Saints and Ninjas

Daniel Hahn and the people from the British Centre for Literary Translation are challenging the notion that nobody's interested in translation. Not just in a shouty way, but in practice too. At the English PEN website, Danny writes about a series of events they held at the recent Edinburgh Book Festival.

This series (...) isn’t just about shoving the translator onto a stage to sit next to their writer, a well-meant gesture but which is mostly about helping the original writer get by in English; rather it’s made up of events about literary translation. Typically, of course, a translator expects to be invisible (that is apparently the most desirable state of affairs) – certainly nobody’s heard of us in the way they might have heard of our authors; and English-speaking audiences, we’re always told, aren’t on the whole interested in, or perhaps just aren’t comfortable with, discussions of the subject. So if we were to programme a series of events about translation, featuring in most cases a line-up of translators nobody’s ever heard of, would anyone show up to hear what we had to say? We put it to the test.

They sold out, he tells us. I want everybody to take note of this - and when you organise your next literary festival, I want you to schedule translator events too. I want us to be on those stages in our own right, as simperingly modest and unattractive as we may be. Hell, if Franzen can lecture about bird-watching, we can thrill audiences with talk of our work. You won't regret it.

Festival Neue Literatur

It's nearly time for the Festival Neue Literatur, the perfect treat for book-loving New Yorkers! A host of Teutonic daffodils will delight your literary senses for three days in February: Germans Larissa Boehning and Inka Parei, Austrian authors Linda Stift and Erwin Uhrmann and Monica Cantieni and Catalin Dorian Florescu from Switzerland. Top celebrity moderators Daniel Kehlmann and Liesl Schillinger will ask them probing questions. And there will even be some writers you have actually heard of, to wit Chris Adrian and Francisco Goldman, to entice you to turn up in the first place. Oooh, and there's a literary brunch with "traditional German fare". Everything is free - even the food - and it's all in English!

Opening this fine example of how to organise a literary festival is my favourite event. Now if I were in New York I'd obviously go to all of the readings and eat the traditional fare and hang out with the authors in bars afterwards and all that, but this is the one I'd be most excited about: How German Is It?  Literary Voices from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A Workshop in Collaboration with Columbia Students on 10 February at Colombia University Deutsches Haus. I think it's a great idea to have graduate students paired up with writers, and I also happen to have met two of them. So I know that they're agonising over the authors' work as we speak, coming up with totally new discussion points that nobody has ever thought of before. Please go along and show your support if you're interested in good writing. I know you'll enjoy it.

 

Prosanova

Now, speaking of major gatherings of emerging writers, the innovative Prosanova literary festival has just kicked off in Hildesheim. And it seems to be a rather exciting event that everybody's talking about. The festival is run by a huge team of students (I'm guessing unpaid), so they get some really odd stuff going on. Plus it's in a very small city so people really notice it, unlike when you have major literary events in big places and they tend to go under. And also, it only takes place once every three years so you don't get event fatigue.

What I like - and don't like - about Prosanova (at least this time) is its very experimental nature. So they're staging literary performances and scenic readings, a competition, events about literary event culture, readings in the dark, and all sorts of other offbeat stuff. Accompanied by the obligatory parties and concerts. And I can see the point, really I can. Don't you love it when people come up with new ideas and formats for putting literature out there? It's great to experiment, and what better place to do so than at university? Think outside the box! Kick over the statues!

But. In practice these things often make me squirm with embarrassment. Although I'm not necessarily a follower of the If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It school of literary events, I do think that the format should never become more important than the content. Go ahead and frame literature in all kinds of ways, but don't make the frame bigger than the picture. Just sayin'.

House of World Cultures Takes A Stand on Sarrazin

Thilo Sarrazin is a former Berlin politician now on the board of the Bundesbank. He's also well known for voicing opinions on poverty, integration and immigration that don't sit well with his membership of the Social Democratic Party - in fact, the right-wing populist Pro Deutschland movement recently extended him an invitation to join and the NPD has also praised his ideas.

He caused a furore last year with his comments along the lines of Muslims or Turkish people in Berlin being only good as greengrocers - as I recall, and I'm loath to research this nasty business properly, so you'll have to bear with me - and before that by comparing benefit claimants to rats. Now Sarrazin has written a whole book. And you know what? I'm not going to link to it. It's called Deutschland schafft sich ab - Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen, and it's published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Which, incidentally, is part of the Bertelsmann empire that has been subject to political scrutiny and headlines of its own too, as Publishing Perspectives reports.

Sarrazin's book comes out at the end of this month, but has been previewed in the BILD tabloid and Spiegel magazine. Upon which even the CDU's Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble distanced themselves from the writer's remarks (see the Bloomberg piece - Spiegel Online has one too, but the intricacies of translation mean it presents at least one of Sarrazin's theses as fact). Today's papers are full of debates on whether what he says is actually racist or not. I haven't read the book and I don't intend to do so, but I think at least in Britain, there would be no problem labelling his ideas racist.

Now until today I'd been ignoring Sarrazin on my blog, unwilling to grant him even the very limited extra publicity it would give him. But now I'm delighted to report that someone's standing up to him!

Yesterday, Berlin's House of World Cultures issued a statement on an event planned there as part of the Berlin International Literature Festival. They write (my translation):

Thilo Sarrazin's polemical theses are completely contrary to the House's basic stand. Unfortunately, such excluding positions are often voiced in society. For this reason, we consider critical debate necessary, particularly on our own premises. The festival director Ulrich Schreiber informed us yesterday that the publishers and Thilo Sarrazin reject a critical dialogue partner on the podium.

