FREE THE BLOG!

Free speech in action

From published writer, film producer and 26 member, Elise Valmorbida:

There is something very comforting about an evening with Salman Rushdie without bag searches or metal detectors. The International PEN festival celebrated writers and the freedom to write. Last time I glimpsed Rushdie in real life, there were body guards and bullet-proof jackets aplenty.

The freedom to write? This is a concept which, in my dusty mind, used to attach to those dreadful places where Amnesty International has to work hardest. But the concept starts to feel vulnerable here in our apparently enlightened liberal democracy... Our Government has passed a blasphemy law, no? Is this true? I must have invented it. I am a fiction writer and sometimes I imagine stuff so vividly I think I’ve lived it. But I think it’s true to say that I cannot write abusively about ideas that happen to be religious -- unless I want to break the law. Can this really be true?

Back to Rushdie. His latest novel features a dictator protagonist, Akbar, whose royal “we” embraces all the beings, and all the things, that comprise his realm. Rushdie read out beautiful passages that riffed like verbal jazz on the notion of perspective. He spoke eloquently about his own multiple selves: the famous name that lends itself to the PEN cause and helps to free oppressed writers, Salman the private person, the novelist, the cultural commentator, the migrant, the others. There must also be a persona who faced death at the hands of a misguided militant. As a man who hid from ubiquitous and infinite assassins, it’s no wonder that Salman Rushdie’s identity went forth and multiplied.

PS: Does every fiction writer have a trace of this condition? We wear the shoes of our characters and speak with their voices, desire as they do, fear as they do, change gender. Anything less would be poor impersonation.

The world according to PEN (first draft)

If all this talk about world literature has whetted your appetite for more, English PEN's new Online World Atlas may be a good place to keep discovering new books (particularly after this blog has run its course in a couple of weeks).

It's been set up as a kind of wikipedia for world literature buffs, where anyone can add or edit content about writers, books and places. A community, in other words, with content that reflects the passions of its participants. This is the 'first draft', and it may be a while before the site earns the description "everything you need to know about the world's great writers and emerging voices", but as with any online experiment, it depends.

The space to dream

"My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination, and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams."

- Alexis Wright became the first native Australian to win that country's equivalent of the Booker Prize, in 2007. She talks in the Guardian about the realities that inspired the book, Carpentaria, and what its surprise success has done for the Aboriginal people.

Guerilla translation

We all know about guerilla marketing and guerilla gardening, not to mention guerilla warfare and, um, guerilla guerillas. At A Short History of Sedition Francisco Goldman told a story that can only be described as a case of guerilla translation.

“It’s fascinating to see how a book can become an object of sedition, a tool of sedition,” Goldman said, referring to his book The Art of Political Murder, which traces an eight-year investigation into the murder of a bishop who dared to confront corrupt authorities by investigating a genocide.

The book implicated the leading candidate for Guatemalan president (among many others) in the murder. The establishment retaliated with a huge propaganda campaign. Then as the election neared, young activists took action, “downloading information about the book in internet cafes, translating it, photocopying it and standing outside the cemetery on the Day of the Dead and handing it out.” The candidate lost, and words won -- not least because the 'Day of the Dead' detail is a small victory in itself.

And here are some photos from the event: Francisco Goldman speaking; Abdellah Taïa talking with his hands; wonderfully textured Young Vic wall.

Cutting into the language

"I believed Yang Lian when he said that the best way to read is to translate, because it requires you to ‘cut in to’ the language. He described translations of his poetry not as his own work but as trees growing from the same ground."

- 26 member Rob Williams writes on the Penguin Blog about Saturday's International Poetry event. A good read, no translation required.

Chinese whispers, Icelandic deadpan

From John Simmons:

Two wonderful readings on Saturday afternoon made an uplifting change from my usual Saturday torture of watching football. First Yang Lian reading his poetry and talking to the Chinese Tze Ming Mok from New Zealand. The basic idea was lovely. Yang Lian read one of his poems (about Stoke Newington!) in Chinese; then a reading of a literal translation by Jacob Edmond; then a version by Tze Ming Mok (she 'half speaks Chinese') in English; then a translation by Yang of the previous version into Chinese; then a final version by Jacob into English. Confused? It was fascinating Chinese whispers, somehow appropriate for a writer-in-exile like Yang. He suggested that the best way of reading is by translating and I think he's right - it's what we do most of the time with business writing. It's only when we've written that description of the annual results that we understand what the original said.

