Simona Grazia Dima - PEN Romania

Simona Grazia Dima

SimonaGrazia Dima is Secretary of Romanian PEN, a poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. In her introduction to her latest volume of poetry she presents the background to her writing – the political and cultural milieu, her ideas, ideals and in particular the extraordinary experience which led her to become the writer that she is today.

I found it all inspiring – the relevance to our materially-obsessed times, the candour, perception and sensitivity. (Editor)

You can read poems by Simona in English here,

and an essay in English here 

Simona-Grazia Dima

Foreword to The Army of Small Beings (Extracts)

The irrepressible need to talk about the hard nucleus of my poetry has been in my heart for a long time.

As I come from a family made up, in my maternal line, of a long chain of priests and hermits, whose roots can be traced back two hundred years, poverty and deprivations were not the hardest burdens on my soul during the dictatorship, although they were not easier for me to endure than it was for others; on the contrary, my health has suffered and is still suffering as a consequence of those conditions. I was born with a very sharp sensitivity and, in high-school and then at university, I was painfully affected by the impact of the social world on values, morality and culture. I saw wasted energies, and what was not being done for the isolated Romanian culture, not only abroad but also, primarily, inside the country – the lack of interest in a person’s true personality, the pastiche and simulacrum we were replaced with (and we still are! − when have we NOT been replaced!?), for the sake of (exclusively social) dogmas and the promotion of some writers who ‘had to be published’.

It was not until the post-revolutionary era that I fully understood how, beyond the particulars of political systems, much of what happened was also because of people; analysing things coolly, we must admit that nobody ever deterred us (neither the dictatorship, nor the system) from being good, just or generous, if we wanted to be, changing the given circumstances with our humanity; therefore, no big words, just a response appropriate for a particular situation. That is why viewing people exclusively as social entities seemed to me rather unproductive. The essence of the political world and that of social thinking revealed themselves to me as not necessarily harmful but merely reductionist and limited, drawing the individual according to the notions of success or failure, as an element on a scale which defined him from the outside. Excessive trust in these notions suggest we should accept as a life slogan the fact that man is only a dog raised with Pavlov’s reflex, a dog quickly coming for his meal, without knowing other legitimate coordinates. Should we blame only the lack of education, the atheism instilled with perseverance? However, man cannot be fully trained. Parents and tradition have also preserved many values. Human development does not take place according to some official coordinates but follows an inner course which is hard to describe or anticipate – a very personal course. So I have not stopped searching for other saving dimensions inside me.

*

However, as I did not have a clear training in the spiritual domain, I would suffer; I took to heart everything I thought was evil and ugly around me. I noticed that loud-mouthed, impertinent, persistent and insincere people were promoted, those that did not seek harmony and were ready to do anything for social advantage. And I was not wrong, (but this is going on now, at higher rates, with increased virulence, for the stake is greater and life’s rhythm is faster today). As I said, I felt that life had other implications than the social dimension, and I have always told myself that this intuition is true. Poetry was an example of a different intuitive success, a perception of some essential truths by means of gentleness, without traumas or outside pressures; by an innate knowledge, similar to Platonic knowledge.

*

I used to read biographies of artists (and I prefer this kind of reading even today). They paid for their independence or creative boldness with exile, marginalization or even death. In other cases, when they were not understood by their contemporaries, they paid with a momentary eclipse. Culture for me was never an insipid or futile activity or entity, consisting in sophisticated chatter, or in the cosiness of a salon or of a comfortable situation. Instead, it was the quintessence of life, a priceless human testament to be left to the descendants. It was an example to be at least contemplated, if not followed.

For me, reality (I mean true reality) was not to be found in the level of the concrete but in the world of principles, which was at the core of poetry, unlike prose - hence, perhaps, the impression of intellectualism or abstraction. I do not believe that the supreme indication of reality can be found in the torrent of daily events but rather in the force of consciousness, and the impact with what is imperishable. In this respect, poetry can be an urge and a living justification of a spiritual existence (even an actualization, just as, by sound, a song becomes immemorial), establishing, by its holy sovereignty, another beatific dimension, in which there is nothing to ignore, nothing to cast away, and nothing to blame. In poetry even the critique and the acid verb has something luminous, a bright halo, due to closeness to a generous Source. The hieratic quality of the icon does not mean dryness.