So, they say, they're not going to host the event unless he changes his mind. Which is about the best thing I've heard all week.

international literature festival berlin

I have been uncharacteristically silent. That's because I'm immersed in the German Book Prize longlist, but the end is in sight. As long as the international literature festival berlin doesn't distract me too much, that is.

They've had a charming idea - Berliners can adopt an author and show them around the city. A friend has been allocated a British writer, and I'm intrigued at how it'll go.

Otherwise it's eleven days of writers, writers, writers all over the shop. The focus is on Arab literatures, often introduced by prominent translators like Stefan "swoon" Weidner and Harmut "charming" Fähndrich. You should be able to read an English version of this interview with the festival's head Ulrich Schreiber very soon indeed. He wants to set "a milestone for literary communication between Europe and the Arab world".

Free the Word!

We arrived in the rain. Or was it hail? London's weather was doing its very best to remind me of why I love living in Berlin. Pushed my credit card into a slot and out came two pre-booked tickets. I'm always so very impressed by technology - my friend told me it made me look like a country bumpkin when I said "Ooooh!"

And then we wandered around the huge Royal Festival Hall looking for the Spirit Level, where Emine Sevgi Özdamar was reading. It was tucked away in the basement, but looked like the coolest part of the joint. I see they're doing a poetry-cum-Northern soul & ska nite there soon. Sigh. When will Berlin's retro rockers finally dig the poetry beat, man? Although this may be one of those things one has to do oneself to get it done at all. I'm envisaging a sweaty event in the Roter Salon... But how will the rude boys and the hair-slided poet girls get along?

I digress. The venue was full to the brim and I had very nearly finished re-reading Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn when Maureen Freely and Martin Chalmers came on stage. Strange, we thought, where is the author? But she did turn up, stealing the show the minute she entered the room, with an interpreter in tow. And the reading was marvellous, everything one might wish for - two brief extracts in German followed by longer sections of Martin Chalmers' very good translation. Lots of chatting, although sometimes the need for interpreting meant the answers didn't quite match the questions. So we learnt that Özdamar dislikes all forms of nationalism and the Turkish criticism that she should write in Turkish rather than German, that she loves the German of Brecht and Heine and that the tone of the book is deliberately sober.

The format was interesting. As I've said, Emine Sevgi Özdamar has a huge stage presence, and she really dwarfed everybody else on the podium. Maureen Freely was charming and witty, but I felt that Martin Chalmers and the interpreter almost blended into the background. That's something translators do tend to do - perhaps because they see themselves as providing a service of a kind to the authors themselves. And of course an interpreter really shouldn't steal the show from whoever they are speaking for. But I would have been interested to hear more from Martin Chalmers than the couple of statements he made on translating the book.

Sadly, the event had to come to an end, and I felt there were still many questions unanswered - why are there so many shoes in the book? How does she feel about her role as one of the few actively political women in late-1960s Istanbul? How did she feel about that back then?

I was once told by a Turkish-German that Turkey "didn't have a 68". Having no idea of contemporary Turkish history, I took his word for it. Özdamar's book proves that young man wrong. The difference between, say, Paris and Istanbul is that Turkey's political spring was followed by a military coup and huge violence and repression - sending the activists into prisons and exile. And The Bridge of the Golden Horn is an excellent and moving illustration of how it all came about.

I was initially surprised that Özdamar was on the programme of the Free the Word! festival with its theme of sedition. But she fitted in perfectly. In a year in which Europe is marking 40 years since 1968 and at a time when Turkish writers are facing a tough time, she brings together both aspects of activism and exile/persecution. Plus, the book is part of English PEN's excellent Writers in Translation programme (for last year), promoting free speech and intercultural understanding. And outstanding writing of course.

Overly Excitable

I'm feeling tired and emotional after a weekend with too little sleep. Why? Because I decided to jet over to London for the amazing Free the Word! festival organised by International PEN this coming weekend. And that decision left me rather emotionally drained. But never fear - thanks to Grandma's Best Babysitting and School Collection Service (love ya mum!), my family will be in safe hands while I'm away.

What convinced me was the event featuring Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In conversation with the translator Maureen Freely and the writer Elif Shafak, no less. I have to admit, I've seen Ms Özdamar (or is it Ms Sevgi Özdamar - correct me if I'm wrong) reading in Berlin before. She's incredibly entertaining. An experienced actress, she knows how to keep an audience's attention. And she's one of those wonderful authors who have the guts to say, "Please don't take photos while I'm reading, I have a double chin and half-moon glasses. But you're welcome to take some of me posing nicely afterwards."

Her novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn is available in English from Serpent's Tail, translated by Martin Chalmers. She has been one of the few women writing on the "guest worker" experience that so many Turkish immigrants went through in the 1960s, although from an unusual perspective, as she comes from a more educated background than many of those who signed contracts for manual jobs in booming 60s and 70s Germany. And I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Unfortunately, I read it too long ago to tell you anything remotely relevant about it. But what I remember most is the way it captured West Berlin and named names, from the factory where both the protagonist and my mother-in-law worked to the road where the protagonist and my father-in-law lived. But the German and Turkish worlds in those days were so far apart that they almost certainly never met. In the first section, at least, Berlin is a cold, dark place with empty streets swathed in perpetual snow.

So I'll definitely be rereading it over the next few days. Oh, and I'll be going to a couple of seminars at the London Book Fair. But more on those after the fact.