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26 Exchanges - the exhibition

This year's London Design Festival has started.

26 has long had a relationship with the festival, and this year's no different. Indeed, what we're undertaking this year might be one of our most ambitious projects to date.

26 Exchanges is coming to life.

As loyal readers of this blog will remember, in association with International PEN, a number of writers around the world were teamed with members of 26. The pairs were then asked to develop a correspondence, a translation, and perhaps a relationship on the page and screen.

We then posted the results on the here.

The idea caught the attention of Harry Pearce of Pentagram, who in collaboration with Sankey at All of Us, will be bringing the exchanges to life in three dimensions and digitally.

You can see the results next week, between Monday 21 and Friday 25 September, at an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Engineering. Its free, and open Monday to Friday, 9.30pm to 5.30pm for one week.

There's a book too, called 26 Exchanges, which will be on sale at the exhibition. Inevitably, there's also a twitter feed.

A big thank you to UNESCO and International PEN for helping us to bring it to life. And hope to see some of you there this week.

26 Exchanges: Coming to life

Just a quick note for you all to carve out a wee bit of time in your diaries, as the 26 Exchanges project will be taking wing from screen into the physical world, as part of this year's London Design Festival. More details as we get them, but for now, please keep 21-25 September free in your various timekeeping devices.

26 Exchanges: 'My brain is starting to smoke'

Part six of Tom Lynham's attempts to find the meaning in a poem by the Colombian writer Rubén Darío Flórez Arcila.

I am standing outside Clapham Common tube on a blissfully balmy Sunday afternoon. I’ve come to interview a young couple and this cherished London village is awash with them. This is green & pleasant land compared to Hackney’s mean streets. Fruitful too. Buggies engineered to Formula One specifications cradle babies like branded racing drivers. Everyone is lapping up the syrupy spring sunshine. 

Daniel and Laura approach and radiate a chilled out charisma. We like the look of each other and settle into a neighbourhood bar. Daniel is from Southern Portugal. I arrived with a van full of musical instruments in 2004. I could not speak the language and it was very difficult to survive. I worked in a supermarket but wanted to study here. After going to university I started meeting other musicians and got involved with musical projects. Then I met Laura and other Colombians through the Colombiage connection. Laura is from Bogotá Colombia. I was studying industrial design in Colombia but always loved the arts and was dancing there for 6 years. London is such a cosmopolitan city that has everything. I did a course in mixing business with art and began working towards the Colombiage festival. They ran workshops on Latin American dancing and Colombian music workshops for children. Daniel is just back from a tour of Frankfurt, Berlin, Koln and Vienna with his main band - Peyote for President. 

We order drinks and I hand them individual copies of Rubén’s poem. This block of time when people read has become a strange limbo for me. I want to be with them but not inhibit them; witness but not influence; enthuse but not smother; push but not rush. They read separately but exchange glances. They look as if they were made for each other. Daniel the musician and Laura the dancer; on the threshold of their careers. 

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Márquez introduces a colourful character called Pietro. He is a flamboyant Italian who beguiles the bourgeoisie of Macondo. They have built the bones of their town but now hunger after the finer things of life. Pietro is a sugary dandy and a maestro of etiquette. His head covered with patent leather curls aroused in women an irrepressible need to sigh. Milking his Italian charisma he educates the adolescent girls of the Buendía residence in the gentle arts of song and dance. Pietro arrives preceded by a cool breath of lavender and always bringing remarkable toys that fill the house – mechanical ballerinas, music boxes, acrobatic monkeys, trotting horses, clowns who play tambourines... But the most impressive of these wonders is a pianola. The family are amazed by the invisible virtuoso performer, who never puts a note wrong. The music fills the house with love and sensuality. The Italian would arrive at dusk, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and translate Petrarch’s sonnets for Amaranta. They would sit on the porch, suffocated by the oregano and the roses. Pietro romances the extended family of sisters with a schmaltzy charm offensive. It is their first encounter with affairs of the heart, and the sibling rivalry drives a wedge between them. Pietro opens a warehouse in Macondo that becomes a hothouse of fantasy, with reproductions of the bell tower of Florence that told time with a concert of carillons, music boxes from Sorrento, and compacts from China that sang five note melodies. His shop becomes a melodic oasis where citizens could forget the distant nightmare of war. Amaranta falls madly for him, but in Marquez’s century of solitude there are few happy endings. Everyone is ultimately destined to be alone. When Amaranta inexplicably refuses Pietro’s hand in marriage, he pleads and weeps and begs but she doesn’t relent. Broken hearted, he barricades himself in the warehouse and after singing a suicidal serenade in a voice that led one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love he cuts his wrists.

