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Tag: translation

  • With Care

    With Care

    Indonesian writer and artist Khairani Barokka writes on ableism in literature and translation.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    [Content warning: intertwining of multiple forms of harm]

    We read a work in translation and, in the midst of engrossment, a word that hurts is flung into our chest. It aches, perhaps breeds ache the diameter of a single coin. Perhaps that coin-shaped pain is carried with us, in however subtle a way, throughout the day, or year, or many years to come. Language is not a throwaway thing; it endures, persists, burrows into, is always specifically targeted weaponry. What it fights against defines our impression of it; what lingers in minds influences daily movements, our very ligaments, our conversations, in its wake. A single word that hurts can colour our memory of the text, and – as we all know – our understandings of both author and translator: our notions of them as people who either do or do not take the time to care about whether or not their words contribute to interlocking systems of supremacy and hatred.

    We in the writing and translating communities strive, I hope, not to cause such lapses of care. Increasingly, tools are available for us to examine our potential biases of sexism, racism, ageism, classism, transphobia, heteronormativity. But how much do we care about – how much do we examine – ableism? It’s deeply underdiscussed, and a matter of urgency for us as writer-translators.

    What are the options for writing ‘disabled’ or ‘D/deaf’ in another language? What are the specific cultural contexts, tropes, and understandings of those words in a text? I wish to plaster these questions onto every piece of writing (particularly those that use ableist tropes) before a translator agrees to take it on; before a publisher signs up to promote and distribute it; before the aches might begin for readers, unbeknownst to those involved in the circulation of literature, or with their knowledge. (Repeat, of course, for language with sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, classist aims, all of which goad each other on; for any language that hurts for the sake of it.)

    ‘Blind’, ‘deaf’, ‘mute’, ‘lame’, ‘stupid’, ‘crazy’ are used in ableist ways rampantly, unthinkingly (think: ‘blind spot’, ‘tone-deaf’ as pejoratives, as opposed to ‘blind man’) in at-times-garlanded lit in translation. For us D/deaf and/or disabled people, the greatest minority in the world, this is an urgent issue.

    Ableism is a tenet of white supremacy; in Java, for instance, understandings of D/deafness and disability as spiritually revered were replaced by the medical systems of the Dutch missionaries. Violence lingers in lines of beauty. It either condones or condemns a massacre of rights for bodies shunned by an ablenormative world; either rejects or keeps in place the widespread abuse – historical and present – of D/deaf and disabled people by a world built for abled bodyminds. This, of course, is not the only way in which words can hurt, but ableism in literature is as underdiscussed as it is pervasive.

    Ableism in the translation industry can be discerned in manifold ways: in the inaccessibility of spaces, online and offline, in which it operates; in which linguistic arts are considered ‘literature’, whereby sign languages and other disabled languages are excluded; in the content of the stories we choose to translate, and how. This stems from the concepts of disability and D/deafness being regarded as uncomplicated, unnuanced, and ‘purely’ biological – rather than phenomena so often influenced by sociocultural and economic factors.

    I am fearful of what even we, as D/deaf and disabled translators, do to further ableism in ways we do not discern. D/deaf and disabled writers and translators must also understand that our own understandings of words and meanings as they relate to bodyminds are culturally shaped, always subjective, always fluid. We must understand that our disabled and sign languages differ from those in another region. That notions of which words are harmful in people shift geographically and according to distinctions of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, biome.

    It behooves us all to investigate not only the use of disability tropes, but the contexts in which they are being used in a text. In terms of author-translator collaboration, this is a fruitful opportunity.

    As those in the translation community know, translating is an artform involving the wearing of many hats: we are writers, editors, and, in the best situations, fiercely protective of both the source text and our rendition of it. When we enter into an agreement to translate a work, we should in the first instance truly be sensitivity readers for ourselves, for what we might enter into (and, of course, for all the people we might impact). We should feel free to refuse work that uses weaponised language, enter into dialogue with the writers we represent if we wish; we should continue to educate ourselves on the ways in which language can harm, should apologise for mistakes and move forward, as a result, as better humans, better artists, better translators.

    This includes paying attention both to the finer intricacies of how complex, culturally-refracted concepts such as ‘disability’ are conceptualised in our source text, and to the larger intricacies of how the work came to be with us, why this author and not others, and how much trust we place in arts institutions.

    Becoming a more sensitive, caring industry also involves understanding that the astounding lack of accessible e-books, audiobooks, Braille options, wheelchair-accessible and distance-sensitive venues, sign language interpretation, scent-free spaces and relaxed performances are not simple, miniscule ‘oversights’. All of this is a funneling of time and resources, internationally, towards systems that keep ablenormativity supreme. It is not the job of us disabled and D/deaf people to educate abled people, yet we are consistently asked to provide emotional and physical labor in service of access for free, instead of being treated and paid in the first instance as consultants. When our literature is inaccessible, this comes of course with attendant disrespect for, and underestimation of, those of us who reject ablenormativity and continue to write, to work in the field, to translate, to interpret, and to bear daily slights and humiliations – to slough off – in order to continue to contribute to art.

    When our literature is inaccessible, in my mind, I see marks everywhere stating: ‘For Abled People Only’. Imagine if those marks were made more palpable to abled folk. Instead of ‘I’m sorry the venue is inaccessible’, emails would say: ‘I’m sorry this is for abled people only’. Imagine if whole bookstores had signs on shelves saying: ‘We’re sorry, this is for sighted people only’. Storied publishing houses saying, in signatures: ‘We’re sorry, we’ve never taken on a D/deaf and/or disabled writer in all our years of operating’.

    How we craft statements twists emotions, carries heft, as all of us who employ language know too well. Each day, literary industries choose which bodyminds to protect and which to target with harm; it’s time all of us committed to learning, to understanding how, why, and what we can choose to do, with utmost deliberation, with care.

    Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer, poet and artist in London whose work has been presented extensively, in 15 countries. Among her honours, she is Modern Poetry in Translation‘s Inaugural Poet in Residence and a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change. Her books are Rope (Nine Arches) and Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), and she is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches). Her most recent exhibition was Annah: Nomenclature at the ICA. http://www.khairanibarokka.com/

    Photo credit: D. Kakembo.

  • Out of the Ashes

    Out of the Ashes

    The last in our series with Granta magazine on writers and their translators, Geovani Martins writes new short fiction, and Julia Sanches writes on translating it.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Out of the Ashes

    Geovani Martins, translated by Julia Sanches

    C’mon Vigidal-Leblon-Ipanema-Gávea, we’re off! Carlos yelled, even though he knew they’d still be five minutes, much to the annoyance of hurried passengers. He was itching to leave, too. The beginning of that trip – when the van rolled down Avenida Aquarela do Brasil and passed beneath enormous trees until it reached Avenida Niemeyer, coming face-to-face with the ocean – that was his favourite bit.

    Carlos was quick to learn the art of fare collection. If it wasn’t for his mixing up street names, no one would’ve known he’d started that gig just over a week ago. Used to the streets of Bangu, Padre Miguel and Realengo, the streets of the South Zone – named after a bunch of generals and marquises – seemed to belong to another world. On top of that, there were the buildings, the people paid to walk packs of dogs, the crowds of nannies hefting other folks’ children this way and that.

    The van finally left, not at maximum capacity but a good way there. Now he just had to pray it filled up in Vidigal. The rest was profit, Carlos thought, cut off by the sight of the looming ocean. He had the feeling again that the world was too good to be true. Carlos wondered if he’d ever get used to that view, like the passengers who rarely bothered to turn and face the window. As long as that didn’t happen, he’d relish every second of it.