This introduction is only meant to sketch the atmosphere in which I began to write poems. ….

On the occasion of a national student event in Suceava, I was walking in the deserted former Throne Citadel, very upset about the helpless situation I felt my country was in (and I did not see the part I could play in the future either). The festival, or colloquium, seemed highly politicized, predictable and manipulated. And so it was. We, Romanians, made a mistake by not being, except to a small degree, open to the miraculous, expecting only the predictable and being satisfied with it. Actually, that was what made me despair the most.

Against this background, the perception of poetry – as I was saying, all areas seemed interwoven, trouble in one area immediately causing another trouble somewhere else, in a symmetrical plan – appeared to be glowing, living, comforting, and almost maternal. My eyes fixed on one of the abysses of the citadel (archaeology has always been a passion), I got caught in a vertigo and whirled about in an incredibly intense suffering, as if death was in front of my eyes and as if I was facing an absolute dead end. Then, all of a sudden, I felt a full resurrection, followed by an intimate, mental vision, perfectly clear, of a river of light – quiet, beatific, friendly and eternal. The entire world, wisdom, senses of the Universe and all my poetry were concentrated in that silvery bright river of thick honey. At that moment I had the certainty that under the layer of overwhelming reality there has always been a layer of eternal peace, of relaxation and friendship, and of perfectly natural humour and merriness, close to each other and merciful. There were only love, compassion and understanding of everything.

Since that moment I have found my full poetic inspiration and I have created the mythology of small beings – the ones I feel the urge to define further, in order to protect them from the vulgarization they may fall victims to (and sometimes have fallen victim to). The small beings are not some minor lives to be mistaken for things like flowers or small animals etc. (although I have often used such topics in my poetry), but they exist in the eternal creative layer, in the foundation inherent in the manifestation and in generic existence, and at this point they meet with Christ’s message or with the message of the Upanishads. As can be seen, I instantaneously reached the conclusion that there is a convergence of religions at a metaphysical level they have, which can allow – and cause, as a special feast – unity in diversity. If these beings are small it is because they are modest, and because they represent the lives hidden at the core of manifestation, determining the other level of the visible existence. They may be similar on the external, manifest level, to those humble people praised by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, but they are also to be feared, for they create the world; and, after it wears out, they destroy it. However, they only destroy its form, while the inward core of existence remains, however, eternal – resuscitated as a celebration of tireless existence. They seem to be various but they are like a monolithic existence, an ontological block which cannot be conceived separately − even though they can be separated into different existences. A sign of oxymoron, of paradox, that might be a possible description for them, accomplishable only through poetry – which is what I have been trying to do. So poetry played not only an aesthetic role for me but also an ontological role, enabling me to understand and live life by its highest coordinates, the spiritual coordinates. In an ideal mystique of the desert, I equated the desert with the desert of the era we live in and the analogy worked wonderfully. It is still working and will continue to work.

The poems literally flooded in cascades after that moment and they were included in a volume which was very difficult to have published. It was a consequence of that ideological era. The small creatures were rightly and wrongly considered subversive: rightly because they seemed to undermine the state order, like a sort of menacing Martians – which they were, actually – dissolving the barren conceptualization we have already talked about; wrongly because they are eternal, can be read at any time and in any place and, since they are invulnerable, cannot be attacked (and they are not maleficent either, because they are beatific). It was therefore sheer ingenuousness to reject them. But the censors did not know that. The system functioned with all its absurd machinery. Therefore, I published the volume after being excluded five times from the editorial plan (editorial production was planned in those years), but it was incomplete. It would have been too large and, besides, not all the poems were ‘suitable’.

*

I have emphasized the moment of epiphany in Suceava because I have previously only talked about it episodically and fragmentarily, and yet it is worth talking about, as my whole poetry has sprung from it. That moment unified the present and the past of my art as an essential core or a condensation of time, just as a seed encloses a tree in itself.

*

My concerns do not seem at all unusual to me in the context of contemporary Romanian poetry, and I wish them to be known more widely, as a dissemination of a rich experience which can bring joy to others. Of course, they refer to an alternative way of writing poetry now, at this moment, when perception is mainly focused on a ‘positivist’ view of life, in the sense of a gaze from/towards the outside. The obstinate search for interiority which characterises my poetry is not a minor or pointless thing to me, as it expresses a sincere aspiration to which I am devoted. I also believe that, in a normal society, it should not be necessary to continuously justify what we do. ….[And] poetry is never a dogma but a spark from the beauty which accompanies us, intact, forever.