Laura begins to untangle Rubén’s poem. It’s amazing poetic language, like he’s telling us the state of the world; that if we go on like this we will destroy it. He talks about a blue point in the universe that will disappear. For the indigenous people, coca is a sacred ritual that relieves you of your bad spirit and cleans the soul. We have destroyed the meaning of coca by mixing it with chemicals. When you go up to the sky, you can see behind you the whole world full of everyone with different points of view. I loved it. So what does Daniel makes of it? With Portuguese as his first language, Spanish as his second, and English as his third. Portuguese and Spanish are so similar. But I didn’t get some of the indigenous references. If you miss one or two details you miss the lot. Our languages come from Latin, but in poetry it makes such a difference where you use the word. Laura says she struggles with the Poems on the Underground displayed in tube trains. I just can’t understand ANYTHING! I know what the words mean, but it just reads like nonsense. Daniel tells me they speak Spanish at home, but that words can have very different meanings according to context. I am interested to see how the dynamics of their relationship influence their perception of the poem. Their chemistry kicks in. They inspire and complete each other’s phrasing. They qualify, intensify and magnify. Two people speaking in one voice.

Laura - I love the plane in the sky and I can feel

Daniel - the white clouds…

Laura - I can almost touch them and see the planet earth…

Daniel - full of the crap of humanity…

Laura - addicts, killers, lovers and…

Daniel - when you pesticide something…

Laura - contaminates like you and me with a new sickness…

Daniel - illness - but one that kills a lot of people…

Laura - a new plague without…

Daniel - without sense…

They are enjoying the intellectual entanglement; no longer translating Ruben’s complex poem just for me, but translating for each other with a fearless reciprocity. 

Laura - We have a very good friend, a Colombian writer…

Daniel - Mario Mendoza…

Laura - He can speak only Spanish and he told me that when you write in your own language…

Daniel - you have to master your own language…

Laura - you don’t have any place for other languages.

Daniel laughing and reflecting - They don’t let happen to them what is happening to us. We don’t speak good English, we don’t speak good Portuguese, and we don’t speak good Spanish anymore…

Laura - Yeah we just end up speaking a mixture of everything! 

Big laughter.

Daniel studies the text again and appeals to Laura for help. The poet always goes back to…a description of love and sex - what is that exactly? How is he trying to relate what is going on…? He quotes a couple of lines - de nuevas pestes sin sentido del furor de la guerra de la dulzura de tu amor…

Laura - Yeah he mixes all those bad things with love and sex and relationships.

Daniel floats rhetorical possibilities for Laura to consider. Seems like he is kind of in the middle, and above he’s got the sky…? I don’t know if that’s what he connects with the purity…? And the beauty of love…? And stuff like that…? And then he is somewhere in-between and he can touch the sky and below I’ve got the earth? Laura smiles - Ummm no. Crestfallen - but only for an instant, Daniel explodes with laughter. He wriggles around on his chair and exclaims SEE - THAT’S JUST MY IMAGINATION! 

Laura explores. The poet is in the plane, the planet is down there, he’s talking about wars and illnesses, and killers and drug addicts but he is full of love. The sweet of your love. Complementing all that bad stuff with love.

Daniel interprets Laura’s translation. So - although there is so much crap going round, love will never stop existing?

Laura fine-tunes. The poet is saying there are bad things and love. You’re in the sky; you can see love in a good way but full of wrong things as well. Down there is the earth, I touch the sky. Up there I have the illnesses…the pests…

Daniel - the plagues and the love that comes from down the earth…

Laura - and he makes my heart pump… She looks to Daniel for approval - Yeah?

Daniel scrutinizes Rubén’s text – Latir…is that what dogs do with the full moon? 

This is my chance to get a word in edgeways, so do my best howling wolf impression – HOWWWWOWW... 

Daniel is emphatic. The poet is trying to give you the impression that your heart is screaming…

We are thrilled by the image of a screaming heart. Our hearts howl for love, howl with pain, howl with loneliness, howl with anger. Our heart is like a wild animal living inside us that no logic can ever tame. Our hearts give birth to our life and rubber-stamp our death. 

Laura introduces some powerful new themes. It talks about jealousy and religion as well, believers in any religion... He says the sky comes from a fanatical jealousy, from a cauldron like the witches use. The light of the sky is in there… 

Daniel - there is a burning flame…

Laura - the believers are burning in the cauldron! Some believers are fanatics. They believe in THEIR religion and that’s it.

Daniel - Like supporting a football team? WE ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD AND THAT’S IT!  But how did you get the religion idea?

Laura - He uses los creyentes – the believers. He talks about jealousy. God is in the sky. 

Daniel tries some soul-searching introspection. Is this Divine Love?

Laura is adamant. No no no…

Daniel feigning hapless genuflection throws himself at the mercy of the words - OH GOD FORGIVE ME I DID NOT GET IT! 

We crackle with laughter.

Laura’s on a mission. The believers are burning in this cauldron thingy…when you are a religious person you just grab your god and pray for things to get better. He’s trying to say that it’s pointless. 