    One stop before Vidigal, in the Fourteenth, the college girl climbed on again. They’d ridden together at least three times that week, always at the same hour. She went from there through Leblon and Ipanema, till the van came down to Jardim de Alah and then back through Gávea, dropping her in front of PUC. She was one of the passengers with the longest route. As he saw her flag down the van, Carlos realised he didn’t only look forward to the ocean but also to that moment, when she climbed into the vehicle, took out one of her earbuds and said: Afternoon, how’s it going? Carlos could hardly answer, busy thinking to himself: I could love this woman.

    In the house where he used to live, his sister and mother admitted he needed a change of scene, of air, and of friends. It was the only way for him to turn over a new leaf, something they agreed he needed. Even so, Dona Creuza was heavy-hearted. She was scared of what might happen to her son in an unfamiliar place. Whether she liked it or not, even with all his screw-ups, he was family and that always counted for something. Since Carlos moved to Rocinha, Dona Creuza’s had several dreams in which her son gets himself in a fix on a strange hill, with no one to stand up and say that he was a good kid – that he’s Dona Alzira’s grandson, that he went to Clementino then Ana Amélia, studied to be an electrician, that he’s just going through a rough patch, that friends are foda: they can lift you up and drag you straight to hell. In Rocinha, the only person Carlos has to lean on is André, his ex-brother-in-law and the driver of the van he’s ended up working. Guy’s tight, he’s trying to give him a hand, but he’s not from those parts either; if shit flies, there isn’t much he can do.

    Aside from the striking route, another thing Carlos likes about fare collection is competing with other vans. Every trip is a new race. And every detail counts: the time spent calling for passengers at every stop, the traffic lights, pulling up to let people off. The fare collector rides shotgun and warns when somebody’s nearing or if the van in front does something stupid. It’s just as important to know when to accelerate – so you can blow through and reach the crowded stop to collect passengers – as it is to know when to slow down and let the van in front get a good distance ahead so you don’t pull up right after to an empty stop. On the first day, Carlos just sat around, thinking all he needed was to call passengers, collect their fare, let the driver know when they were getting off. As the day unfolded, he watched the other fare collectors’ movements and noticed the game they were playing. At the end of the day, André clued him in on how it all worked. He said Carlos needed to wrap his head ’round it quick and get behind it 100 per cent, ’cause a good fare collector makes all the difference.

    Now and then some cracked-up chick or dude would get in the van, either mission-back or mission-bound, at all hours of the day, in all kinds of states. From the most put-together, to folks in dirty clothes who hadn’t slept in days, and nine-to-fivers in their work gear with bibles under their arms – all kinds of specimens. They were heavy with worry and had a look in their eyes that reminded Carlos of his very worst moment, when he hit rock-bottom.

    It happened on a day he and 2D spent smoking a ton of zirrês by the trainline after finishing a gig together, tossing out some rubble for a tia in Vila Vintém. Soon as they’d smoked all their cash came the torture of figuring out what to do to scare up some more green – but then a playboy from Castelo Branco rocked up wanting a toke. Fiend got to the trainline all amped up. Hell knows where he started to end up there, but player was way too fucked up to hit the boca. He asked them to mission for him, and they went in exchange for a ten-real rock. And they went once, twice, three, four times, till player decided to stop snorting and smoke rock instead, but not with weed like they were. It had to be in a cup: pure crack. 2D said he’d fetch two rocks; playboy smoked it straight and they carried on with their zirrê. Except then the player said he was running low on cash and that’s why he’d switched to rock. That was the sitch: if they weren’t game, he’d find some crackhead in a minute flat to mission for him instead. 2D shoved off after that, kid had never smoked crack out of a cup. Carlos spent the rest of the day with the playboy. Once it got dark and they were peaking, some of the playboy’s friends came to the trainline to bail him out. They were all players too, gym-rat types, and shit went sideways: they wanted to come down on Carlos, claiming he was the one who dragged their buddy there, that the guy was clean, been off drugs for months. Wasn’t for the other junkies around Carlos, he would’ve got his ass beat, for sure. On his way home to see if there was an umbrella or anything to sell, he remembered that before that mess had started, playboy’d left him twenty reals.

    He was headed to the boca when he bumped into 2D. He tried to sneak past but his friend clocked him, came up to him, and said: Yo, I’ve got a hold of seven already, throw in three and we’ll smoke a zidane. Carlos said he was cool, player had left him tripping and he was homebound to see if he could get some grub. 2D stuck around, on the mission to find a buddy to go halves with, while Carlos headed to the other end of the favela, where 2D wouldn’t catch him copping two ten-real rocks. He was bent on smoking from a cup, and doing it solo. It was only when he was crumbling the rock over some foil that he remembered the ashes. He didn’t have a cigarette and, without ash, there was no smoking from a cup. Asking another junkie was out of the question – folks didn’t give handouts and the junkie’d want a pull at the very least. He’d have to ask around on the street, knowing people were wise to what the ash was for. Doing that in the favela where you grow up is foda, like filing for junkie credentials, bottoming out. But being all the way on the other side, he decided to risk it.  

    He spotted a couple of parás drinking at the bar door and waited to see if one of them smoked. They all did, one cigarette after the other. Carlos hung around, working up the courage. Till one of them stepped away a little, and he approached him. He started by asking for a smoke, wanting to keep a low profile. But when the guy turned him down, Carlos said the ash would do. Dude flipped. Said if he wanted ash or some other crap like that he could get a job and buy it himself, that he hadn’t come to Rio to support a bunch of bums, much less junkies.

    Carlos figured he’d best ask a girl instead. Though wracked with hatred and shame, he wasn’t about to give up. He was there after all, rocks in pocket, and there was no turning back now. He passed a young piece smoking a cig and made to approach her but didn’t, then leaned back on the wall to wait for his next chance. A girl rocked up to the gate opposite Carlos. She called out a bunch to some chick called Brenda and, when it looked like she was about to leave, leaned back on the house wall and lit a cigarette. It was time. The girl was raging, cigarette between fingers. Carlos thought he’d best just ask for the ash so the girl could wash her hands of him fast; sometimes folks even spared a cigarette if the packet was full. He got there and, sure enough, when he asked for the ash, the girl, fed up and ready to eighty-six him, pulled out a packet. As she was handing over the cigarette, about to say something or other, she looked the crackhead right in the face. Carlinhos? she asked. It was Priscila. They’d gone to school together as kids and, in their teens, they’d even made out a couple of times in one of those bailes. He left the cigarette and hightailed it out of here, wanting to bury his head in the concrete.

    He bumped into 2D again on his way home, said he’d got a hold of two ten-real rocks and been trying to track him down so they could split that zirra. 2D had dropped seven on a five-real rock and some two-real weed but he had a cig and they could fix a zirrê with some tobacco – not ideal, but that’s what they had. They sat on the trainline. Everything was dark and crawling with junkies. They smoked the first one. Complete silence. Carlos crumbled the second rock and handed it to his buddy so he could roll another, which he didn’t finish smoking. In the middle of that bagulho, something real weird went down. Carlos got the feeling he’d start crying right there on the line, then split. That was when he settled it: he had to change.

    Up top, Rocinha looks like another city. Every time Carlos passes route 99 he turns to scope the view of Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, even for just a second. For folks who work in transit, it’s not the best spot to start spacing out. That’s where the fierce bustle on the hill begins. Moto-taxis, cars, buses, moving trucks, garbage trucks, police vehicles – all of them fighting for space on a street halved by the parked cars. As Carlos tries to commit the name of each part of the hill to memory, he gets used to that new reality too. Everything’s fast; there are 24-hour stores, 24-hour noise. Even with the confusion, Carlos has the feeling he could live there for the rest of his life. Maybe, in time, he’d buy his own van, start a business, make a life for himself. He’d always heard that the South Zone was where the money’s at and, now that life had taken him there, it was a matter of diving in and seeing what happened.  