Translated from the Romanian of Simona-Grazia Dima by Adriana-Ioana Nacu-Minculescu

Simona-Grazia Dima was born in Timisoara, in a family of writers. When 8 years old she won a prize for a theatrical sketch, Lica's Mask, which was staged by the Puppet Theatre in Timisoara, as well on tours throughout Romania and abroad. She graduated as a national valedictorian from the University of Timisoara, the Faculty of Philology. As a student, she was the president of the literary circle of the Students' University Centre in Timisoara. Simona-Grazia Dima is mainly a poet, but also an essayist, a literary critic and a translator.

She is an active contributor to the leading Romanian literary magazines and the author of ten books of poetry :Ecuaţie liniştită (Serene Equation),1985, Dimineţile gândului (Mornings of Thought), 1989, Scara lui Iacob (Jacob's Ladder), l995, Noaptea romană (Roman Night), 1997, Focul matematic (The Mathematical Fire), 1997, Confesor de tigri (A Tiger's Confessor), 1998, Ultimul etrusc (The Last Etruscan), 2002, Călătorii apocrife (Apocryphal Journeys), 2002, Dreptul rănii de a rămâne deschisă (The Right of the Wound to Be Left Gaping), 2003, La ora fulgerului (When Lightnings Start Flaring) She has published two books of essays and literary criticism and has translated from English Arthur Osborne's Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge (2003, title of the Romanian version: Sri Ramana Maharshi sau calea Cunoaşterii Supreme).

Currently Simona-Grazia Dima manages an international literary project which is a part of the International PEN Organization’s activity (The Linguistic and Translation Rights Committee), by preparing an anthology of contemporary Romanian literature in both electronic and written form in English and Macedonian languages. She is a principal editor in the Romanian Academy and lives in Bucharest, the capital of Romania.

Times Stephen Spender Translation Prize for Brian Holton

Many congratulations to Scottish PEN member Brian Holton whose translation of Du Fu's poem has been commended in the 2012 Times Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. As far as we know it is the first time a major UK translation prize has given an award for work in Scots.

Below is the prizewinning translation and Brian's commentary. You can find out more about his poetry and translations on his website.

 

 

Spring Sun on the Watterside Clachan

i
Frae toun ti toun, fowk eident at the hairst;
frae bank ti bank, the Watter deep in spate.
Gin A cud see the lang miles o heiven an yirth,
A'd see but the turnin years o aa ma days.
Ma theikit ruif wis warth a pickle poems,
tho in ma hairt it wis Tír na nÓg A socht aye.
Cark an care they smoored the line o ma life –
whit a lang an wearie stravaig ti win here the nou!
ii
Frae hyneawa A cam ti the thrie westlan kinriks:
it wis sax year syne A snappert an fell doun here.
Fremt masel, A forgaither wi auld freins,
but it's burn an shaw that kittles up ma speirits.
That faur ben wi idleset, A'll thole ma dairnit duds,
an whan A gang about, A'll dree ma holie shuin.
Ma mairch fences, they're aathegither stentless,
for the Lang Watter an the lift abune are aa ma joy.
iii
The bamboo A plantit's insnorlt wi tender green,
the geans A sneddit back blushin like wee lassies;
ma hairt clear an cauld as the mune's stane gless,
A'm come to face the wund frae the snawy ben.
An ashet o siller they haunit this auld bodach,
a reid-tape dunderheid at did whit he wis tellt.
An wha'd hae thocht, whan ma teeth hed faan out,
ma name'd be doun i the Buke o Wyce Auld Men?
iv
Maugre ma maladies A hae a crammasy signet still,
but nou A'm hame ti dauner owre purpie crottle;
A'm ettlin at ma eild inben ma kintra yett,
me at wis blate afore the wisocks o the Secretariat.
The bricht leam o the sun twines about the swallas,
an leafs on the watter pairt for the pickie-maas;
whiles the neibours brings shell-puddocks an fishies,
an speir whit time will A can gang an see them.
v
Yin cantin gowk¹ made mane at cateran bands,
the ither² wis incaa'd ti Court, a mid-age man;
the tane begoud ti scrieve his Speil the Touer,
the tither, weill-infitten, gat glorie for Bogle Tales:
their haas hereawa is set doun in the Buke o Warthies,
their hie ingyne better-kent nor our Halie Hermits.
In anither season, A umbethocht me o thir twae –
i the sun o yin mair springtime, ma hairt is wae.