Daniel - So religion is one of the things destroying us. If we could stop thinking this way… 

Laura - If you close yourself to one religion - you can’t see that we are one strong force…

Daniel - We all share the blue spot in the sky.

Laura - Yeah, it’s about waking people up. 

Daniel - And how about the coke situation? It’s that awakening?

Laura - The title of the poem is AMAZONAS, EL CIELO Y LA TIERRA which is the Amazon, the sky and the earth. The Amazon is nature, and nature is the planet, and we are just destroying it.

Daniel - The things nature gives you but get labelled as a horrible. Like the drugs... 

Laura - He’s linking one thing to another. He starts talking about the earth, and the nature is inside like penetrating sex. The forest is devouring the people who enter in the darkness. Nature can destroy it through earthquakes, but we are destroying it as well. And then he starts talking about coke. 

Daniel - He’s telling us that we don’t understand the connection we have with everything. As with religion, we separate: This is good. This is bad. You shouldn’t do that. You’re going to pay for this.

Laura - He talks about the indigenous people…

Daniel - they understand all that…

Laura - the solution for these things. Their wisdom…

Daniel - What’s this bit about the coke? La coca empezó con la palabra, era de tierra el sexo? 

Laura - The coke, they use the indigenous language. Coke is a Spanish word - coca. The coke started with the word. 

Daniel - Depending on the way we name things we define them - and we corrupt so many things through naming… 

Laura - Coke works from the earth. Sex…mouth and the saliva… Then he links this with the sky. Links earth with Amazon and then finishes with religion. Amazing! 

Daniel – It’s confusing for me the way he links all the ideas - the coke started with the word. And sex belonged to the earth. The mouth and the saliva. In the saliva was the sky. His eyes widen and he shrieks - MY BRAIN IS STARTING TO SMOKE… The coke was white like the sand in the sea. Land of dreams… 

They read together now in perfect unison. Daniel & Laura - The coke was the sky and the earth every night. 

Daniel sighs with a huge sense of closure. Ahhh…and the change is the digital image; craziness without metaphors for the tribe.

We are exhausted. They have done brilliantly. No preparation. Off the tops of their heads. Dealing with hugely complex issues ambiguously presented. I ask if Ruben’s poem is specifically Colombian as opposed to South American. Laura says - It’s very South American but it’s about all of us. Daniel talks about identity. Colombians have a deeper connection to their nature and tribal roots. Brazil, Peru and Ecuador are physically more similar to their ancestors. Argentina and Chile are more European - even the way they look. But the Amazon is still the green heart of the earth. 

I ask how they translate their creativity into different expressions. Laura - In the way I work with Colombiage we try to show another face of Colombia. Through the power of arts you can translate everything. It’s a way to be inspired and inspire other people. Daniel links it to the planet. Nature will always be more powerful than us. It has the power to adapt. If a catastrophe comes and we all die, nature will go on. My relationship with music is to unlock our emotions. Creativity helps us achieve certain things and understand other things. The effect on people is common to all arts. It’s not so much about being a musician, or a writer, or a dancer, but a species that has to live harmoniously. We are all are connected to this poem - no matter who you are. 

Read part 5 of this exchange.

26 Exchanges: 'The cholita of San Simon'

I've now completed my version of Edwin Gomez Anconi's poem, writes John Simmons. I hope, if he sees it and can understand enough of the English, that he doesn't think it a complete travesty. But I'm aware that in producing 'my version' I've introduced my own thoughts and sensibilities that might not have been intended by Edwin. In doing so, I hope we still meet each other on the same bridge, walking towards each other from different sides.

This has been a wonderful exercise to undertake. I have just a little Spanish but enough to feel my way towards a meaning. But the process of thinking in another language and another culture has been enormously rewarding. It's absorbed a lot of time and thought over the last few weeks but I feel I've emerged refreshed by being dipped in these two languages that are not mine: Spanish and Aymara.

Finally I discovered that San Simon is a Bolivian university in Cochabamba high in the Andes. You can study Bolivian folklore at San Simon and there is a group Caporales San Simon that has gained a wider reputation, becoming one of the ways to spread Bolivian culture around the world. You can watch them on YouTube.

I'd like to thank Edwin for sending me, perhaps unwittingly, on this extraordinary journey. Here's the complete poem.

Edwin Gomez Anconi
The cholita of San Simon

Whatever flower you are, you are a flower of beauty,
A flower that blooms today in San Simon's cold hard cemented class.
Whatever flower you are, you are a flower of beauty,
That after today not even winter will wither.

And so you are my cholita of San Simon
So strong, so brave, my lovely dreamer
Waiting for the end of your class
So we can stroll together through the gardens of San Simon
Anxiously waiting for the break
Scattering seed corn in your earth
Making me into corn whisky.