    After his last trip on his seventh day of work, it was time for his wages. Dona Creuza had asked André only to only pay him at the end of the month, and her former son-in-law had agreed, but after talking to Carlos he realised it’d be foda to get through the month withouta cent. He’d pay him on that day so he had something to keep him going, then every two weeks. André believed that showing a person you trusted them could help give them the strength to be better. With this feeling in mind, he pulled his pouch out of his bag, set aside R$560, and handed them to his assistant. Carlos pocketed the money, lit a cigarette, said goodnight, see you tomorrow, and walked off into the hill.

    On Translating in a Not-So-Vast and Noisy Room

    Julia Sanches

    Now and then, I imagine people think translation happens in a vacuum. An unadulterated translator (picture a vessel) sits alongside her unimpeachable text in a vast, mostly empty and colourless room, with all the words – past, present, and future – of her source and target languages floating around her like invisible apples to be picked as needed. The text she translates and its author may have a history, a baggage; they may have influences and motives, politics and intent. But not the translator. She is to approach her task unattached and apolitical, and handle each word gingerly so as not to smoosh or deform it, or make it too much her own. She should not, in fact, think of these words as hers at all; they belong to the English language – that wriggly thing that we are constantly trying to pin down, curate, make sense of. Now and then I imagine people think of translation as solitary and soundless, as effortlessly graceful as sex in a Hollywood movie.

    We translators know better, of course. Although we may want to come at the text fresh and uncontaminated, armed with words come from goodness knows where that click into place with a sound that announces their rightness, we know that’s not how it happens. We also have our histories and our baggages and our politics and our very own trajectories to our very own Englishes. Korean translator Anton Hur recently tweeted that, ‘in a literary translation, finding the voice is an act of triangulation between the author, the translator, and a third voice’. (In that vast colourless room, there is also, always, Twitter.) What appeals to me about this is that the translator, rather than sit on the author’s knee as a quiet ventriloquist dummy, has not only words but also that very authorial thing: voice.

    When I first started translating Geovani Martins, it was (I mean, it still is) as a white, middle-class Brazilian who has spent all but three months of her life outside her home country. My voice (my English voice) has been formed by the American public-school system, a smattering of international schools, a Scottish university, British and American friends, and British and American literature and cinema, not to mention the British and American translators I have read throughout my life. Geovani’s voice has been crafted by exposure to several of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, a keen interest and ear for their various and varied slangs, fiction by authors like Machado de Assis, the crônicas of Rubem Braga, and Brazilian hip-hop, samba, and rap; information I’ve gleaned from conversations with the author and some light online stalking.

    The Portuguese voice in ‘Out of the Ashes’ reflects many of these formative points: Rio street slang mixed with the democratic eye of a writer of crônicas, which demand a careful attention to the minor details that make up daily life. It’s important to note that the voice in this story shifts according to the protagonist’s circumstance. In the beginning, when Carlos seems more at peace, the rhythm of the writing is regular and staid. Towards the middle, when we read about the day Carlos hit rock-bottom, there is a hankering, restless energy to the prose; the language is at street-level. And then, at the end, a lull, followed by a certain ominousness as the narrator’s omniscience retreats and leaves a lacuna of information. As Carlos walks off into the hill, we know what his hopes are and we know the weight of his history. But we have no idea how things will go.

    Thinking back, I realise that the van Carlos rides through Rio de Janeiro, and those of his competition, first appeared in my readerly imagination as the dollar vans I would see screech and honk and yell their way down Utica Ave. and Flatbush Ave., toward south Brooklyn, when I lived in New York City. It’s possible that some of the texture of this image has found its way into the translation, much as a person will begin unconsciously to use a word she has recently read or heard. (Weeks ago, I picked up Sophie Lewis’s translation of Colette Fellous’s This Tilting World, and her use of the verb ‘heft’ obviously stayed with me, edging fittingly into my translation of ‘Out of the Ashes’.) This past Saturday night, after a day spent surrounded by people at my ceramics studio (where I learned that in the schools of South Providence, kids are using the term ‘kiki’ to mean ‘hang out’), my partner and I watched John Waters’s certifiable Cecil B. Demented, about an independent film director who kidnaps a Hollywood actress called Honey Whitlock (played by Melanie Griffiths) to star in his film rebellion against Hollywood and in favor of independent cinema. Adrian Grenier plays Lyle, a young man constantly off his head on some narcotic. At some point, Lyle/Adrian yells at Honey/Melanie: ‘Honey, I’m peaking!’ In ‘Out of the Ashes’, Carlos and the playboy with whom he gets high also peak.

    Now and then, I imagine people think translation is or should be as self-contained and handsome as a Hollywood actress in a perfume ad, or a suburban front lawn (I can’t help thinking of Ocean Vuong’s ‘suburbs with suicidally pristine lawns’). And I wonder if what we translators should be doing is making our baggage (read: voices) more visible, if not louder; if we should not be exposing our army of make-up artists and dieticians, our home chefs and careful lighting, our mowers, water sprinklers, and trash bags full of mown grass and litterfall.  Perhaps the truth is that our vast and colourless room is rather noisy, colourful, and not very vast at all but a labyrinth of corridors and chambers. And that, from this mess of experiences, we translate. 

  • Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds

    Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds

    The second in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn share an embrace.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I – LIGANDO MUNDOS, INVENTANDO MUNDOS

    José Eduardo Agualusa

    O narrador de um dos meus romances, “A Rainha Ginga”, é um tradutor – um padre brasileiro, com sangue indígena, africano e português, enviado para Angola, no final do século XVI, para trabalhar como intérprete para a Rainha Ginga, ou N’Zinga M’Bandi. 

    Levei a vida inteira para escrever este livro. Passei anos lendo  velhos textos sobre a história de Angola, conversando com especialistas, colecionando documentos que mencionassem aspetos menos conhecidos da extraordinária vida da grande rainha. Queria escrever partindo de um olhar africano, de alguém que se movesse na corte de N’Zinga, mas não sabia como fazer a ponte para o mundo que estava invadindo aquele, e, sobretudo, para o nosso tempo. Uma tarde, sem aviso, emergiu dentro de mim a figura do padre, o tradutor, Francisco José, e então comecei a escrever e só parei nove meses depois. Francisco José não é apenas um tradutor (um língua, como se dizia então) – ele é um mediador entre mundos. Cabe-lhe a ele o esforço de traduzir universos. 

    Eis, afinal, o difícil ofício de todos os tradutores. A parte mais fácil é a de encontrar na língua de chegada a palavra que melhor espelha a da língua de partida. Difícil mesmo é traduzir conceitos. Se um escritor enfrenta o desafio de ser outros, sempre que entra na sua ficção, ao tradutor cabe o desafio duplo de ser esses outros num idioma remoto, e conseguir que, ainda assim, todos os personagens soem coerentes e convincentes, como se aquela língua fosse a deles desde o leite materno. 

    Um escritor raramente escolhe os seus tradutores. Com sorte, é escolhido por eles. Se tiver mesmo muita sorte, encontra um companheiro para a vida, alguém capaz de partilhar com ele a  aventura de inventar e reinventar mundos. Eu tive essa sorte na língua inglesa. Fui o primeiro autor de ficção que o Daniel Hahn traduziu, e ele foi a primeira pessoa a ocupar-se da tradução de um romance meu. Assim, começámos juntos. Daniel é o meu língua no idioma inglês. Devo-lhe, em larga medida, o sucesso internacional dos nossos livros. 

    Um escritor que tenha a desventura de ver os seus livros recriados para um determinado idioma por múltiplos tradutores há-de parecer, nessa língua, um tanto incoerente e despersonalizado – por muito bons que sejam todos esses profissionais. Em contrapartida, um autor medíocre, beneficiando de um único tradutor extraordinário, pode até transformar-se, nessa segunda língua, num escritor sólido e interessante. Há casos assim, de tradutores que aperfeiçoam de tal forma as obras originais que o melhor a fazer em benefício destas seria retraduzi-las de volta. 