Translated from the classical Chinese by Brian Holton ¹Wang Can (AD 177–217) ²Jia Yi (201–169BC)

Translation commentary

Du Fu uses New-Style regulated verse, a form of some complexity, which, through the impudence of his rule-breaking and the virtuosity of his craft, he raised from being a vehicle fit only for upper class occasional verse to a poetic form of suppleness and precision which is capable of expressing the strongest emotions and transmitting the most complex messages: the tone and level of achievement are comparable to a Shakespearean sonnet or a Beethoven quartet.

The metrical patterns are based on syllable pitch-contours, something neither Scots nor English can replicate; there is a rhyme in every couplet, which is not easily achievable in translation: I substitute a shifting pattern of alliteration and a series of half-rhymes, and for the rhythm, a stress-based line in the style of the ballad stanza, with a mid-line caesura.

One reason for using Scots is to bring home the essential strangeness of Du Fu to English readers: the distance between his Eighth Century Chinese and the modern language is similar to that between English and Scots. For Scots speakers, by using the Mither Tongue, language of home and family and friendship, I aim to bring out both the essential warmness and humanity and the deep sorrow of Du Fu's voice.

Du Fu was also an extremely erudite poet, who was famous for the breadth of his reading, his knowledge of history, and the obscure and recondite nature of his references: such allusions can have no force at all in translation, and in most cases can only be kept by doing violence to the text, so I have gently substituted western allusions where I can (eg Boreas for an allusion of equal antiquity). Du Fu can also juxtapose a startlingly conversational couplet with one in the most high-flown diction. What a joy he is to work with!

Brian Holton

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Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence

It may be a coincidence that just as the post-ironic Creative Scotland crumbles a book is published that expresses the views of 27 writers on the cultural implications of Scottish independence but I can’t help seeing a connection.

Over half the writers are members of PEN (and the rest would be very welcome if they’d care to join). The 27 essays vary greatly in tone and in points of departure and arrival, but most state or imply support for independence. There is, however, a prominent note of scepticism: whatever the political gains and losses of a self-governing Scotland, it is unrealistic to assume that an improvement in cultural health will automatically follow. The record under the SNP aegis is not encouraging.

The book’s editor, Scott Hames of Stirling University, states in his introduction that the collection aims to ‘record what various Scottish writers really thought about the independence question, in a context free from the noise and enforced concision of the media debate’. Unfortunately, perhaps inevitably, the media debate has seized on the comments of two of Scotland’s leading writers, Alastair Gray and James Kelman, whose usefully (for the press) controversial depiction of English colonisation of Scottish culture has so far dominated response to the book. But Gray and Kelman should be read in the context of the other views expressed, many of which reach beyond the old resentments and complaints.

A phrase that comes up in many of the essays is ‘social justice’. To my mind, social justice includes the right of access to all forms of creative expression, as practitioner and audience. It includes the right of all our citizens, but especially our children as they will carry these expectations into the future, to read and write, to make and listen to music, to make and enjoy pictures, to dance, to design and construct all kinds of objects, to create in ways we haven’t yet imagined. Whether or not our writers win prizes emanating from the dubious activities of corporate organisations is hardly relevant to the literary health of Scotland. What does matter is that our citizens have access to the books our writers write, and are enabled to participate in the experience of reading and responding to their words.

The issues raised in these essays are important, now and for the future, and I’d urge all practising writers (and readers) to engage with them. For Scottish PEN, the relationship between government and artistic endeavour is crucial, and we need to be alert to the more insidious ways culture is manipulated and curtailed. Whichever way the referendum vote goes, we need to look both close to home and beyond our immediate neighbour for the means to sustain a vibrant artistic life. These 27 contrasting voices are a good place to start. Scottish PEN, with its international perspective and commitment to freedom of expression, has a key role to play in the coming months.

In the meantime, I recommend Unstated. It’s published by Word Power Books, www.wordpower.co.uk. But don’t hang about – the first printing is already sold out and there’s probably a queue for the second.

