious as hearing a description of one. Feelings are not easily converted into words: the abstract, oceanic universe of memories which have such emotional resonance for the dreamer, can only be communicated through one instrument – language – which is, inevitably, more restricted. When we wake up, all we have to evoke our anguish and fear are generic words like ‘anguish’ and ‘fear’.

    The same can happen when dealing with a historical nightmare. A recent article by Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker showed that, twenty years after the war in Rwanda – when the Hutus murdered 800,000 Tutsis in the space of a hundred days, in a spiral of hatred fermented by colonialism and by the UN looking the other way – it is still difficult to reach a consensus on what name to use to describe what happened. In Rwanda itself they discuss whether it would be best to choose a word from the local language or from the language of the colonisers, whether verbal precision is enough or if a neologism is called for in order to describe the tragedy.

    Similar debates arise out of any collective trauma. There are Jewish groups who reject the established term ‘holocaust’, with its suggestion of sacrifice and the expiation of sins, in favour of the less ambiguous ‘shoah’ (‘calamity’ or ‘annihilation’). In Turkey, it is still taboo to use the word ‘genocide’ to describe the Armenian massacre begun in 1915. In Brazil, something similar is happening in the struggle for recognition of what was and is being perpetrated against indigenous communities.

    These are small battles within a long and difficult war, that of passing on memories so that the horror is not repeated. Words are the first and sometimes only weapon available to the victims of any attempt at extermination, and it’s important to find some way of ensuring that they do not become mere slogans deploying a vocabulary approved by militants, and do not betray the nature of what happened.

    It is, therefore, also a matter of aesthetics. That’s where the parallel between historical narrative and literary fiction comes in. In both cases, the repeated use of words, even if these are morally correct, can produce entirely the wrong effect, by making those words banal, solemn or overly sentimental. A book that merely describes what happened in Rwanda or during the Holocaust as the terrible massacres that they were, will simply be repeating what the newspapers said and what more informed readers already know. To touch the sensibilities of the more demanding reader, to arouse their empathy and provoke their discomfort and to encourage some practical action (if non-violent activism is the objective) requires more than the mere repetition of the truth of the facts.

    A careful eye must be kept on the truth of the language used as well. The most distressing writings about Rwanda, like those of Gourevitch himself, somehow find a balance between their extreme, incandescent subject and the informative distance needed to describe it. A film like Schindler’s List, which depends on empathy, shocks and tears, makes use of a certain narrative amorality in order to have a moral impact on its audience.

    As a novelist, and especially in a book like Diary of the Fall, which deals with a subject that has been written about time and again – the effects of the Second World War on three generations of Jews – I was faced by just such a challenge. From the start, I knew that I would have to balance language and invention, using changes of narrative pace and other techniques in order to bring the characters and their dramas to life, to achieve the paradox that characterises the most successful literary examples: lying as a way of telling the truth.

    Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated novels and short stories by such writers as Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Javier Marías and Bernardo Atxaga. She has won various prizes for her work, most recently the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão, for which she was also runner-up with her translation of António Lobo Antunes’ The Land at the End of the World. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded the OBE for services to literature.

     

  • The shot at Sarajevo

    Translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth

    Over a glass of beer, two students are discussing their national identity, ironically. One student is Czech while the other is a Bosnian who has come to Prague to study at the Film Academy.

    This is a scene from a novel of mine written some time ago. The key question the novel asks is: ‘What have you given the world apart from that shot in Sarajevo?’

    The novel, The Sign of the Rose, was translated some time ago into French (Sous le signe de la Rose) and German (Im Zeichen der Rose), and it has been quoted in the past few weeks by journalists searching for words to evoke the Sarajevo assassination.

    It’s hard to resist the imperative of an anniversary. I myself have been led by the centenary of the assassination to leaf through the pages of books I have already read: Zweig, Canetti, Borges, Ehrenburg… I have even read Nabokov, who exhibits an idiosyncratic contempt for the evocation of historical events in literature. But what I have found interesting is that Czesław Miłosz – a writer with an otherwise marked sense of history – does not mention the assassination in his writing about the first days of the Great War. And I have been struck by a page in the book The Labyrinth of the World. Its author, Marguerite Yourcenar, does not mention the name of the dead Crown Prince. Or the assassin. She simply remarks that an Austrian prince was killed in Sarajevo.

    Perhaps this wouldn’t have been so strange if Marguerite Yourcenar had held to the principle of nomina sunt odiosa or ‘naming no names’. But she does not. In the same book, she refers to another assassination. This time she mentions the name of the victim, the Swedish king Gustav III. He was killed at a masked ball.