    A Rainha Ginga teve, na vida real, secretários e tradutores, portugueses e brasileiros, homens da igreja, como o meu personagem, que traduziam para português a correspondência que esta lhes ditava. Desta forma, o que hoje tomamos por falas da rainha, pela expressão direta do seu pensamento, é, na verdade, uma recriação dos seus tradutores. Assim acontece comigo. Também eu sou, enquanto romancista em língua inglesa, uma invenção de Daniel Hahn. Um abraço ao meu criador.

    ~

    II – CONNECTING WORLDS, INVENTING WORLDS

    José Eduardo Agualusa

    (Translated Created by Daniel Hahn)

    The narrator of one of my novels, Queen Ginga, is a translator – he’s a Brazilian priest, with indigenous, African and Portuguese blood, who is sent to Angola at the end of the sixteenth century to work as an interpreter for Queen Ginga, or N’Zinga M’Bandi.

    It took me my whole life to write that book. I spent years reading old texts about the history of Angola, talking to experts, collecting documents that mentioned lesser-known aspects of this great queen’s remarkable life. I wanted to write from an African gaze, a story as seen by someone who moves about in N’Zinga’s court, but who doesn’t know how to build the bridge connecting it to the world that’s invading his, and, especially, to our own time. One evening, without warning, a character appeared inside me, the figure of the priest, the translator, Francisco José, and then I started writing and only stopped nine months later. Francisco José isn’t only a translator (a língua as they used to say: a tongue) – he is a mediator between worlds. It is his role to strive to translate universes.

    That, ultimately, is the difficult task faced by all translators. The easiest part is finding the word in the target language that provides the best mirror-reflection of the one in the source language. What really is difficult is the translating of concepts. If a writer confronts the challenge of being other people each time he enters into his fiction, the translator is faced with the double challenge of being these others in a distant language, and yet still managing, somehow, to make every character coherent and convincing, as if this language had come to them with their mothers’ milk.

    A writer rarely gets to choose his translators. If he’s lucky, he is chosen by them. If he’s really very lucky indeed, he finds a friend for life, somebody capable of sharing with him the adventure of inventing and reinventing worlds. I had just that very luck in the English language. I was the first writer of fiction Daniel Hahn translated, and he was the first person to take on the translation of a novel of mine. We began together, then. Daniel is my língua in the English language. To a great extent, I owe the international success of our books to him.

    A writer who has the misfortune of seeing his books recreated for a given language by multiple translators must inevitably, in that language, seem somewhat incoherent and depersonalised – however good all those professionals might be. On the other hand, a mediocre writer, benefiting from a single remarkable translator, can even be transformed, in this second language, into a writer who is substantial and interesting. Such cases do exist, of translators who improve the original works to such an extent that the best thing one might do for them would be to translate them back.

    Queen Ginga, in real life, did have secretaries and translators, from Portugal and Brazil, men of the church, like my character, who translated into Portuguese the correspondence she dictated to them. In this way, what we today take as quotations from the queen, as direct expressions of her thinking, are in reality a recreation by her translators. So it is with me. I, too, as a novelist in the English language, am an invention of Daniel Hahn’s. I’m sending my creator a hug.

    ~

    III – CONNECTING WORDS, INVENTING WORDS?

    Daniel Hahn

    (After an original idea by José Eduardo Agualusa)

    Agualusa starts thus: The narrator of one of my novels, Queen Ginga, is a translator – (OK – sorry to interrupt, but Queen Ginga will have to be in italics, otherwise readers will think she’s the narrator referred to. Whereas the narrator is actually…) a Brazilian priest, with indigenous, African and Portuguese blood, who is sent to Angola – taking out a comma here, I think – at the end of the sixteenth century – and another – to work as an interpreter for Queen Ginga, or N’Zinga M’Bandi. (Possibly add a little gloss here – my readers likely won’t have heard of her. Though maybe readers of the original wouldn’t either? OK, leave it for now.)

    And so it begins.

    Second para: this one looks – oh – surprisingly easy! I shouldn’t say that out loud. Agualusa is often very much easier to translate than I’ll admit. (Don’t tell anyone.) He goes on: It took me my whole life to write that book. God, I’m glad I’m not a novelist. (Sorry, that last bit’s me, not him, obviously. Don’t mind me.) I spent years reading old texts, collecting documents, etc. (Etc. etc. This bit’s a doddle.) Ah, now the priest character appears to him: Then, one afternoon, without w–. Oh damn.

    You wouldn’t think ‘one afternoon’ would be the biggest challenge in this paragraph, would you? But Agualusa’s ‘tarde’ covers some of what we’d call the afternoon, and some of what we’d call the evening – *sends JEA e-mail asking ‘What time exactly did imaginary priest materialise?’*. (This afternoon/evening thing is a recurring annoyance in my work, and there are many similar examples – languages are precise or imprecise in entirely different ways. English basically needs a new word coined and all my troubles in the world will be over – eveternoon, perhaps. Or afterning. No?)

    I do like the idea of a writer being possessed by the spirit of a translator, btw – we usually talk about just the opposite happening, of course. Revenge!

    Anyway, on we stumble: Francisco José is not only (isn’t only?) a translator – a língua, as they used to say (oh, shit – OK, I’ll come back to that), he is a mediator between worlds. It falls to him to make an effort to translate universes. Wait – ‘Falls to him to make an effort to’ is horrible, though. To struggle to? But that seems to emphasise the unlikelihood of his managing it. Can I get away with a word like strive, which is such a lovely word? I think I can.

    To strive to translate universes. Yes – nice. I’m quite pleased with the clarity I’ve retained from that line of Agualusa’s. He couldn’t have put it better myself. Or vice versa.

    But back to that ‘língua’. The word means ‘tongue’ (in the same double-sense as English, both language and organ in your mouth), so I might drop in a little gloss for my Anglophones who don’t know this: Francisco José isn’t only a translator (a língua as they used to say, a tongue) – he is a mediator between worlds. But there’s another problem, which is that ‘língua’ meaning ‘tongue’ is a feminine noun (uma língua); here, used as a sort-of-synonym for translator-person, it’s masculine (um língua). Christ, I hate writers. ‘He is a tongue man’? No, that absolutely doesn’t help. I think I just have to live without that little gender-swap, tbqh. Not entirely satisfactory, but this time I’m going to admit defeat. I wouldn’t usually, but I have a deadline, and, well, my work happens in the real world, and circumstances here are sometimes imperfect.

    (Aha – answer just in from author-oracle email: the imaginary priest materialised late in the tarde, which is to say, in the evening. Good – strange things are more interesting when they happen in evenings than in afternoons.)

    OK, looks like para 3 at least I can speed through. That, ultimately, is the difficult task faced by all translators. (All translators, but especially those whose writers use language-play involving changing the gender of nouns that aren’t gendered in English. Just saying.) If a writer confronts the challenge of being other people each time he enters his fiction, the translator is faced with the double challenge of being these others in a distant language, and yet still managing, somehow, to make every character coherent and convincing. Yes! (Oh, sorry – the interjection is me again.) This is well said. I agree, obviously. Naturally I don’t need to agree with the substance of everything I say on behalf of my writers, but it helps! A good sympathetic match between writer and translator can be a blessing.

    Which – oh – is exactly where it looks like paragraph 4 is going.