Jenni Calder

Book Festival Transwonderland

The fiftieth anniversary of the famous Writers' Conference during the 1962 Edinburgh International Festival was celebrated with various events at this year's Book Festival. I chose, however, to go only to a number of events which particularly interested me. Online podcasts of the 50th anniversary events are in any case readily available.

 

Noo Saro-Wiwa  was interviewed by Drew Campbell, and highlighted as 'The Scottish PEN "Free the Word" Event'. She lived in Britain for a long time, and is the daughter of Nigerian political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was judicially murdered by the Abacha military dictatorship. Her reading was about her return visit to a now democratic Nigeria, which is recorded in Looking for Transwonderland. It is no conventional travelogue, but a clear-eyed, very well-informed, and often very funny, look at Nigeria from her enlightening perspective of dual citizenship. The title refers to an amusement park in Lagos which is nearly falling apart, yet also testifies to a yearning from Nigerians to make their country a better place, and their irrepressible optimism about not only the possibility, but the necessity to do so.

 

Janine di Giovanni and Ed Vulliamy, chaired by Bidisha with tact and sensitivity as both are not only veteran war-zone journalists, but also strong personalities, gave their personal accounts of the war following the break-up of Yugoslavia which devastated Bosnia twenty years ago now. It was, as the Book Festival programme all too accurately described it, 'the worst carnage to blight Europe since the Third Reich'. It demonstrated once again how bestial human beings can be to each other, even when, or perhaps especially when, close neighbours. Di Giovanni and Vulliamy also rightly blamed the failure of nerve of the western powers in being so slow to intervene, as well as the forces of extreme Serb and Croat nationalism. A more temperate account of this event is to be found in Morelle Smith's excellent blog.

 

David Bellos, who translated the novels of Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare, among others, gave a gripping talk on the art of translation. He argued that attempting 'faithful' translations of any text is a futile exercise. It is in the nature of language that we always 'translate' to each other, even when we speak the 'same' language. All communication involves using language in various contexts, and it is these contexts which create meaning, not isolated words.

 

Two literary heavyweights, Joyce Carol Oates and Carol Ann Duffy, read and discussed their work to sell-out audiences in the capacious tent of the RBS Theatre. Duffy read from The Bees, and also impersonated the likes of Mrs. Noah, with accompaniment from the 'merry flautist' John Sampson. A surprise bonus was her inviting Roger McGough from the audience to read a couple of poems. Oates was introduced by Jackie McGlone with a light, unobtrusive touch, highlighting informality. She read from her new novel Mudwoman and gave something of a brilliant masterclass in how she structured her novel, which explores the psychology of dreams and the pain of bereavement.

 

John Lanchester, chaired by Alan Taylor, read from his novel Capital, and discussed the consequences of financial meltdown in terms of the gentrification of a London street originally populated by a thriving, or at least reasonably cohesive, working-class community. His satirical bite was complemented by banter from Taylor about class in Edinburgh.

 

A more benign view of Edinburgh was given by Ron Butlin. Chaired by Gavin Wallace, he read from the poems he wrote as Edinburgh Makar in The Magicians of Edinburgh. 'David Hume Takes a Last Walk on Arthur's Seat' was especially moving. Paul Durcan gave a bravura performance in a morning session at the Spiegeltent. His poems were full of dark humour, but he read them with perky defiance and a strong sense of irony for a solid three quarters of an hour. It's a pity though that the audience was not invited to ask questions, thus making it a rather short session. Bashabi Fraser read from Ragas and Reels, poems about Scots-Asians, with photographs by Herman Rodrigues, who gave a brief talk, peppered with anecdotal jokes, about his enthusiasm for photography. She also talked about Under the Banyan Tree, a sumptuously illustrated book about Scots who made a great contribution to the Raj and are still fondly remembered in India.

 

The 'transwonderland' of economic chicanery all over the globe, with attendant crass exploitation, drug and sex trafficking, plus violence with 'extreme prejudice' was discussed, with many a vivid story, by the writer and journalist Lydia Cacho. A woman of steely courage, she mentioned how a drug-lord in Mexico, her homeland, offered to be her 'protector'. Bumping into her in a restaurant, he asked her to drop a napkin, thereby not compromising herself, if she wanted a kingpin who threatened her to be 'taken care of '. She went back to friends at her table and hissed 'Don't you dare drop a napkin!'.

