books: a good reason to party

Lucky enough to be in Brazil again, participating in the Simpoesia poetry festival.

I love the way literary events are rarely stuffy here. Here's a few examples:
- a poetry launch I went to in São Paulo last year was in a pizzaria; people sat eating and drinking, moved around to chat to others, and if they wanted to went and bought the book from a table at the end of the room, but no enforced listening and obligation to clap politely
- Frederico Barbosa, a poet and director of the Casa das Rosas literary house that hosted Simpoesia, compèred the final reading as if it were a chat show (with cheesy loud music to fanfare the arrival of each new poet on stage)
- for the launch of a book about the samba singer and songwriter Paulo César Pinheiro, the author Conceição Campos sat at a table at the end of the room signing her book A letra brasileira de Paulo César Pinheiro, and talking to people individually, while a samba band, Samba de Fato, performed one song of Paulo César's after another (a photo of Samba de Fato below, at the end of the evening, having been joined by a guitarrist and percussionist who turned up with instruments, and by a woman from the audience who volunteered to sing a certain song with them)

Saving Salt

I was shocked to hear that the relatively new poetry publisher Salt have found themselves in trouble through the recession. Without them and the even smaller but wonderful Shearsman British poetry publishing would have a lot less range. They've posted a very simple rescue plan: buy one of their books, asap!
Here's four I'd recommend:
1. The End of Limbo by Valeria Melchioretto. Absolutely unique. I won't give some spiel, just look at the poems on Salt and then buy it if you like them as much as I do.
2. A book by Vahni Capildeo, one of the poets writing in Britain I really like to read (and to hear: she's a very good performer, by the way)
3. The book I haven't read yet but want to, Lake Onega and Other Poems, so have just bought: by the experimental Finnish poet Leevi Lehto. I heard Marjorie Perloff talk about his poetry the other week, and lo and behold, he's a Salt poet too.
4. A book I've very much enjoyed, the Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo's The Trees. I'd never heard of this wonderful poet before Salt put him out.
In fact, one poem I liked so much that it found it's way in a re-working into one of my poems (that homage to Montejo is in the new Shearsman magazine, no.s 79/80, also worth buying!)

Let's hope Salt make it, for all the amazing poetry and short stories they can still bring to our attention.

party piece...

At the last big nosh-up at my place I read a few poems by Gertrude Stein that the Brazilian poet, translator, blogger, small press honcho and Simpoesia literary festival organizer Virna Teixeira had in her small press Arqueria's pamphlet That's Amore . Great to be reminded of the Stein poems, and it spurred me to quickly translate this poem by the contemporary Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas for the party. Appropriately enough, I had to lock myself in the bathroom to find the time to finish translating it.

In the Tub with Gertrude Stein

gertrude stein has a big bum move over gertrude
stein and when she moves over she makes a noise like
someone drawing a wet cloth over the enormous
glass pane of a public building

gertrude stein from here to there it’s you the flannel for washing
behind the ear is all yours from here to there it’s me the rubber ducky
is mine like that we’ll both be satisfied

but gertrude stein is a show-off she finds farting underwater
funny come on gertrude stein what about me? I can’t believe
someone gets such a kick out of making bubbles

and then because it’s her bath she pulls the plug and nicks
my towel

and leaves the house not wearing a stitch her bum enormous down
the stairs and into the streets of st.-germain-des-prés


By Angélica Freitas

Translated by Stefan Tobler

From the mouths of babes and drunks

Drunkards get to the point.
In The Harp just off St Martins Lane two nights ago, my friend Ernesto and I were accosted by an imposing Churchillian figure in faded denim, staring out the open window from his perch on a rather too small bar stool. 'Hey, you look like academic guys, with your beards.' We tried to wriggle out of the charge, but not quick enough to come up with alternative careers, owned up to our studies. G. was a chef.
When he heard I was studying and translating a contemporary Brazilian poet, G. the pissed Harpist stared goggle-eyed (was this good or bad?): 'Can you say some of it for me?'. I know his poetry, don't I? But I couldn't recite any. Was it the pressure? Only partly. I really haven't exercised that part of my knowing it. I've cut and pasted Antônio Moura's poetry hundreds of times, but here's someone who wants to hear it and I'm high and dry without a single line or two to croak out. Moura's last collection is Rio Silêncio, or Silence River, and for all my efforts his poems have returned to silence. He launches into his own whistle-stop tour through 'that Welsh eejit' Dylan Thomas' lesser known gems (he loves Thomas, and recites them all).
Quick-fire, out comes the next question, 'Where does poetry go from here?' I start to laugh - am I being quizzed?
'Don't laugh, don't laugh,' he says. 'This is serious.'