    A writer, we continue, rarely gets to choose his translators. If he’s lucky, he is chosen by them. If he’s really very lucky indeed, he finds a friend for life. Yeah, I think I’m going with friend, but the Portuguese companheiro can be companion, collaborator, partner, comrade depending on context, and none of them neutral, so I am simply choosing, based on what I presume to claim about my relationship with my author. The word companion would be better, in the sense of a travelling companion, a fellow traveller, except that a companion for life suggests the wrong things. A friend for life, then, capable of sharing with him the adventure of inventing and reinventing worlds. (A lot of vent-ing in that line – advent/invent/reinvent – but it’s the same in Portuguese so I should probably just grit my teeth and go with it.) I was the first writer of fiction Daniel Hahn translated (God it’s weird writing stuff like this in the third person – I know it’s meant to be in his voice, but I’m here, too, you know!). We began together. Daniel is my língua (I know, I know, I’m a failure – don’t @ me) in the English language. To a large extent, I owe to him the international success of our books. No, hang on – sorry! – that sounds unnatural to me – ‘I owe to him the success’? More natural would be to reorder as ‘I owe the success of our books to him’ – though ending the paragraph in this way now shifts more emphasis onto the final ‘him’. (Me!) Yeah, OK, my ego and I can live with that. (Also, what a nice thing to say!)

    Onwards.

    A writer who has the misfortune of seeing his books recreated for a given language by multiple translators must inevitably, in that language (this word is repeated in English, where it isn’t in Portuguese – damn – no matter, ignore it, no one’s going to notice…), seem somewhat incoherent and depersonalised (right word?). On the other hand, a mediocre writer, benefiting from a single remarkable translator, can even be transformed, in this second language, into a writer who is solid (this is the ‘correct’ translation of the Portuguese word, but doesn’t work for me – robust? substantial?) and interesting. Great.

    And so to the conclusion.

    (That was quick! Well, it’s easy when you know how…)

    Queen Ginga did have secretaries and translators who translated into Portuguese the correspondence she dictated to them. What we today take as quotations from the queen are in reality a recreation by her translators. So it is with me. I, too, as a novelist in the English language, am an invention of Daniel Hahn’s. And then comes that lovely final line, in which he sends a hug to ‘my creator’. (So tempted to capitalise that as Creator. Would be nice to make a Shakespearean ‘onlie begetter’ reference, too, but he hasn’t so I mustn’t. He hasn’t so I mustn’t – good translators’ rule of thumb, that.) Actually ‘sending a hug to my creator’ is less natural in English than a ‘sending my creator a hug’, so let’s go with that – also thereby redeeming me for the earlier paragraph where I moved the ‘him’ to the end – here the reversal is opposite, balancing out, with the object in question (still me!) moved slightly away from the focus. That’s it. A lovely simple ending:

    I’m sending my creator a hug.

    And thus, as a humble, invisible translator, I let him get the last word.

    Oh. Oops.

    Well, since I’ve broken cover and am here anyway, companheiro, I’m sending you a hug back.

    José Eduardo Agualusa is a novelist and a reporter, born in Huambo in 1960. He studied in Lisbon and currently lives in Portugal, Angola and Brazil. In 2007, Agualusa was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2013 the Fernando Namora Prize, as well as a translation grant from English PEN in 2014. His novel A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award 2017.

    Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His translations include six novels by José Eduardo Agualusa, with whom he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. He is on the board of English PEN.

  • Editorial: PEN Transmissions x Granta

    Editorial: PEN Transmissions x Granta

    In a PEN Transmissions interview from July 2019, Kapka Kassabova says that ‘good art by its very nature crosses all borders’. Today, in October, the need for such ‘good art’ is acute. And it’s not just national, physical borders that we traverse: literature moves us across personal, communal, and linguistic borders in particular, vital ways.

    In this Granta x PEN Transmissions collaboration, we swim in the wake of International Translation Day, the celebration on 30 September of translators’ and translated writers’ roles in fostering internationalism. In the series, we give equal billing to writers and translators: we recognise writing and translation as cousins in craft, and we consider the two (or more) people who speak to us when we read in translation.

    Additional borders are crossed in translated literature. It is perhaps telling that, in a political moment when boundaries are being reinforced and freedoms challenged, the publication and readership of literature in translation is increasing. Sigrid Rausing, in her introduction to Granta 147: 40th-Birthday Special, speaks about the ‘narratives of place’ so central to Granta’s editorial history. Such narratives are complex stories indeed, and this series takes many and varied looks at places, spaces, and the borders that sometimes-falsely, always-stubbornly, never-permanently circumscribe them.

    Two lines from Peter Stamm and Michael Hofmann’s piece ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’, which opens the series, bespeak something of the relationships between subject, writer, translator and reader – and the boundaries they transgress – that this collaboration explores:

    Peter: ‘The only thing I can do is write about him, so that the clean, well-lighted place isn’t completely lost to me’.

    Michael: ‘I owe him the memory and the feeling of many stories, many people, many places’.

    – Will Forrester, Editor, PEN Transmissions, and Luke Neima, Online Editor, Granta

  • A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    The first in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, Peter Stamm pens new short fiction and Michael Hofmann writes on translating Stamm.

    After twenty years with one barber, I’m looking for a new one. At the age of exactly a hundred, Herr S. has closed his salon. He started out in 1933 as a trainee in Winterthur, worked in Lindau on Lake Constance and then in Lichtenstein for a few years before the war, before setting up his own business in 1945 in Zurich, where he has worked for the past seventy-four years. His salon looked just the way it must have looked in the forties, or even earlier, given that he had taken it over from a predecessor and barely changed anything.

    Herr S. was a great reader of newspapers. Over the years, he had more and more time for the habit, as his customers died away or lost their hair and were no more trouble to him. Once, when I brought along my two boys for a trim, he groaned: ‘All that hair!’ It was the only time I ever saw him in a bad mood. After that, I went on my own again. It was the unfussiness of his salon that attracted me, our halting conversations, Herr S.’s movements that had become mechanical and streamlined over the decades, his ‘Merci, thank you,’ when I paid him. Over the years, he would occasionally mention retirement, but he kept putting off the moment. Quitting, I had the impression, would have been more onerous than going on working.

    Herr S.’s salon seemed to be always open, from 7.30 in the morning to 6.30 at night. He hadn’t had a holiday for many years, in his younger days he had enjoyed going away, but that was no longer the case. Herr S. would occasionally tell me that someone from the paper, or from the local TV station had been by, suggesting an article or magazine feature about him. He was surely the oldest barber in Switzerland, perhaps in the whole of Europe. The interest flattered him, but he declined. He just wanted to do his job, and otherwise be left in peace. Perhaps he sensed that no newspaper article or TV spot was enough to encompass the thick end of nine decades in his profession: so many days, so many customers, so much hair. Any reportage would have turned him into a sort of freak, and that was the last thing he was or wanted to be.

    When I sat in his ancient barber’s chair, I would often think of the Hemingway story called ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’ about the old waiter telling his young and impatient colleague not to send the drunken regular home, but to let him have another drink. ‘Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.’ Later, he tries to explain to himself what it is that makes the place, the cafe, so important. ‘It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music.’ There then follows the famous riff on nothing: ‘It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it, and never felt it but he knew it all was already nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.’ Now Herr S. has closed his salon, and the only thing I can do is write about him, so that the clean, well-lighted place isn’t completely lost to me.

    ~

    Translating Peter Stamm

    Everything of Peter Stamm’s that has appeared in English – certainly, all the books of his that have come out in English – has been in my English. This has the feeling of a contented, faintly-worried boast (no translation being entirely without guilt). Peter is not hard to translate – he doesn’t write in Swiss dialect, he doesn’t use the glutinous, agglomerative syntax of German, his books are not buried in historical periods or in the specialist vocabularies of orchestral music or the law. Until lately, he didn’t even write about Switzerland, but set his books all over. He is in fact a distinctly Anglo-Saxon type of writer: limpid, efficient, swift. His stories move quickly and end suddenly.