Your long, thick, black braids
Quick-flick playing with them
Your embroidered blouse
Everything tells me it will be hard to keep you at my side
While you dance in your pollera, your pleated skirt,
Oh to have such a woman, such a symbol of my pride.

Hurry up, university calls you
To be part of your own transformation
You're already here to stay
Like you, we're all Uni today.

In the shifting degrees of your life, be proud to be Quechua
K’acha tik’a kochalitay
Whatever makes me fall for you
Whatever inspires me to write these lines
Whatever makes me what I am: it’s you, my cholita of San Simon.
Don’t change, don’t ever change;
Be mine, cholita San Simon.

26 Exchanges: My K poet

Like the pairing of two townships with unpronounceable names, writes Elise Valmorbida, I’ve been ‘twinned with’ Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, a writer-member of International PEN. Some of my names are Elise Francesca Valmorbida.

John Simmons, founder of 26, thinks that the names Nongkynrih and Valmorbida are a good match for each other – so I should get on very well with my twin.

26 is so named because of the number of letters in the alphabet. Not the Italian alphabet, though. The Italian alphabet is ‘missing’ five letters, among them the letter K. 

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is a Khasi poet. What does that mean? Khasi the people: a matrilineal society living in hilly north-eastern India, near Assam and Bangladesh. And Khasi the language: historically mostly oral, until a Welsh missionary captured it in Roman script. But how Roman is this? 

Ka Khrismas kum ka tlang ka wan pa ka iai wan

ban pynshoh bieit ia ka mynsiem da ki kular jong ka bneng.

Ka jingim ka shim ia ka dur riewkhuid bashongshit,

ba ibeiñ, bad ki kseh ki duh noh ia la ki kti ki kjat.

Hynrei u mahajon shalakki na ki thor u thnem ka khaiï,

u die ia ki khlur la kum ia ki bindi.

I read this exotic text like a person staring at dark reflective water. I can only see the surface. Apart from the veiled glint of Khrismas. I like it with a K. I can see there’s a lot of K in Khasi. But what lies underneath? My K poet sends me an email on his way to Kolkata.

Christmas like winter comes again and again

seducing our hearts with promises of heaven.

Life takes on a cheerfully, sneeringly

devout look, pines lose their limbs.

But the cunning dealer from the plains

does a brisk trade selling stars like bindis.

Khasis take to Krismas but, my K poet says, they don’t take too well to Hindi – English is the language of secondary school and university. I guess that makes English the stepmother-tongue. It links Khasi people with other kinds of people who live in India, who speak hundreds of languages other than the 18 official – national – ones. It links my K poet with me. So English, another kind of cunning dealer, does a trade that is brisk. (I had to end with a K.)

26 member Elise Valmorbida is author of The TV President. Her latest novel, The Winding Stick, is due out in May. 

26 Exchanges: A very romantic poem

Part five of Tom Lynham's attempts to find the meaning in a poem by the Colombian writer Rubén Darío Flórez Arcila.

I have arranged to meet Miriam on the heaving pavement outside Borders bookshop in Oxford Street. I tracked her down through an organisation based in London called Colombiage that celebrates and promotes Colombian culture. I am getting used to these literary blind dates now. Today I am suspended in a torrent of humanity dashing to lunch. I try to imagine what Miriam might look like. I lock eye contact with several hopefuls but they rush on by. My head wiggles from side to side as if I can’t decide anything in my life. Miriam materialises from the crowd and asks if I am me. We duck around the corner into the Photographer’s Gallery café.

In tandem with these interviews I am journeying through One Hundred Years of Solitude. In its early years, the emerging settlement of Macondo is stricken with a plague of insomnia and one of the side effects is memory loss. Gabriel Garcia Márquez writes that first to go is the recollection of childhood, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being. The citizens of Macondo combat the viral dementia by writing the names of things - on things. Table is scrawled on tables; bed is painted on beds. Even farm animals are labelled with their identity (cow) and purpose (milk for coffee). But of course even a name is useless if you forget the values of the letters that make up the words. Oppressive regimes deny people the alphabet of life – liberty, security, equality and freedom of expression – to engineer a dysfunctional society that is easily managed. The collective memory can become highly selective in what it chooses to admit and deny what did or did not happen. The father of Macondo - José Arcadio Buendía – decides the remedy is to build a memory machine with a spinning dictionary at its heart that could refresh one’s memory on a daily basis, but without computer technology, it is a hopelessly unrealistic contraption. Miraculously, the populace is cured by a visiting gypsy who dishes out potions that restore their memory, but he also introduces them to the magic of photography and sets up a daguerreotype laboratory. When José Arcadio Buendía saw his whole family fastened onto a sheet of iridescent material for an eternity, he was mute with stupefaction. But he worries that people will slowly wear away while his image endures untarnished. Márquez’s writing - like photography – explores how we translate our past into our present, and our present into our future. At the heart of 26 Exchanges, is the question of what we bring to someone else’s communication, and how we translate the output of the encounter to others. In writing up and editing an interview, I manipulate the truth on the tape and embellish it with subjective interpretations. The founders of Macondo are troubled by the relentless illusion of change; the railroad outrunning the horse; the cinema eclipsing the theatre; the phonograph usurping live music. They are kept in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation…an intricate stew of truths and mirages. Our hero José Arcadio Buendía becomes so obsessed with the incorruptible ‘truth’ promised by the daguerreotype, he tries to use it to establish scientific proof that God exists.  