Yesterday I snatched a free hour or two to sit in the sun in Wellington Square and start Saramago's O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). In one corner of the near circular lawn a couple were having a lavish picnic, laughter peeled from Korean students sitting on the far side, and a mother and toddler ran about in the middle. A couple stumbled in, dishevelled, all over the place, like the people that hang around outside halfway houses and drug rehab clinics. They plonked themselves down a couple of yards from me. Was I in their corner?
'What you reading, good book?'
'To early to tell,' I say. I'm on the second page. It's not too early to tell, but I want to carry on reading. That answer should do it.
Except he likes to chat, comes and asks what the book is, if Portuguese is a kind of Spanish, and then asks if I can help with something. A woman told him there's a word for when you can't find the words for what you're thinking, no, no, more than that, for your feelings too, your emotions. And now he can't remember it, and it's driving him mad. Do I know it? I don't, suggest he ask the dictionary makers at Oxford University Press round the corner. - Ah, they'll never let me in there! Well, probably not, I agree, but he could leave a note. - Yeah, it's driving me mad, that word.

Is there a word for that? Because it's what we've all got, isn't it?, trying to draw the right words out of the silence, and it's not just a light entertainment for the literati, it's serious. I don't know, that word isn't just one word, maybe it's just language.

We were in The Harp that night after the launch of Hearing Eye's beautiful book of Stephen Watts' Mountain Language / Lingua di montagna (in Cristina Viti's translation), a delightful, moving long poem written with something of a novelist's touch, such affection for the people in it, and lyrical perceptions of alpine life. And perfect 'illustrations' by Stephen too.
To give his poem the last words:

Forgive me, nonno, I cannot properly put
into words that which I meant to say.

What paulistanos read on the metro

In Sao Paulo last year (in our Northern summer, their Southern winter), I loved the book vending machines in the metro.
It seems a mixture of peaceful non-resistance, sly cunning and the law is what people want to get them through those commutes...
(The top right book is of Brazilian law, the middle shelf has Machiavelli and Gandhi, and Machiavelli's The Prince is below the Gandhi too:)

Lose your language to find it.. Mikhail Shishkin

There's a whole bunch of Russian writers at the Book Fair, something that warms my soul..

Of course what's hype, what's not... even the Saturday Guardian seemed to warm most to the sensational side of things: mentioning only one of the authors brought over - who happens to be a larger-than-life figure willing to splash right into hot water by making all sorts of statements about Jews and Russians. Bykov is certainly a gifted orator, I haven't read his writing yet.

Anyway - the authors are reading in London (Waterstones, Picadilly at 6:30 every day this week incl. Saturday), and on Thurs and Fri around our island (Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Cambridge, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews).

I did hear Mikhail Shishkin talk about his writing last night. And read a short translated extract. He seems like the real thing. He talked about how he lost his language when he moved to Switzerland with his Swiss wife - in order to find it again. He said that every writer must decide if he's chasing today's language - and nothing changes as fast as that, becomes stale as quickly - or if he's going to find his own language.

He said lots more interesting stuff too, but best to point you towards his books. Which is tricky. Nothing in English yet, (surprise, surprise), except a short excerpt or two (see Rossica 19, the beautifully produced magazine from the organization behind the reading tour).

But a novel is coming out next year in Germany (Venushaar), and some travel writing is available in German. If you read French, look for 'Chichkine' on the publisher Fayard's list, that's him.

oh, and another green shoot!

About this time last year Meike Ziervogel was wandering round the London Book Fair, hatching a little plan, and it seems it's not only hope that springs eternal:
Her publisher Peirene Press is now up and running and no doubt her authors in translation will, like Peirene's fountain, inspire British readers and writers. One title coming up is by the Catalan writer Maria Barbal - a novel with an unusually calm voice Meike says. I'm looking forward to reading it in English, as it will be co-translated by Laura McGloughlin.. someone with a similar name claims she's having Pete Doherty's baby, that's not her!
Laura is a great translator, and when I was getting a short extract of Willemsen's An Afghan Journey translated her editing eye was invaluable (thank you!).

company for a trip to berlin, paris or amsterdam?