    His stars are the stars of the Anglo-Saxon world, Hemingway (as here), Chekhov, Carver, others. (In the German-speaking world this gains him readers but many suspicious reviewers and few prizes: where is the difficulty, they want the difficulty.) From the six novels and two (in the original, four) books of his stories I’ve translated over the past twenty years I owe him the memory and the feeling of many stories, many people, many places: Paris, the French Atlantic coast, New York City, Estonia, Barcelona, Norway north of the Arctic Circle, Munich, Stockholm; cities, islands, mountain villages; young people, old people; young men and girls, empty-nesters; latterly a kind of ghostly alternate reality in the story ‘Summer Folk,’ the novels To the Back of Beyond and the forthcoming Gentle Indifference of the World. What I feel towards him is an utter trustingness. Whatever he brings me will be fine. A feeling of having been promised.

    Peter is kind enough to reciprocate. He trusts me back. I think of my trust as anticipatory, given in advance, his as retrospective. Whatever I do, it will have been all right. He knows this from experience. There will be reasons for it. It will have been given thought, and it will work in English, and it will be the best I can do. The style of the books is simple, but simple, as Peter’s admirer and defender, the translator or sometime translator and now thinker-about-translation Tim Parks concedes, isn’t the same as easy. It comes with its own difficulties. How to be absolutely natural. How not to come over as simple-minded, artless. There are always things to be learned, problems to be overcome.

    The British variant of English seems to me to need at least an occasional minimum of showing off. (In his piece about his hairdresser, for example, I have ‘onerous’ and I have ‘riff’.) I give perhaps surprising amounts of thought to naturalness and clarity of surface on the one hand, on the other to a kind of Nordic sourness, lack of illusion, abruptness, suddenness and uncompromisingness of bad outcome. Blankness. Sometimes I run pairs of sentences together so that they aren’t too curt; I’ve thought a lot about polysyndeton and run-on sentences (what captious American grammarians are pleased to call comma-splice sentences). I’ve worked quite deliberately with pairs of prepositions to – as I thought – make an impression of pain. Sometimes, this has even been noticed. By my lights, it’s not fancy, and I would never inflict such a thing on Peter’s writing. If anything, it’s a little like what Frost called ‘the sound of sense’. Monosyllables at work.

    Peter Stamm was born in 1963, in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novels Agnes, On A Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, Seven Years and the collection In Strange Gardens and Other Stories, as well as numerous short stories and radio plays. He lives outside of Zurich.

    Michael Hofmann has translated books by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen and many others. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in March 2008.

  • Channeling the rage: an interview with Meena Kandasamy

    Channeling the rage: an interview with Meena Kandasamy

    Meena Kandasamy is a writer, translator, activist and feminist who challenges comfortable notions of Western feminism, capitalism, and imperialism in her work. We talked to her per email about translating Tamil writers, nationalism and feminism, and the false dichotomy of a political and a private sphere.

     

     

    You’ve recently edited and translated Desires Become Demons, a chapbook of poetry by Tamil women poets into English, and you’re also translating at least one novel (that I know of) from Tamil to English. Obviously I’ve been thinking about whose voices are heard, globally, and how translation turns into activism in that context. How do the Tamil poets you translate challenge you – and how do they contribute to, and challenge, notions of feminism held in the West?

    I came into translation about 15 years ago, because there is a gatekeeping of voices-not only internationally, but even within the Indian context. This gatekeeping is along the lines of inequalities: caste and class and gender and race. So, the Anglophone Indians would read/ discuss/debate issues that were being written about in the English media, and then on the streets of Tamil Nadu, there would be another discourse. As a Tamil woman, it was quite schizophrenic — and I sort of did my early books of translations, of the Dalit leader Thirumavalavan to fill what I felt was a huge void in what was being consumed in English. This concern about putting voices out there – who are not amplified or picked up easily within the Anglophone discourse – has been a motivation behind my choice of projects.

    The four women poets who appear in Desires Become Demons, Malathi Maithri, Salma, Sukirtharani and Kutti Revathi, are crucial, radical voices. Their work cannot be contained within their poetry alone, they are also active politically in articulating the rights of women and oppressed people. Their poetry is incandescent in its construction, and explosive in its purpose. They are writing within and against a society that is seemingly progressive, a society that covers-up its male hegemony in various guises. Their feminism attacks the caste system, say, in the poems of Sukirtharani. Their feminism clamours loudly for female desire and the negotiations women have to make for gaining a little autonomy in the poems of Salma. Malathi Maithiri and Kutti Revathi both tear apart the charade of Indian nationalism, they are sharp in their criticism of imperialism and war. As a feminist writer myself, I often encounter the average Westerner who assumes that all of us are in need of rescuing – and I think such a book, such a project, turns that trope on its head. In so many ways, it is poetry that says, ‘Listen. Learn.’

    It is not just saying, ‘women are equal to men’ – it goes beyond that to say, ‘Look, the caste system is rotten’, ‘Look, language is unequally constructed’, and asks difficult questions. An interview is too short a space to unpack how feminism in the Tamil context would wary from the Western, neoliberal definition of feminism. I hope I’ve answered at least a part of your question.

    In your foreword to Desires Become Demons, you point out that Western feminism sees nationalism and feminism as ‘inherently opposed concepts’. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that. I guess I see the struggle for self-rule as separate from nationalism, if that makes sense, but I do also realise that as someone from Austria, my understanding of nationalism is exclusively negative.

    Because Western feminism is actually capitalist, imperialist feminism. Imperialism and capitalism are not going to be happy to probe their role in the creation of what are modern-day nation states. They are not going to acknowledge the sinister effects of colonialism. When linguistically, culturally disparate people are grouped together for the purpose of colonial administration, do they constitute a nation? India, Sri Lanka—these are all nations that were products of the British empire. Obviously people will revolt against this, and they would seek their own autonomy, respect for their language, the right to read and live and speak their language. I’m not an Indian nationalist—to borrow from Lenin, I see India as a prison house of nationalities. Kashmir is today the most occupied place on the planet. Tamil Eelam has been militarised in unimaginable ways. If Kashmiri people, if the people of Tamil Eelam demand the right to be recognised as a nation – I see it important to support that struggle. This nationalism of the oppressed, yearning to break free, is different from the fraud-nationalism of corporate capitalism and religious jingoism.

    You’ve referred to yourself as a a Marxist feminist in a previous email. In some ways, When I Hit You is a brilliant deconstruction of male (faux-) Marxism. Could you elaborate on what it means to you to be a Marxist feminist? I wonder how your Marxism is shaping your feminism and vice versa. 

    In a world that is not so label-dependent, it would be fine to just say writer, and get on with it. But there’s an urgent need to say feminist, if only to channel the rage I feel at how women are treated in society (and by extension, within literature too). But feminist as a label has been most glibly, successfully and criminally hijacked by capitalism (the new feminists are Sheryl Sandberg and Ivanka Trump and Theresa May), so you need to qualify that with exactly specifying what sort of feminist you are, and I think Marxist-Feminist just about captures it. I think that the creation of an equal, just society is impossible under capitalism, which is why we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and imagine other ways of living. I think understanding caste, class, race inequalities is fundamental to any understanding of women’s struggle. All the same, even to the point of annoyance, it is important to reiterate the fundamental need to address women’s questions within a Marxist framework (and other liberatory, emancipatory, or radical movements) because you blink, and then you are in the kitchen making tea for the male comrades. And men on the left would conveniently label you a petit-bourgeois feminist just so that their own authority does not get challenged.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about that brilliant article in Another Gaze on the Making of the Millennial Woman – especially about whose voices get heard (privileged, white, see above), but also about how, as young women, we’re essentially asked to prioritise the personal, to prioritise ‘feelings’ in our art in order to conform to expectations. But I’m also very wary of falling into the trap of: ‘When a man writes about something, it’s about everyone. When a woman writes about something, it’s just for women.’ Where do you see the balance in all this? How do we avoid withdrawing into a sphere of making merely inward-looking art, while at the same time not conceding that ‘male’ art is somehow more worthy?