The gallery is light and bright in a newly refurbished building. The café includes a small kitchen, communal tables and a counter selling postcards, limited edition prints and photographer’s monographs. Miriam is English and studied Art History and Hispanic Studies at Nottingham University. She spent her gap year in Latin America teaching English in Peru and travelling. In her final year she went to Mexico and Brazil to get my Spanish and Portuguese up to scratch. Now she works at Christies the auctioneers, loves using her languages in the art world, and is plugged into various Latin American cultural organisations. She spent time in Colombia - A few days in Bogotá - a bit like Mexico City but slightly more manageable - then to Armenia, a beautiful town in the coffee growing area. The culture in every region is so different - dance, music and background. Lots of African influence on the coast. Ask people about their roots and you discover their ancestors came from amazing mix of indigenous and Spanish origins. 

Because Miriam does not have the formative cultural influences, I wonder how her translation will differ from the Colombians I have met. Her cappuccino grows cold as she soaks up the poem. A long musical hmmmmmm… tells me she has finished reading. Her version of the opening line takes me by surprise. The earth is a blue point from the dark coal of the universe. No one else has used the word coal and it strikes a grittier image. She continues - It’s a sign that becomes the final point after the deep comas of the author. This is first mention of coma, and suggests a profound journey from a difficult place. In just two lines, my perception of Rubén’s writing is richer. Miriam is disarmingly modest and peppers her translations with bubbles of laughter - as if the words are tickling her. The insight like sex penetrating that the forest brings, on entering its boiling darkness of sweat and there I am one who devours her. Her direct translation - as opposed to interpretation - gives the lines an edgy momentum. The words sit oddly but spark off each other. The coca leaf started with the word. It was like earth is to sex, to the mouth, to saliva, and the word in the saliva was like sky. Like a metaphor, the cocoa was white like the sand of the sea, the earth of a dream. The coca leaf was the sky and the earth every night. Now it’s a digital image, the madness of the Shaman without metaphors.  The collision of the immaculate digital image with the ambiguity of the Shaman is jarring. There is no earth without unearthing and to come back is to regress or go back to the sky without stars; the sky that you take in your heart. The simple word is enough. The earth is enough without phrases just to return to your sky again. She pauses for breath and to say how beautiful it is. The plane takes me to your sky and I can nearly touch the white clouds. Below the earth is populated with… bajezas… She’s not sure about this word but thinks it will be something negative …of homicides of addicts, of lovers, infested like you and I. Of new pests without meaning from the furore of war to the sweetness of your love. Below us is the earth and I touch the sky, but above I take…la pest… she knows pest is not correct but leaves it hanging …and love that comes from the earth below and makes my heart beat. The sky comes from a fanatical jealousy to splendidness is there in the ground they burn in your jealousy and the sky of flames the believers. Several new words leap out at me – furore introduces a vortex of turmoil, and splendidness makes it soar.

I ask what the poem means to her. It’s VERY romantic…she hoots with laughter…which is very Latino! But he mentions parts of the world below which are so apart from the romantic idea, the world of the Amazon and the less developed Colombia. The digital image - that’s a completely different world. The negative imagery links to the problems in Colombia…and there are many. She thinks it through. But the love is even sweeter because the negatives exaggerate it. I ask if Rubén is writing the poem to somebody - a love poem? Miriam sighs dramatically. Maybe I am just such a romantic I want it to be. He begins the poem addressing HER, but then goes to YOU and I, as if it is directed to a person. Or it could be written to the Amazon and his love for its roots. 

I ask about the last verse and mention that others have struggled to resolve it. He’s talking about jealousy and burning. The jealousy you always associate with a relationship. He is personifying his roots by using such strong phrases associated with humans. It does relate to the poem. There is sense of intensity all the way through, the sweat…and earth…and penetrating, and building up to end on such an amazing climax. Miriam has to get back to the office. We have been counting the minutes. She grabs her bag, rises to leave, beams at me and giggles - Work will be very dull compared to this!

Read part four of this exchange.

26 Exchanges: Digging into language

Part five of John Simmons's exchange with the Bolivian poet Edwin Gomez, looking at Gomez's poem 'La Cholita de San Simon':

The penultimate stanza I've expressed like this...

