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26 Exchanges: Freedom to be Inventive

Tamara O'Brien is a freelance writer working on corporate, commercial and government projects. Through her 26 Exchange she was reminded why she fell in love with language in the first place.

I was really pleased to get a language I hadn't a hope of understanding. Relieved in fact - anything vaguely familiar and I would have felt obliged to get it 'properly' translated, which would have taken all the fun out of it. My exchange partner is Farirai from Zimbabwe, and her language is Shona. My plan was to get a Shona-English dictionary from Amazon, translate as many words as I could and join the dots. I was thrilled to get a small, beautiful paperback with a waterfall on the cover. It seemed to bode well for the adventure. It was small though. I found less than a dozen words. But that seemed right. Here are some notes I made on my sparsely-translated printout of Farirai's text:

The language spoken in heaven
Words within words - which do you look up?
A fund of passwords
sokuti nokuti
ndini ndiri
tingatanga
murmagumo
madiki diki

Lost in this delight of a language, I remembered that it belongs to one of the most beleagured peoples on earth. Farirai herself is an AIDS counsellor. So it felt a bit precious to luxuriate in it so much. But for someone whose trade is words, often hard, dry, commercial ones, Shona was as exhilarating as the waterfall had promised.

As for the translation - when I read Farirai's original piece I was surprised by how much I got 'right', at the beginning anyway. Her text has a poetic quality I could never have reproduced. What I really like is how the poetry is very unflowery - it's inherent in the rhythm and sense of wonder: "These high mountains, sometimes I see them covered with mist and I marvel where it comes from." Because I had no skill in the language I was free to invent a fable from its bare bones. That seems to me to reflect the theme. Heaven is poetry and earth is story.

Farirai and Tamara's Exchange

Farirai’s original piece, Heaven and Earth, in her own English-language translation:

Heaven and earth are having a dialogue although they are different. Heaven admires earth because of her beauty. Earth replies complimenting heaven on how well adorned she is. They argue in the dialogue trying to brain tease each other. In the end, they ask each other a question which has no answer” who is older?” Their dialogue as follows:

I am heaven. I stay very far from you earth. We cannot shake each other’s hands in greeting. When I look at how beautiful you are, I drink water. When I look at the mountains, I marvel where they came from. Some are small; others are so high as if they would reach out to me. These high mountains sometimes I see them covered with mist and I marvel where it comes from. Some I see them with trees, flowers and fruit trees of different types and I do not even know their names. Hey, and they are so many. Ah- it is marvelous I tell you. I wonder when I see some mountains without any trees and then I say to myself,” so mountains do get bald as people hey?” Nevertheless, all this difference makes me admire you more time after time.

Do not make me laugh you Heaven. What about your beauty? Every time Iam looking at you. Every time my eyes are always looking at you and how you have been adorned. I wonder why you do not fall on me. What is holding you that are so strong that it does not break? What about your color, all the same from the east to the west. I see the sun rising up from you, and then it spends the whole day traveling like the son in-law of the road I wonder where it goes. Sometimes I am burnt from the sun that I have no hiding place. Then, there are times when I do not see the sun. Ah- I marvel at you Heaven!

You know what earth, am surprised at what you are saying. As for you who showed rivers and seas where to travel year after year without getting lost. What about the echoes of the sea, I hear them from up here. What about the things which live in water, how numerous they are! They keep you entertained as you watch. There is fish, trees, snakes, hippos, crocodiles and many other big fish, which I am afraid to look at. But they all live together in there. During winter, I see that in other places, the water turns into snow then I wonder how these animals survive. However, the whiteness of the snow is so admirable. How about in summer when the sun is hot, I see people going to the beach to swim and to relax. Things which happen on earth are wonderful.

At night I think that is when you heaven are most beautiful. I see you adorned with stars and the moon. They both shine on earth and give us light at night. I wonder, during the day where you put children of yours. What really makes them shine so brightly? There are times when I do not see the moon or it shows partially. Then you hear people saying, “The moon is dead or sitting” I wonder what does that mean? So your children they die and come back? Mine do not do that the one who has died is dead and we will not see them again. That is how different we are my friend.

Ah- our dialogue does not end my friend. However, I want to know just one thing before we separate. Who is older than the other is? The way I see it is that since I am up here in heaven Iam older than you. Do not answer me back we will start another story until the sun sets. However, as for you, just know that I am older than you.

Sky and Earth, Tamara’s interpretation of the piece:

Sky and Earth are on good terms now. Sky is called Heaven, its voice is a choir, and everything it says is praise for its maker. Earth and Heaven are mirrors. But it was not always so. Once there was an argument between Earth and Sky, a competition to answer the question, which is older?

Sky went first. It said it had lived far longer than Earth. In fact, it had contained Earth. In Earth-Sky there were two great friends, Water and Time. These two played together and created new things. They made wood, they made smoke.  For fun, they made a cat – something which hates water and ignores time. 

But one day a child came along and told them they were different.  Water, she said, belongs to Earth, with the things that can be seen and felt.  Time belongs to Sky, with things that are mysteries and endless.  You are different. You can’t keep playing together like this.

The friends were dismayed, but the little girl said that if they thought about it, they’d see it was true.  And from that day the two friends went their separate ways.  And so, said Sky, I did exist before Earth.  Anyone can see this is true.

Then it was Earth’s turn to speak, and Earth said, You’re right.  Sky is older than Earth. But without Earth there would be nothing to prove Sky’s existence. No colours, clouds or seasons.  No sun or shade. No fish or snake, heat or cold. And no people – not even bossy little girls to tell us what is and isn’t so. Sky agreed. There was no need for one to win at the expense of the other. They decided to separate for the sake of the children, who seemed to find this arrangement easier, but they would remain good friends, the one always present and honoured in the other. 

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.

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.

Island mentality?

Which country has “one of the smallest volumes of literature in translation (just 2% of books published)”? The UK. PEN’s events organiser Sarah Ardizzone expands on why we need the Free the Word! Festival in The Guardian today.

Inspired by: PEN/The Writer Next Door

NEVER  JUDGE A WRITER BY HIS/ER PEN

Written by 26 member Peter Kirby.

This morning I sat outside at a café and stranger-gazed.
Beside me stood 3 tables.
Each one occupied.
Each occupant played with a pen.
Pretty odd, I thought.
None were actually writing.
The pen was a comforter.

The girl with both heels off the ground and brioche-glaze hair held her Bic biro firmly in her right hand, like a candle bearer at a catholic christening.
Her phone rings.
She answers in a language I can’t quite pick up making her imminent written words all the less predictable.
The pens rolls off the table.
It sits there on the floor wondering if that’s it, their relationship over.
Minutes later, she sees the pen, picks it up and writes something.
Let’s just imagine it was brilliant.

The guy with the sawdust neck taps his skull with a pen.
A thud inside, to maybe spur a thought?
Then, he stops.
The pen mines into his ear to eek out last night’s wax.
He wipes it on his cords.

At the third table 2 women in wool write at 90 degrees to one another.
One must be a musician.
It’s the way she holds it in a chopstick fashion, wafting it in the space between them to conduct her wild chatter.
She pops the nib in and out to punctuate her point.
She writes on air.

I make notes, in pencil.