    Thank you for your opinion on that piece, and for sharing it with me and the readers of this blog. It is enlightening to me, just to realise how difference works. I have to honestly say that coming from very different contexts, our experience indeed varies. I do not ever remember prioritising the personal, or being asked to do so when I started writing. I started as a translator (so the personal was hidden), I wrote political essays (the personal was hidden), and I edited a magazine (the personal was hidden). I tried to articulate myself through poetry (which I yearned to keep secret and personal, alas!). When I had to write a novel, I chose a political /historical theme because that was most urgent and pressing, and also because I dreaded that if I wrote a love story or a romance or something it would be seen as kitchen-drama, you know! I think a lot of young women from similar backgrounds could do the same – merely to resist being boxed in, and to be taken seriously. But then, life intervenes, and rudely awakens you and makes you realise that irrespective of how emancipated / empowered you are, the fact that you are a woman could be used against you, violently even, and then, my second novel happened. So, here I was, first writing about a massacre in 1968 where scores of Dalit agricultural workers and their families were killed for striking for higher wages, and then, in a moment I was pushed from this bloody battleground to write about what happened in my bedroom. I do not think male art is worthy, neither do I (any longer) think that the political is something separate from the domestic. I think it is a dangerous, false dichotomy.

    Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), and the critically acclaimed novel, Gypsy Goddess (2014) and When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). Exquisite Cadavers is forthcoming in November 2019. She edited and translated the poetry chapbook Desires Become Demons (Tilted Axis Press, 2019). Meena holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and lives in East London.

    Interview by Theodora Danek.

  • Against labels

    In 1992, during the Yugoslav Wars, my family fled to Finland. Because I was only two years old at the time I don’t have any memories whatsoever from life back in Kosovo, the country I was born in. I learned to read at an early age, and books and stories quickly became my passion. For as long as I can remember, writing stories is what I’ve wanted to do in life. It makes me extremely happy and proud to be able to report that my childhood dream came true. I am a writer today.

    When I was a child I never thought that home was somewhere other than Finland. I never asked my parents whether we would be moving back to Kosovo one day, and I never felt out of place. I never experienced any emotion of dislocation or otherness because the world I lived in was the only world I knew. When I started going to a Finnish school and having conversations with teachers and other students this changed drastically, and I realized that I was different from my peers – a refugee, an immigrant, an asylum seeker. Until that point I had no reason to think of myself as an outsider, to refer to myself as an immigrant, to think about where my home was.

    During my school years I was frequently confronted by questions regarding my background, my ‘real home’, such as: ‘What is it like to live in a foreign country? Under such pressure, between two different languages, two different cultures, between religions?’. Or: ‘How does it feel when there’s a war in your home country?’ Answering these kinds of questions made me exceptionally uncomfortable, I truly feared them, and eventually I got into the habit of avoiding new people as I knew that the questions would start pouring in once I told others my Albanian name. I always felt that because of my background I was seen as less fortunate, that in the eyes of others I was traumatized, ruined for good, that my world was somehow shattered.

    The way I saw it, there was no war in my home, no pressure in my existence, no violence in my past. Switching between Albanian and Finnish and knowing about both Finnish and Albanian traditions felt completely natural. It was painless, effortless, because I knew nothing else. This was my world, I had nothing else to compare my reality to. I quickly realized these questions offended me because they presumed that my life is somehow torn apart, divided in two, burdened with elements that don’t mix.

    When my first novel My Cat Yugoslavia was published in Finland in August 2014, the media started referring to me as an ‘immigrant writer’. Because I have written a novel about an Albanian family living in Finland as an ethnic Albanian living in Finland, many assume that I am my protagonist, that I own a pet snake, that I am or have been in an abusive relationship and that my father is dead, just like in the story I’ve written. It made me laugh at first, and I wasn’t surprised, because as a student of literature I was aware of how debut novels are typically perceived.

    Once I even got a call from a journalist who had interviewed me the day before. He said they weren’t happy with the pictures they had taken during the interview and suggested we take new ones. ‘Since it’s such a warm day, could you come out with your pet boa?’ he asked. I told him with great resentment that I don’t have a snake. I’ve never had a snake. My Cat Yugoslavia is just a book, a work of fiction, and I don’t keep a talking cat as a companion either.

    I gradually became increasingly irritated by the label I was given, and I became more and more offended by the headlines about me and my work: ‘Experience Finland Through the Eyes of an Immigrant’, they’d say, ‘This Is What Being a Foreigner In Finland is Like’, or, ‘To a Migrant Finland is Cold and Racist’.

    Being labeled like this made me extremely sad because what made me pursue a career in fiction was the ability to tell stories – fates free from labels, stereotypes, prejudice and oppression. It proved that I’m still being seen through a filter, that what I feared the most as a child is still happening and present in my life, in my career as a writer of fiction. I’m not seen as a creative individual, I am just a face for an audience, a bridge between ‘us’ and ‘them’, an interpreter of worlds. Even though I had written a novel in Finnish, even though I had lived in Finland my whole life, even though I had graduated from a Finnish university, I was seen as someone from the outside, as someone who speaks from the sidelines, as someone who’s in the margins of Finnish society.

    The implication is this: that this is not my home, this is not my country, this is not my language.

    I’ve been a writer for only a few years, but during this time I’ve been asked countless times about migration, racism, nationality, the situation in the Middle East. ‘What should we do with all the people fleeing the area and coming to Finland?’ Or: ‘Would you care to share your thoughts on how Finland could perform better in assimilating refugees?’ As if I had exceptional insight or an answer to one of the biggest questions of our time because of my background. Needless to say, being an immigrant or a refugee doesn’t make anyone an expert in immigration, nor does writing about an immigrant family.

    Placing a person, a writer, an artist, in a category – whether it’s as ‘woman writer’,  ‘immigrant writer’, ‘refugee’, ‘gay’, ‘Muslim’ – jeopardizes what they can do and create, threatens their freedom to express themselves the way they see fit, and endangers the uniqueness of every single story.

    Nowadays, when someone asks me about my personal story and the world I was raised in I say that it’s simply beautiful, it is whole, and every language I know and every country I’ve lived in has made my life fuller and richer and more wonderful. That’s what I say, maybe annoyingly so, when someone asks me about my home country. When they ask me about the war I say that even though I’ve experienced loss and grief, I am very lucky because I get to do what I love. I’ve had success early on in my career, I am privileged and very fortunate to have people around me who support and understand me and what I do. I tell them this because it is the truth. I am an artist, I get to be my home, my own language, my own culture.

    I am a country.

    My Cat Yugoslavia is available from Pushkin Press.Photo credit: Giuseppe Milo on flickr.

  • Lampedusa: Gateway to Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Elena Varvello on the power of place

    There is a photo that lies asleep in the memory of my cellphone. It was taken by a dear friend of mine on a sunny summer afternoon, during a day trip she took with the youngest of my sons. There is a bend in the river, and trees on the bank and on the mountainside, their reflection on the water, along with the reflection of clouds. The other bank is missing – out of the shot. In the background, a man and a woman are resting on a beach surrounded by trees with their rucksacks and towels, too small in that little picture, their faces out of focus.

    That river flows in a valley not too far from my village, only an hour’s drive, more or less.

    My friend sent me the photo because she wanted to share with me that sunny afternoon, the two of them reaching the river, taking a dip, diving from a rock, swimming in the cold water. I can imagine their laughter, the sound of the river, the sun and the wind on their skin, the cool shade under the trees.

    It seems such a beautiful place, quiet and peaceful and still.