    This makes the fact that the Austrian Crown Prince (who was not masked when he was killed…) is not named all the more unusual. But when you consider the whole sentence referring to the assassination, it becomes clear why the wise Marguerite Yourcenar omits the name of the Austrian Crown Prince (reducing him instead to ephemeral anonymity):

    An Austrian prince, whose hunting trophies I later saw with revulsion in his castle in Bohemia, was killed in Sarajevo, just like one of the wild animals he was used to hunting in expeditions arranged for him to pursue red deer or bears.

    Elsewhere in the book, Marguerite Yourcenar evokes the stormy night when the news of the assassination was carried along telegraph wires. When the news was just spreading, when Gavrilo Princip was in prison and Ferdinand and his wife were in the mortuary, the twelve-year old Margarite Yourcenar happened to be in town. What she remembers of that night is that she returned from the balcony where she’d been, feeling like ‘a straw in the sand’.

    In re-reading that phrase, I was reminded of Pascal’s famous words ‘man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed’*. The idea that a person is just ‘a straw in the sand’ resonates with me more than ‘a thinking reed’. That’s how I feel now. Do I owe the feeling to my life experience, which includes one day at the Siege of Sarajevo, and much more besides? Perhaps. But I also owe it to my experience of literature and the role of the writer.

    ***

    I live in Sarajevo. I went to primary school, secondary school and university in Sarajevo. I attended one of the oldest secondary schools in Sarajevo, in which Gavrilo Princip, who killed Franz Ferdinand, had once been a pupil. Our teachers did not take us to his grave and in history classes I learned as much about Gavrilo Princip as I did about any other historical event. We learned that he belonged to the secret ‘Young Bosnia’ organisation. He killed Franz Ferdinand. That was the trigger (but not the cause) of the First World War.

    Almost every day I pass the cemetery with the chapel containing the mortal remains of Gavrilo Princip. To be honest, I would find it hard to describe the chapel. People pass it by as they would any other building in their hometown. All lost in their own problems and thoughts.

    I bought my first pair of high-heels as a student from the street corner that Princip had stood at the moment he was about to make history. Footprints were later pressed into the concrete at the spot where he’d stood. Were I to let my mind wander on the theme of the Sarajevo assassination, I could write a story in which I try out my first high-heels by stepping into the footprints of Princip’s feet. But I didn’t do that. Nor did I ever see any citizen of Sarajevo paying any attention to those footprints. Only tourists. Did I ever enter the museum dedicated to the Sarajevo assassination? You know how it is with museums. You visit foreign museums, but your own rarely, or never.

    On 7 February 2014, I finally set out to look more closely at the chapel containing Gavrilo Princip’s remains and to take photographs of it. The centenary of the assassination was on my mind. I spent two hours taking photographs and it was only on my way home that I realised that there had been a demonstration in the centre of town. Demands for a change of government, social unrest, etc. Part of the Government building was even on fire.

    The unrest lasted into the late evening and became a global news story. That evening I stumbled upon a fiery scene and when I tried to take photographs a policeman grabbed my little camera and trampled on it. All those pictures of the chapel containing Gavrilo Princip’s remains were lost. I regret losing the camera (it cost a lot of money!) but the whole experience felt like a warning to me as a writer. One should write and take photographs for more profound reasons than anniversaries.

    And one should talk for more profound reasons than chatting over a glass of beer. That is why, in my book, the character to whom the question is addressed, ‘What have you given the world apart from that shot in Sarajevo?’ gives no reply.

     

    NB. I owe the title of this piece to a story by I. B. Singer. He is one of my favourite authors who writes about the individual in relation to history.

    *Blaise Pascal c.1654-1662  Pensées, no.347 (translated by A Krailsheimer)

    You can browse for and order books by Marguerite Yourcenar via Foyles.

    Death in the Museum of Modern Art, translated by Celia Hawkesworth,  is published  by Istros Books.

  • Playing Vietnamese

    Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

    The train to Brno is almost empty, even though the Pope is delivering mass there tomorrow (I guess most of the congregation will travel early in the morning). Opposite me sits a girl of about twenty. She’s pretty, with long hair and no make-up. She has no handbag, just a backpack. She may be going to the mass. I’ll try to catch her eye when she looks up from her book, then I’ll ask her.

    For the time being, she and I are reading.

    Both the books we’re holding have only just come out, and both make unpleasant reading for the Czechs.