Then Sjon, the Icelandic novelist and Bjorn collaborator, in discussion with Victoria Cribb, his translator. Sjon, looking wonderfully nerdy, was as deadpan as it's possible to be and very funny. Having tried, as an experiment, to write the most Icelandic book ever, he was surprised when The Blue Fox became an international success, translated into 20 languages. Interesting facts emerged: the fox is the biggest land mammal native to Iceland apart from the human. How about this for a first line of a chapter: "The night was cold and of the longer variety". A structure to the novel of four chapters: white, dark, white, dark.

A lot to think about, a lot to enjoy. "In small countries we learn about the world from the stories of the rest of the world." The bigger the country the less able it seems to be, or less willing, to learn about the world from the stories elsewhere in the world.

Cloud nine

At The Rights of the Reader event on Saturday, Alberto Manguel spoke about how our bodies ‘exude happiness’ when we read. There’s something about happiness that evades analysis; that is instinctive, physical, beyond words. Manguel didn’t connect the emotion with the experience of being read to, but it crept up on me at various times over the weekend when a writer or translator pulled at the spine of a book, adjusted a microphone and began to read.

Spotting the repeated German words in Sevgi Ozdamar’s reading, trying to guess the passage. Held spellbound by the sinuous weaving of sounds in Yang Lian’s poems. Gobsmacked (probably literally open-mouthed) at the persuasive performances of Femi Akinsanya and Jamal Msebele.

The Right to Read Aloud: number nine in Daniel Pennac’s list of ten reader’s rights. Pure pleasure. To sit back and let the sounds, ideas, connections carry you away. It’s something, as adults, that we don’t seem to do very often. Is it because we associate it with childhood days? Among the thoughts left to me by the Festival is this: pursue the spoken word…

A Short History of Sedition

Until Sunday, I had been approaching translated literature as a kind of literary exercise.  Exploring foreign texts provided new food for thought: it satisfied my appetite for literary and language analysis, promised a mind expanding experience, a better cultural awareness - and added a new section to my ever expanding library.

I am now re-evaluating this approach. 

After hearing the writers talking on the A Short History of Sedition, I might have been somewhat self indulgent, a tad on the naïve side. To take a more sympathetic view, I might smply have been an English reader who takes freedom of expression for granted and is accustomed to an endless choice of literature. Either way, I have gone slightly off course. I have got a little too hung up on the language, the translated bit; and forgotten about the different experiences of being a reader and writer which International PEN was also revealing.

Listening to Perihan Mağdan powerfully (and humorously) outline her experiences as a Turkish writer and her relationship to Turkish readers was the first thing that really got me thinking. Her writing prompted, from what I can gather, charges of anti ‘Turkishness’ – a charge which, in a colleague’s case, led to murder. This wouldn’t happen in England – and not simply because of our legal structure.  Parodying Englishness is commonplace and seems to be enjoyed; literature provokes discussion and rarely action, let alone violence; writers are respected and rarely vilified.

Whilst the ‘English way’ is definitely preferable, it is interesting to consider whether our readership has become slightly too passive, whether everything is a bit too diluted, whether we have lost the sense of just how powerful the writer – and the written word – really is?

In a society filled with book groups, costa coffee bookshops, Richard and Judy recommendations and celebrity writers, it is easy to overlook the position of the author and the purpose of their books: after listening to Perihan Mağdan, Abdellah Taia and Francisco Goldman, it is less so. These authors are risking their safety to tell stories which needed to be told, they are using the written word to provide a voice or as a means of self expression, an assertion of identify. Their work had consequences, provoked actions and reactions, and had an impact.

Whilst I was struck, disturbed and moved by the readings which I heard; it is this re-evaluation of literature which will remain with me for the moment and it is here, perhaps, that one of the greatest values of translated literature lies.  It is not only the communicating of messages and expression of experiences which is so important; the value of texts from other countries also lies in their ability to make you question and change your own assumptions and attitudes. I am certainly looking at mine.