So.. here's news of another little outfit that's started in spite of larger publishers crashing and burning right now.
They're two people with publishing experience, who realized that when they travelled they didn't have a ready way to accompany their travels with reading from that place.. hence Oxygen Books, a kind of city-themed anthology series. They are very keen on contemporary writing, stuff that hasn't been translated yet, stuff about what it's like to be in that city now (as well as more classic bits of writing on that city).

the fun of the fair

Decided to head down to London for the headrush of the fair this year, and it's worth it. So many feel-good signs of plucky little publishing. Here's one very new, very green shoot..

A website and events put together by a group of translators from Chinese. They know some great authors.. for now I'll let you explore their site, Paper Republic.

They also have an event on soon, wish I was still in London!:

Thursday 23 April 2009 – London, East meets West: Authors Talking to Authors, featuring Han Dong, Xinran, Aamer Hussein, Kate Pullinger, and Richard Lea of the Guardian newspaper. Venue: Oxfam shop, 91 Marylebone High St, London, W1U 4RB. Tel: 020 74873570. Please call in advance to book a place. 7pm.

Expect another few little posts over the next few days.

the wealth of translation: Brazilian poets: 5, in the UK, ever.

Without wanting to labour a point raised in the last post - trawling British Library and other catalogues, I've found a total of five Brazilian poets who have been graced with full poetry collections from a British press!:

Andrade, Carlos Drummond de (1981) The minus sign (Manchester: Carcanet).
Translated by Virginia de Araujo.

Bandeira, Manuel (1984) Recife (London: Rivelin Grapheme).
Translated by Eddie Flintoff.

Espínola, Adriano (1992) Taxi, or, Poem of love in transit (New York; London: Garland).
Translated by Charles A. Perrone.

Olinto, Antonio (1972) Theories and other poems (London: Rex Collins).
Translated by Jean McQuillen.
Olinto, Antonio (1986) O Dia da Ira = The Day of Wrath (Rio de Janeiro: Nordica; London: Collings).
Translated by Richard Chappell.

Padilha, Telmo. (1976) Bird/Night (London: Collings).
Translated by Fernando Camacho.

I've probably missed someone.
And no, the fact that Olinto had two translations doesn't mean he's the one to go for necessarily. Olinto and Espínola aren't household names, and I'll be honest that I haven't come across their poetry yet, so won't comment on it.
Bandeira and Drummond de Andrade are incredible though. Michael Hamburger talks a lot about Drummond de Andrade in his The Truth of Poetry.

the famous 3 per cent? If only!

It often gets bandied about that only 3% of books published in English are in translation. Well, it's probably worse.
The source of this out-of-date figure seems to be Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility (p20 of Routledge's 95, edition): he says 3 per cent of US books are in translation - of UK books he finds the figure is 2.4 per cent!

In any case, as a blog linked to a brilliant new U.S. publisher of translations points out:
"that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%"
0.7% for the U.S., and it's clear as day that the % of literary fiction/poetry in translation in the UK is lower still.

Books that are getting away..: Sherko Fatah's The Dark Ship

Starting an occasional series of news on some books not out in English that you might want to hear about...

Das dunkle Schiff (The Dark Ship)
by Sherko Fatah
Publisher: Jung und Jung. 2008

This novel is about a Kurdish Iraqi young man who, after getting involved with fundamentalists, escapes Iraq to try to start a new life in Germany. The book deals with Iraq from Saddam Hussein's time to today, with people-smuggling and asylum seekers in Europe, with fundamentalists and terrorists cells, as we follow the young man's life in Iraq and then his journey to Europe, including a terrifying trip as a stowaway in the dark hold of a ship.

Fatah’s book would arguably be even more important in the UK than in Germany, as in the UK there is widespread misunderstanding about how many people are given asylum, and why they seek it. According to this article below, from last year, only around 3% of Iraqi asylum seekers were having their application accepted in the UK, the lowest figure in Europe, although how often do the papers tell us that? A quick trawl on the net didn't give me more recent figures, (yes, blogging doesn't replace work by paid journalists!), but my guess is that not much has changed for asylum seekers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/20/iraq.immigration


Whether or not it were such a pressing issue, whether or not you give a sh** about asylum seekers, one way or another, it's a great book.