 

Hurry up, university calls you

To be part of your own transformation

You're already here to stay

Like you, we're all Uni today

 

I found this the most difficult stanza to find definite meaning in. The last line is 'Ahora si la U es de todos' which is very idiomatic. I thought there was something of the pronoun for 'you' in there and realised eventually that 'la U' probably refers to the university. So I wanted an idiomatic equivalent in English that still held the possibility of another reading, another meaning in the context of the poem. It seemed to me that there is something celebratory about the integration of the Cholita's culture that 'Uni' expresses. I put the couplet into rhyme to reinforce the sense of celebration.

 

So, there's just one stanza to go. Looking ahead the next line refers to qechua, another Andean language, different from the Aymara of the original poem. Digging into these languages on wikipedia I came across a fascinating piece of information. Apparently in the grammar of Quechua there are two forms of the first person plural. There is an inclusive 'we and you' and an exclusive 'we without you'. (Perhaps this even has relevance to thinking about 'la U'.) So if, for example, you were to say 'we believe' you have a choice of pronouns in Quechua. And that choice makes a big difference that we don't think enough about in English where we simply have 'we'.

 

It certainly raises interesting questions about 'tone of voice'. It also shows that language reflects and shapes culture, and even the way we think about the world. What pronoun would you use in Quechua for that 'we think'? We are made what we are by the language we speak.

Read part four of this exchange.

What is 26 Exchanges?

26 Exchanges: Picking petals off a daisy

Part four of John Simmons's exchange with the Bolivian poet Edwin Gomez, looking at Gomez's poem 'La Cholita de San Simon':

This seems to get more difficult as it goes on. Perhaps that's just the nature of poetry rather than any linguistic discovery. The poet is getting more and more absorbed in his love for la cholita, perhaps with undercurrents of other emotions too. There's apprehension there, an uncertainty about the nature of the relationship. If he loves her, does she love him? Or is that still to come? The uncertainty is increased by the translation difficulties. In a sense it's up to me to make this decision, as if picking petals off a daisy, she loves him, she loves him not. Here's my attempt at the third stanza.

 

Your long, thick, black braids

Quick-flick playing with them

Your embroidered blouse

Everything tells me it will be hard to keep you at my side

While you dance in your pollera, your pleated skirt,

Oh to have such a woman, such a symbol of my pride.

 

The next stanza looms before me like the Andes. How to cross these words? I can see them, I know many of them, but they seem impenetrable - how to find a way through?

Read part three of this exchange.

What is '26 Exchanges'?

26 Exchanges: A bit breathless in Brixton

Part four of Tom Lynham's attempts to find the meaning in a poem by the Colombian writer Rubén Darío Flórez Arcila.

I emerge from the gloomy tube into Brixton station and confront a bank of churning escalators. Stairway to heaven or journey to the centre of the earth? Not sure, but I do see a paternoster of Márquezian characters gliding up and down in effortless locomotion. The whole human zoo is here today, translating their inner aspirations via their outer manifestations. Every lock of hair, turn of sock, painted eyelash, rouged lip, tattooed shoulder, elastic strap, saggy trouser, branded sneaker and emblazoned T-shirt is a mating call. I count wiggers and brutherz, Goths and Rastas, rude boyz and hoodies, hoochies and gangstas, thizzies and old skool, kandy kids and waisians, femme dykes and try-babies, kwazzy-jerks and shuga-daddies. But strangest of all is the soundtrack. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony blares out of the public address speakers. Back in 1989, US forces ejected General Noriega from the Vatican Embassy in Panama by bombarding him with heavy metal rock. In 2009, London Transport deters troublesome kids from entering the station by playing music that is so uncool, they wouldn’t be seen dead within earshot of it. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo becomes a magnet for itinerant gypsies, insane evangelists, snake doctors, mad inventors and wandering minstrels. Márquez describes them as - handsome specimens with oily skins and intelligent hands, whose dances and music sowed panic and uproarious joy through the streets. They bring extra-terrestrial wonders that amaze the residents: A hen who laid one hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine…an apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories…a poultice to lose time…jugglers with six arms…a syrup to make one invisible. 

Bar Amazonica is five minutes from the station and styles itself The First in Colombian Salsa, Pachanga & Boogaloo. The dining area is fitted out with wooden booths reminiscent of a Tyrolean bierkeller. A few men sit and drink. A large windowless dance hall off to one side contains PVC sofas, spotlights and a snoozing glitterball. I dropped in last week asking for Colombian contacts. The manager took my number. Yesterday Diego phoned and said he would be happy to talk. I introduce myself at the bar and someone goes to find him. I glide across the rectangle of scuffed parquet flooring where three nights a week, people come to lose their inhibitions and practice vertical sex. The walls are saturated with the perspiration of expectation. 