More than a thimbleful of talent

From Robert Mighall:

A Chinese exile once remarked to me: ‘in your country everyone is free to say exactly what they like. Only nobody listens’. This observation has been on my mind lately since I joined the blogosphere, in a vain (in all senses) attempt to publicise a book of mine that will be published in a few weeks. The internet means everyone can find a voice, everyone can be published. This doesn’t mean anyone will be read or even noticed. Cramming our messages into bottles and tossing them into the vast oceans of cyberspace, a hundred million castaways, hope forlornly for a readership.

Yet, there is worse than indifference, as my trip to the Young Vic on Sunday to sample a Thimbleful of the Festival brought home to me. It was another Chinese dissident, a poet, Yang Lian, exiled for his words, who underlined this point, and humbled my vain petulance into shame. He also read a few lines from another poet, who was serving a ten year prison sentence (a sentence for a sentence), for an intercepted email. An Algerian with a tale of torture (which he somehow managed to make blackly humorous), forcibly underlined one of the purposes of Free the Word, which is to do exactly that.

Not everyone who read from their work was a political exile. Icelanders, Americans, even Sir Tom Stoppard, made an appearance, and added to the mix of voices and cultures filling the foyer of the Theatre, and enlivening a damp dull Sunday afternoon. It was like randomly roaming the airwaves. One minute tuning into the sounds and stories of Turkey or Morocco, the next street poetry from East London. The latter from a cheeky chap called Jamal Msebele (otherwise known as Lord Microphone) who declared he was fourteen years old, but eighteen on Fridays. Fourteen and published, and staggeringly talented too. The young performers were the biggest delight for me. A girl of seventeen from Wembley, Femi Akinsanya stood six feet and confident on the stage as she intoned her poem powerfully. It ended: ‘Be proud of your voice. Free the word’. She was, and then so was I, once more. A Thimbleful of such determined dedication to be heard was exactly what I needed.

What does the writer next door say?

As the introduction to the Free The Word festival by International PEN international secretary Eugene Schoulgin suggested, questions are always more important than answers. And in that vein, some of the ideas provided by Alaa Al Aswany during the opening event on Friday, ‘The Writer Next Door’, posed questions of wider significance.

Al Aswany proved to be a mine of astute and subtle observations, under questioning by Maya Jaggi. A dentist by training, he has not given up his practice despite the wild success of 'The Yacoubian Building', one of the biggest sellers the Arabic world has ever seen. Why not? Well, it appears to be the human contact. “I don’t care about teeth, but the people themselves,” he declared.

He argued strongly that the act of literature is not just about the writing of the layer history below politics, but also that it is meant to attack hypocrisy, “the things we know but don’t tell the truth about.” In this context, when asked about the process of radicalisation in Egyptian and other societies, he suggested that “you can’t treat the symptoms without attacking the disease.” And for him, corruption, intolerance and extremism in Arab world regimes were merely symptoms of the underlying disease of those regimes being dictatorships or undemocratic. “Arab dictators try to say that they can cure the symptoms, but they can’t. If there were real democracies, these things would disappear.”

In addition to the pervasive atmosphere of surveillance in these repressive societies, he pointed out that it was generally the least efficient people, “the mediocrities”, who rise to the top, due to their closeness to the ruling party. Diseases won’t be cured by the worst doctors.

His new novel, ‘Chicago’, draws on the time Al Aswany spent as a student in the USA, to explore from a distance the pathologies of Egypt, and especially the complex relationship the country has with migration. “Egypt is a county that many migrants keep close to their hearts. But despite this, not every migrant to the west is a failure.”

He was also robust on the question of whether there is a ‘clash between civilizations’, the Islamic and western worlds. “There are wars between kingdoms, but the world is actually divided between the human and non-human, those who want to be treated with dignity and on a fair basis and those who are dictators, fanatics, the corrupt, George Bush…”

Perhaps the most contentious point Al Aswany made was his last; that the human rights of minorities in repressive societies, “is not a priority when everybody is suffering.” As practical as that may be, it’s a view that Free The Word has been challenging this weekend.