    The girl is reading a widely publicized book by a nineteen-year-old Czech girl who was born in the south of the country and got nothing but A grades for Czech grammar at school, but is still regarded as Vietnamese. It’s the first proper book to be written in Czech by a representative of the Vietnamese minority, it’s called White Horse, Golden Dragon, and the author’s name is Lan Pham Thi. This autobiographical story is set in Písek, where the heroine graduated from high school and where she was beaten up by skinheads. After years of toil, her father sets up the restaurant of his dreams, which is ceremonially opened by the Lord Mayor (‘because we’re in favour of tolerance and cooperation’), who has a skinhead as his chauffeur (he beat up the author too). The Lord Mayor is a jolly Czech, whose favourite joke goes like this: A Czech comes along to a Vietnamese market stall and asks: ‘Have you got AIDS?’ ‘No,’ says the Vietnamese stallholder, ‘but I can get it by tomorrow.’ The Vietnamese dad in the book has a Czech friend in whose name he has bought a house. It has never been hard to reach agreement. The Czech friend’s philosophy is this: ‘Since the day they invented money, nobody has had to say thank you.’ The dad’s philosophy is this: ‘The main thing is to be careful not to piss anybody off.’ The reviewers were unanimous: ‘We are racists, but it makes for a good read.’

    The girl with long hair reads so fast that in half an hour she’s got through half the book without looking up once.

    *

    White Horse, Golden Dragon, the book the girl was reading on the train to Brno, won the 2009 Book Club competition for unpublished work. The book that wins this annual award gets published, and achieves impressive sales figures.

    The journalists rushed to interview the nineteen-year-old winner, Lan Pham Thi, but she could only answer their questions by e-mail, because in the meantime she’d gone to Kuala Lumpur to study IT.

    In her response to the media she said that she was still trying to resolve the dilemma of whether she is Czech or Vietnamese, but had come to the conclusion that she is a Czech with Vietnamese parents. Asked why not a single positive Czech appears in her book, she replied that she hadn’t been aware of it while she was writing.

    Despite a patently negative attitude towards the Roma in the Czech Republic, there has been an upsurge of literature by them, and the number of Roma students in higher education is probably at a record level for Europe. As a result, lots of people were quietly hoping that Lan Pham Thi was the portent of another positive development, especially as one of the government ministers for home affairs had recently suggested that the state should give money to any Vietnamese person who was willing to leave the country. The fact that thanks to the Vietnamese, almost every urban district in the Czech Republic has two well-stocked grocery stores, open every day of the year, made no impression on him.

    The author sent her signed book contract to the publisher from Kuala Lumpur. With a Vietnamese friend representing her at the prize-giving, she made her acceptance speech and apologized for her absence via a video recording.

    A couple of weeks after White Horse, Golden Dragon was published, the critic Zdenko Pavelka wrote that he was concerned about some of the details. For example, one of the verbs used to describe the scene where the heroine’s father opens his dream restaurant in the town of Písek, with the participation of the Lord Mayor. The local television is there, and Lan Pham Thi writes that the camera is ‘whirring.’ But cameras haven’t whirred for a few decades now. The skinheads who attack the heroine use sharpened razor blades. The critic checked, and found that nowadays they use very sharp knives – they stopped using razor blades in the 1990s. On top of that, the story is set in Písek, where the Lord Mayor couldn’t have come to the opening, because Písek has an ordinary town mayor, and not the equivalent of a Lord Mayor.

    From these and similar details Pavelka concluded that the book could not have been written by a Vietnamese girl at all, but must have been the work of a man, a Czech, aged at least fifty. What the critic found most annoying was that the book had been widely promoted as being by a young Vietnamese woman, as if that in itself were a literary merit.

    His article set off a major media campaign of general suspicion that Lan Pham Thi didn’t really exist.

    Two months later the campaign reached its goal, with the help of the writer who had come second in the Book Club competition, who said he knew it was a hoax (his own book hadn’t been published).

    But the competition jury announced that even if they’d been aware that the book wasn’t written by a Vietnamese woman, the man who came second still wouldn’t have won. And besides, he hadn’t come second at all – that was just his imagination.

    The author of the Vietnamese eye-opener turned out to be thirty-nine-year-old journalist and travel writer Jan Cempírek (the critic had got his age wrong).

    He publicly admitted that he had committed literary fraud in order to draw attention to the problems affecting the Vietnamese in the Czech Republic. He also wanted to find out what sort of reception a book that contained nothing but clichés and a black-and-white view of the world would get. And he wanted to show ‘what the ordinary Czech thinks a Vietnamese thinks in the Czech Republic.’

    He announced that he was donating the prize money from the Book Club competition to the publication of a Vietnamese-Czech dictionary.

    How the Vietnamese really feel and what their lives are like remain a mystery.

     *

    This is an extract from Do-It-Yourself Paradise by Polish author Mariusz Szczygieł, one of two books of reportage about the Czechs as a people. The other, Gottland – Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia, has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and has just been published by Melville House Books. The true stories told in Szczygieł’s reports often concern strange hoaxes and cover-ups, implying that in a Czech context, for various political and personal reasons, the truth is often subjected to manipulation.

    Do-It-Yourself-Paradise is published in Polish by Czarne.

    Gottland by Mariusz Szczygieł is published by Melville House.

    You can purchase Gottland via our partner Foyles.