I settle at a table and check the tape recorder batteries. Diego appears and sparkles with enthusiasm. Born in Colombia in 1976, he came to England as a teenager to study music technology. I tell him about Rubén’s poem and describe 26 Exchanges as an exploration of translation. He twigs immediately and finds a striking parallel. I work as a translator for other musicians. The person at the desk in the studio has to interpret what the musician wants, so the music and technology become inseparable. First you lay down the base track of a Salsa then you layer one track over another. It’s like a pyramid. Then you start mixing. I’ve heard acres of Latin American music over the last two weeks, but know nothing about the origins or genres. Diego illuminates. We’ve got lots of different rhythms. Cumbia is from the Atlantic coast in Colombia and extends down to Ecuador. It’s a mixture of Afro drums with brass instruments and comes from colonisation times. Then on the Pacific coast which is mainly black, they still play original African drums and rhythms. There used to be no R&B in Colombia. Now there is dance music, R&B and influences from America and Europe. Everything is being mixed up with old African instruments, plus the cumbia, and it’s becoming a new gender of music - like reggaeton which uses technology like Cubase, LOGIC and midi instruments mixed with African rhythms. 

I ask why music is so essential to Latin Americans. It’s about expressing your aura, your ego - I am from here and this is how we make music. We have lots of songs related to places. Cali in Colombia has the Guinness Book of Records for the most songs about a city. Dancing is a ritual from ancient times. Man goes to seduce a woman. It says - I am here, and I am a beautiful person, and I am showing myself to you. In Colombia we have bajenato from the Atlantic coast. Very romantic rhythms. Lyrics about love or deception. Like opera, it’s comedy or tragedy with nothing in the middle. They feel good about the love stories. But when its bad - OHHH my girl left me - they turn to drink and tragedy. It feels good to dance so you look for a woman. In Colombia people write more about tragedies than comedies because of the rigid culture. So tragedy is a reminder of something not right that we shouldn’t do. Every country has a musical identity but we share a lot. We share cumbia with Ecuador, but they listen to more Colombian cumbia than any other. Colombians listen to more Puerto Rican music than Colombian music. The Cubans listen to more Colombian. So everybody listens to each other except themselves. 

I hand Diego the poem. He devours it line by line. It starts out talking about Mother Earth. In the black hole of the universe, there is this beautiful little dot. Then it doesn’t make too much sense. It’s about Me and Earth. Like deep penetrated sex, the jungle swallows all who enter. He grins. It sounds so beautiful in Spanish but doesn’t make sense in English. He reads sections out loud in rapid Spanish. It’s very difficult to translate. This next part is a comparison between coke, sex and sand. Coca grew like the word, sex…like the mouth, like the word in the saliva…was the heaven. Diego expands the background. In southern areas aborigines chase food in the jungle and chewing the leaf of coca gives them energy. This is very difficult to find meaning. It is talking about the coca…grows…like the word air, like the sex and the word in the saliva was heaven…

The words are tantalising. We don’t know exactly what Rubén is trying to say, but think we can feel it. A dim distant biblical reference creeps into my head. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God... The idea that language was a gift from the gods occurs in numerous religions. Mayan folklore has parallels with the story of the Tower of Babel; that man became so lippy, the gods divided us with different tongues to curb our arrogance. 

Diego moves onto the next section. This bit is about land…you don’t have a land unless you have been expelled from it. I struggle to grasp this and he tries to clarify. You don’t know what your land means until you lose it. In Spanish it makes a kind of sense. It’s about cultural identity. To come back to your land is to go to heaven without stars that you carry in your heart. Diego laughs and explains the form of Latin American tragedy. The way it goes traditionally is - something bad happened to me but I’ve still got you. He reads on. The plane flies me to heaven. I could almost touch the white beautiful clouds. Downwards the earth is populated by assassins, addicts, lovers, everything wrong. Downwards all the bad things like you and me full of new violence, full of war, but still full of your love. Diego grins and slaps the table. Ha! This part is very good. The poet is still in the plane. Below is the earth and I am touching heaven. But up here I still have viruses and the bad things from down there and that makes my heart beat. I am made of good and bad things. Diego has been translating off the top of his head. A pen and piece of paper would be good!  But suddenly, he is on a roll like a code breaker who has cracked a cipher. He rattles through the last lines. Heaven comes from the fanaticism of jealousy, its purity like flames in the ground, burns in jealousy the souls of the believers! We both feel a bit breathless. Diego passes the poem back to me but I insist he keeps it. He traces a finger over the text. I respond to everything in it. It is very clever. I am made from down there, but I am touching the purity of heaven. We all feel like that. This bit here is very erotic. If it could be translated properly it would be brilliant.

Read part three of this exchange.

26 Exchanges: An orphan tongue

Txomin Pellein's piece takes writer and brand consultant Susannah Hart on a journey deep into the Basque language.