Sherko Fatah, born in Germany into a Kurdish-Iraqi family, has real literary ability and his novel succeeds in touching on these many themes without seeming contrived, never tub-thumping, perhaps because of the beautifully quiet, reserved style of the narration. A style that also isn’t afraid of sounding characters’ inner depths and contradictions.

He's written other good books, including Im Grenzland (Borderlands), which follows a smuggler in Saddam Hussein's Iraq as he crosses the mined borderland to bring goods back to his northern Iraqi town. Das dunkle Schiff (The Dark Ship) is his masterpiece so far.

my discovery of 2008

I had a lot of fun last year translating lots of different German authors for an English language version of the Goethe-Institut website 'Deutschland Erlesen': a great idea - click on a city and you get poems and prose from and about that city by German writers.

Lots of really good pieces, but I was particularly happy to do it because it meant I read some authors I'd not got round to yet, and this Peter Kurzeck's writing blew me away:

http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/dle/fra/kur/enindex.htm

When Die Zeit’s autumn 2008 literary supplement asked which author should be awarded the Nobel Prize forLiterature he was the first to be mentioned. He is widely regarded as the great, overlooked German author of our times.
A quick browse through the major newspapers’ reviews of his books shows a rare degree of unanimous praise, comparing him to Robert Walser, Marcel Proust and Thomas Bernhard among others.
Précised reviews can be found in German here, for example:
http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/26585.html
A short summary of the acclaim his last book received can be found on this page in English:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1319.html

His books appear to be autobiographical. As he says at one point, he decided from an early age not to forget anything, and his books are a flow of memories, sensations and associations. Going beyond autobiography, a poetic story of a time unfolds: whether of his childhood village or the hustle and bustle of a big city. Nor does he change the names of places or people. As he said in an interview, he can’t bear to write in a ‘no man’s land’. Because things will never be as they are now, in this moment and place, he is compelled to capture them.
His amazed, bemused dwelling on the particularities of life is the reason why his books burst with a delight in people, places and foods, and are simultaneously terribly sad, they are the blues. His books are one long song to time passing, things lost, treasured moments here now but soon to be lost. And an immense pleasure and privilege to read.

Vallejo and Moura and further tradução

To celebrate hearing that my translations of a selection of Antônio Moura's Rio Silêncio (2004) poems were commended in the 2008 John Dryden Translation Competition, here are poems that I think are worth seeing together. The first is by Vallejo; the second one is by Moura from Rio Silêncio, it starts with some lines from the Vallejo poem (Moura has also translated Vallejo into Portuguese); the third is my translation of Moura's poem.
English translations of Vallejo's poem are available, translations by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi are published by Shearsman, and over the last 30 years Clayton Eschlemann has published and revised his Vallejo translations, recently collected by California University Press.
In the way that Moura's poem starts from Vallejo's, I'd like to see poems that start from Moura's. I would like to include them in an exhibition based around Moura's Rio Silêncio.

Considerando en frío, imparcialmente,
que el hombre es triste, tose y, sin embargo,
se complace en su pecho colorado;
que lo único que hace es componerse
de días;
que es lóbrego mamífero y se peina...

Considerando
que el hombre procede suavemente del trabajo
y repercute jefe, suena subordinado;
que el diagrama del tiempo
es constante diorama en sus medallas
y, a medio abrir, sus ojos estudiaron,
desde lejanos tiempos,
su fórmula famélica de masa...

Comprendiendo sin esfuerzo
que el hombre se queda, a veces, pensando,
como queriendo llorar,
y, sujeto a tenderse como objeto,
se hace buen carpintero, suda, mata
y luego canta, almuerza, se abotona...

Considerando también
que el hombre es en verdad un animal
y, no obstante, al voltear, me da con su tristeza en la cabeza...

Examinando, en fin,
sus encontradas piezas, su retrete,
su desesperación, al terminar su día atroz, borrándolo...

Comprendiendo
que él sabe que le quiero,
que le odio con afecto y me es, en suma, indiferente...