    Nothing is moving – it’s just a photo, after all – but from the moment I saw it I knew I had a story to tell. A story about the man and the woman resting on the beach with their rucksacks and towels: do they love each other? Are they just friends? Siblings, perhaps? Do they secretly want to split up? Are they waiting for someone? Is someone else watching them, unseen? What are they thinking about? Do they want to run away, or are they about to dive in the river?

    I told myself: ‘Someday you’ll write a story set on that beach surrounded by trees’. I’m not saying I’ll do it for sure: I’m just saying that I would love to do it, that today I’m still thinking about it, that something happened when I first saw that photo, when I first saw that bend in the river, that beach.

    This is how my imagination works, I suppose: mysteriously, the process of writing always begins with a place. This is the power of places and landscapes – rivers, woods, cornfields, roads, paths, hills, villages, gardens, lawns, houses, a bridge, a factory, an old mine, a creek: they contain stories – dozens of them – as if they were books, and somehow they compel me to tell those stories, to write them down. Just like that beach that lies in the memory of my cellphone, places are my fuel, my inspiration.

    But there is much more than that. From the first story I wrote, up until my latest novel, Can you hear me?, places have always been characters. They have always been anything but backdrops. They have their own voices – even their silence is a kind of voice, a beautiful one – their moods and their thoughts, and I can feel them. I need them. I crave them.

    Can you hear me? is full of characters because it is full of places. The woods in which Elia and Stefano wander to find an antidote to the boredom and emptiness of summer are characters, as well as the hills, the abandoned cotton mill, the gas station, the old mine, the kitchens and bedrooms and porches.

    The creek is a character too, the one I think about more often, as if it were one of the protagonists. When Elia’s father, Ettore, takes the girl to the bank of that creek, one August night, and forces her to sit on a trunk, the two of them are not alone: there is the water, the stones, the mud and the bushes too. There is the waterfall and the slippery rocks. The wind that blows through the leaves and the sound of the waterfall are like a cry. The creek is crying for Ettore, not just for the girl, and I can feel its compassion.

    Places have their own nature. Somehow they are able to talk, act and react, even though they might seem so silent and still – in truth, they are full of life: little, barely-perceptible, sometimes invisible movements. They constantly look at other characters and constantly whisper their words into their hearts. Above all, they hide their secrets. They are a mystery, like all of us.

    So, let’s go back to the photo that lies asleep in the memory of my cellphone, like an amazing, strange, ancient fish at the bottom of a frozen lake. My friend and my son – he’s only ten years old – don’t know how much it touched me, how often I take my phone, dig in its memory, find that picture and look at it. How could I explain how I feel, the impression of life, the stories that beach whispers to me?

    I answered the message she sent me – ‘We’re here and we’re having fun!’ I texted I was happy for them. I wrote: ‘Wow: what a place! I’d like to go there sometime.’ That’s it. Everything else is my secret, the process of my imagination, the voices I imagine to hear, like the cry of the creek, that August night, in Can you hear me?

    The man and the woman are still on the beach with their rucksacks and towel, apparently motionless. I’m sure sooner or later they’ll do something and say something, because of that place surrounded by trees. It will make them breathe and move and talk. It will bring them to life. They’ll live there forever, as Ettore – the most hidden part of him – will live forever on the bank of that creek, in the dark, near the water, hearing that place crying and silently responding to it – what a place.

    Yes, what a place.

    Can you hear me?  is Elena Varvello’s first novel to be published in English, translated by Alex Valente, and is out now with Two Roads Books.

    Photo credit:  Federico Botta

  • The power of place

    There is a photo that lies asleep in the memory of my cellphone. It was taken by a dear friend of mine on a sunny summer afternoon, during a day trip she took with the youngest of my sons. There is a bend in the river, and trees on the bank and on the mountainside, their reflection on the water, along with the reflection of clouds. The other bank is missing – out of the shot. In the background, a man and a woman are resting on a beach surrounded by trees with their rucksacks and towels, too small in that little picture, their faces out of focus.

    That river flows in a valley not too far from my village, only an hour’s drive, more or less.

    My friend sent me the photo because she wanted to share with me that sunny afternoon, the two of them reaching the river, taking a dip, diving from a rock, swimming in the cold water. I can imagine their laughter, the sound of the river, the sun and the wind on their skin, the cool shade under the trees.

    It seems such a beautiful place, quiet and peaceful and still.

    Nothing is moving – it’s just a photo, after all – but from the moment I saw it I knew I had a story to tell. A story about the man and the woman resting on the beach with their rucksacks and towels: do they love each other? Are they just friends? Siblings, perhaps? Do they secretly want to split up? Are they waiting for someone? Is someone else watching them, unseen? What are they thinking about? Do they want to run away, or are they about to dive in the river?

    I told myself: ‘Someday you’ll write a story set on that beach surrounded by trees’. I’m not saying I’ll do it for sure: I’m just saying that I would love to do it, that today I’m still thinking about it, that something happened when I first saw that photo, when I first saw that bend in the river, that beach.

    This is how my imagination works, I suppose: mysteriously, the process of writing always begins with a place. This is the power of places and landscapes – rivers, woods, cornfields, roads, paths, hills, villages, gardens, lawns, houses, a bridge, a factory, an old mine, a creek: they contain stories – dozens of them – as if they were books, and somehow they compel me to tell those stories, to write them down. Just like that beach that lies in the memory of my cellphone, places are my fuel, my inspiration.

    But there is much more than that. From the first story I wrote, up until my latest novel, Can you hear me?, places have always been characters. They have always been anything but backdrops. They have their own voices – even their silence is a kind of voice, a beautiful one – their moods and their thoughts, and I can feel them. I need them. I crave them.

    Can you hear me? is full of characters because it is full of places. The woods in which Elia and Stefano wander to find an antidote to the boredom and emptiness of summer are characters, as well as the hills, the abandoned cotton mill, the gas station, the old mine, the kitchens and bedrooms and porches.

    The creek is a character too, the one I think about more often, as if it were one of the protagonists. When Elia’s father, Ettore, takes the girl to the bank of that creek, one August night, and forces her to sit on a trunk, the two of them are not alone: there is the water, the stones, the mud and the bushes too. There is the waterfall and the slippery rocks. The wind that blows through the leaves and the sound of the waterfall are like a cry. The creek is crying for Ettore, not just for the girl, and I can feel its compassion.

    Places have their own nature. Somehow they are able to talk, act and react, even though they might seem so silent and still – in truth, they are full of life: little, barely-perceptible, sometimes invisible movements. They constantly look at other characters and constantly whisper their words into their hearts. Above all, they hide their secrets. They are a mystery, like all of us.

    So, let’s go back to the photo that lies asleep in the memory of my cellphone, like an amazing, strange, ancient fish at the bottom of a frozen lake. My friend and my son – he’s only ten years old – don’t know how much it touched me, how often I take my phone, dig in its memory, find that picture and look at it. How could I explain how I feel, the impression of life, the stories that beach whispers to me?

    I answered the message she sent me – ‘We’re here and we’re having fun!’ I texted I was happy for them. I wrote: ‘Wow: what a place! I’d like to go there sometime.’ That’s it. Everything else is my secret, the process of my imagination, the voices I imagine to hear, like the cry of the creek, that August night, in Can you hear me?

    The man and the woman are still on the beach with their rucksacks and towel, apparently motionless. I’m sure sooner or later they’ll do something and say something, because of that place surrounded by trees. It will make them breathe and move and talk. It will bring them to life. They’ll live there forever, as Ettore – the most hidden part of him – will live forever on the bank of that creek, in the dark, near the water, hearing that place crying and silently responding to it – what a place.

    Yes, what a place.

    Elena Varvello is an Italian writer. Can you hear me?  is her first novel to be published in English, translated by Alex Valente, and is out now with Two Roads Books. Photo credit:  Federico Botta