OK, I’ll come clean: I’m a linguist. So when I volunteered for this PEN thing I thought it couldn’t be that difficult.  I know French, Russian, Latin, more than a little German, Spanish, Italian, a smattering of Swedish, Finnish and Dutch. I can work out headlines in tens of languages.

But I really, really, really don’t know any Basque (or, as the Basques themselves call it, Euskara.) Then again, only a very few people in the world do know any Basque. In fact, all I know about Basque is that Basque is not like anything else – it’s not a Germanic or a Romance or a Slavonic or a Finno-Ugric language.  It might even be pre-Proto-Indo-European.  It’s out on a limb, a language isolate, an island of language, an orphan tongue.  It’s got no parents, no siblings and, as far as we can tell, no distant cousins either. It’s spoken by around one million people around the world and its homeland is the Basque country – the borders between France and Spain. It’s estimated that no more than 632,000 of the world’s Basque speakers are native speakers.

I know now a few more things about Basque. Firstly, it has more Xs and Zs in it than any other language I’ve ever seen written down. I read that the American poet Phillis Levin described it as ‘like a treasure map’ because of all the Xs. Though some medieval poems and letters have survived, publication in Basque only began in 1545.  An organisation called Euskaltzaindia (the Royal Basque Language Academy) is officially in charge of the unification of the Basque language and the current orthography was only introduced in 1964.  So this makes it not only a very old spoken language, but a rather new written language.  One of the most interesting Basque literary forms is the bertso, a type of extemporized song composed according to various rules and rhyming patterns; the singers are called bertsoli and the art of creating and performing these songs is called bertsolaritza. Regional and national championships are still held and learning about bertsolaritza alone would take me many months.

Given my surpassing ignorance about Basque, it was all the more surprising that, though there is much I cannot tell you about Txomin Pellein’s piece, I can tell you some things.  I can tell you, for a start, that it is not a poem, nor a story, nor a piece of descriptive writing.  I can tell you that it is some form of literary history of Basque.  I can tell you that it focuses on a particular period of modernising or modernisation or modern influences on Basque literature – the period from 1950 to 1960.  I can tell you that it concerns, in the main, three writers, who were respectively born in Paris, Bilbao and San Sebastian.

Without a dictionary, I know it contains references to books, culture, churches, control, censorship, industry, Franco, erotica of various kinds (including masturbation, paedophilia and necrophilia), drugs and alcohol, and existentialism.  With a dictionary, I can work out a little more, but, disappointingly, only a little.  It turns out that Basque is an inflected language with affixes and infixes and declensions galore; Wikipedia tells me that a Basque noun can have more than 450,000 forms.  It’s really difficult to look up a word in Basque if you don’t know its root form.  However, I have found out that the piece is something to do with a ‘break’ or a ‘fracture’ in Basque literary history – perhaps a breakaway, a break with tradition, a schism?  Each of the featured writers was, I think, responsible for a new break – Jon Mirande Aiphasorho for the first, Gabriel Aresti Segurola for the second, Jose Luis Alvarez Enparanza for the third.

The author himself, Txomin Peillen (Txomin, by the way, is the Basque form of Dominic), is head of Basque at the University of Bayonne. He was pretty much a contemporary of the three writers he has written about. As one of the at least 500 million speakers of English worldwide (the highest estimate is about 1.8 billion), I wonder how it feels to be a keeper of the flame of a language that is only spoken by 1 million people. Does it make you feel culturally, as well as linguistically, isolated?  Does every word you speak or write feel special? My words are common currency and cheap as anything, but Basque words have survived against the odds, stubbornly resisting the surrounding linguistic pressures. Each word has cost a lot more. Indeed, the link between language and identity is never more clearly visible than in the case of ‘small’ languages. Even as I wrote this, I read on the news that the military leader of the Basque separatist organisation ETA had been arrested in France.

Some people are learning Basque as a foreign language right now; you can even find on-line Basque courses.  One of the currently held beliefs amongst aspirational middle-class parents is that learning Mandarin will be an advantage to their children because of the sheer volume of Mandarin speakers in the world.  By that metric, Basque as a modern foreign language would be pretty low down the options list.

So who does learn to speak Basque?  One of the people I read about (courtesy of the Basque Oral History Project by the Basque Museum in Boise, Idaho and the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada in Reno) was Frank Berria, the son of Basque immigrants to the US, and 79 years old in 2001 when his interview for the project was recorded.  Basque was his first language and he spoke no English at all when he started school in 1927.  At the time of the interview, he still loved speaking Basque, was an active member of his local Basque community in Boise, but was only then learning to write the language.  So in 2001, as an American Mid-West father and grandfather, he was just in the process of becoming a Basque writer.

In Boise, it turns out you can even send your child to Basque immersion preschool. I guess Txomin knows about Boise’s thriving Basque community; I wonder if he has ever visited and played a game of mus with Frank.  

What is 26 Exchanges?