Considerando sus documentos generales
y mirando con lentes aquel certificado
que prueba que nació muy pequeñito...

le hago una seña,
viene,
y le doy un abrazo, emocionado.
¡Qué mas da! Emocionado... Emocionado...

by César Vallejo, from Poemas Humanas

Considerando a frio, imparcialmente,
que o homem é triste, tosse e, no entanto
se acomoda em seu peito avermelhado,
que ele nada mais é do que compor-se
de dias, que é lúgubre mamífero e se penteia,
considerando isso e lembrando que o dia
é um punhado de pó de estrelas
que a noite, com sua pá, atira
sobre as pálpebras de sono,
que o céu tem som violeta sobre os
cabelos deste homem que trafega no poente
com cheiro de pólvora nas mãos
e que este mesmo homem, quando penetra
em sua amada, quer, talvez, voltar
Que o sol é a solidão às claras
Que a lua é um búzio numa toalha gralhazul
gargalhando o destino em crateras
Que a sombra que nasceu comigo
espera de meu corpo um gesto que
ela possa, com amor, repeti-lo
Que o silêncio dos noivos é a voz do Amor
procurando uma boca por abrigo
e que as palavras dos que não se entendem
não são mais palavras mas sanguessugas na língua
Que, entre dentes, a Roda da Fortuna mastiga o Fracasso
e que o diabo bebe as suas fezes sorrindo ao meu lado
Lembrando que amanhã, pela manhã talvez,
o mar venha desfazendo meus membros de areia e
me fazendo lembrar que, ao mesmo tempo,
não lembro de nada, a não ser de um ventre

by Antônio Moura, from Rio Silêncio (2004)

Considering coldly, impartially
that man is sad, coughs and yet
settles in, and for, his reddened chest,
that he is nothing more than composed
of days, is a sombre mammal and combs himself,
considering this and remembering that day
is a fistful of dust from stars
that sift through night’s fingers
and land on eyelashes before sleep,
that the sky has a violet sound over
this man’s hair as he works in the setting sun
with the smell of gunpowder on his hands
and that this same man, when he enters
his lover, wants, perhaps, to return
That the sun is loneliness without the shadow of a doubt
That the moon is a conch in a magpie cloth
laughing into its craters over its fate
That the shadow that was born with me
waits for a movement from my body so that
she can, lovingly, repeat it
That the silence of a couple is love’s voice
looking for a mouth to shelter in
and that those who don’t understand each other
don’t have words but leeches on their tongues
That, between its teeth, the wheel of fortune chews each failure
and that the devil sits smiling beside me drinking his shit
Remembering that tomorrow, tomorrow morning,
the sea could start to crumble my limbs of sand and
remind me that, at the same time,
I don’t remember anything, except perhaps a womb

by Antônio Moura, from Rio Silêncio (2004). Translated by Stefan Tobler (2007)

Rotten English

Just over 20 years after Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature came out in English, here's an anthology of writers in many Englishes, Rotten English, from a major publisher.

Yet there’s something slightly out-dated about both Deleuze and Guattari and this book. They focus on literatures from particular communities. For all Deleuze and Guattari’s praise of what they call minor literature (a making strange of the standard major language) as a deterritorialization, they and the new anthology (from what I gather in the reviews) talk about non-standard language which still has a pretty recognizable origin in a collective group. In our mobile world aren’t many people’s Englishes strange in ways that can’t be given a seal of approval by any group? A combination not immediately clear (say, growing up with Chinese and French parents in Yorkshire). And if we can’t say it’s a standard Jamaican or Midlands English will it still be respected? I doubt it, but I’d be interested to hear of examples that prove me wrong.

There’s still a long way to go. It makes you want to cry when The Independent’s critic Katy Guest simply backs up Kamau Braithwaite’s claim that British English (poetry, one assumes) is about pentameters and Caribbean English is about Calypso. Why should our place of origin rule our poetic form? In Guest’s summing up, the political revolt of rotten English flips over into some sort of fascist, organic idea of culture: ‘One [English] is the language of stone castles and northern rain; the other the sound of a tropical sea.’ No! Ian McMillan is amusing and on less dodgy political ground in his review of the book . . . a review that came out in, interestingly, The Times.

Not that I have anything against talking about rain, but northern rain isn't pentametered. Nor against castles, though I'd probably prefer sand to stone ones. Oh, also yew trees (next entry).