Mario Relich

Two War Correspondents Remember Bosnia

Discussion at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 17^th August 2012 - Janine di Giovanni and Ed Vulliamy, - twenty years on from the beginning of the war in Bosnia. Chaired by Bidisha

TheWar is Dead, Long Live the War; Bosnia, the Reckoning – EdVulliamy

 Ghosts by Daylight; A memoir of War and Love – Janine di Giovanni

 

Ed Vuilliamy said that the war in Bosnia broke preconceptions. His optimism and his faith were shattered. He used to believe that justice would prevail, that the good guys would win and the bad ones would be punished, but such ideas were blown apart with this war. He spoke passionately about the ‘impotence and hubris’ of the international community and its politicians.

Janine said that journalists felt they ‘can and must do something’. We used to feel she said, that our reporting could actually affect policy. That their work was about ‘bearing witness’ an overused phrase she agreed yet one that seemed to fit. To give a voice to people who don’t have one. But she admitted that since Bosnia, a lot of reporting seems to be more geared towards getting scoops and newspaper sales.

In the days of the war in Bosnia she reminds us, back in the 90s, they used to be there before others got there, before médecins sans frontières got there, before the NGOs got there. Nowadays, we have embedded reporting which she thinks is destructive of journalism – you are censored in what you write. For her, it was always important to go and talk to the people involved, go into the villages and speak to them, which cannot be done if you’re embedded.

In his book, as Bidisha points out, Ed names things as they are, he talks about mass rape for example, he detests the euphemisms so often used. Collateral damage he says, means a village consisting mainly of women, children and the elderly, is attacked, and the inhabitants killed.

When asked about the ‘neutrality’ of journalists, Janine said ‘I’m a journalist and I’m not supposed to have a side’ but that doesn’t mean that they should not have compassion for the people who were suffering. She says she usually has seen war from the side of those who were having the worst of it, and being attacked.

She related how guilty she felt when after a few weeks or so in Sarajevo she went to Zagreb for a short time, to have a break - and a shower. She felt that she should be back there, in Sarajevo where the others were suffering all the dangers and privations of the siege. All the foreign journalists were very aware, she said, that they were in a different situation from the Bosnian people – if things got very difficult for them, they could leave, they could get out. Not so, for the people of Sarajevo.

Journalists need to be objective about facts yes, but neutrality is something else.

Ed Vulliamy was accused of ‘breaching neutrality’ by testifying at the Hague. Some reporters felt he should not have, because journalists are supposed to be neutral, report facts and not take sides. But Ed said he was horrified by the ‘neutrality’ of the international community. The war could have been stopped with very little loss of life he says, if the international community had intervened. Each case has to be weighed individually, he does not always think that intervention is the right action, but in this case, he says, yes it was.

Janine reminds us that in Bosnia, this was in the days before emails and the internet, before blogging and twitter. We had to phone in our reports, she said, reading them out from the page we’d written it on. Journalism nowadays is too much about journalists, rather than about the people they have gone there to report on. They are encouraged to write in the first person.

Ed says he tries to make himself invisible in his story. ‘We [the journalists] don’t matter.’ Yes, he says, it is hard after seeing all that they have seen, their ‘post traumatic lives’ are not easy.

Janine says she is bitter about the siege in Sarajevo, as it could have been stopped. ‘politicians allowed it to happen’. She says there should have been intervention in Sarajevo before the siege. We can never forget what happened, she says, - and it seems we [humanity] are doomed to repeat our mistakes [as in Syria today].

In Bosnia, Ed said, it was complicated by both victims and perpetrators being neighbours, knowing each other so well. He was told by one person who had been tortured that his torturer said to him – your grandfather tortured my grandfather. The pleasure that was taken in torturing was also horrific to them. There was a strange kind of atmosphere, he said, a kind of chumminess between perpetrators and victims, and then the atrocities would happen.

They were asked about their present situation – if they were still able to write their own stories – both because of embedded journalism and because of the traumatic nature of their work.

Janine said – I still do it. Then she talked about young, desperate, would be journalists who blog and even go to war zones and undertake dangerous border crossings when they know very little about the situation. Whereas they are experienced journalists who can far better assess situations in general and the level of risk involved. These young people she said, think it’s glamorous to be a war correspondent but it’s not at all. But I can still earn a living. Photo journalists I know, often have to fund themselves. But those who are truly committed will do that.

Ed said that his last assignment was in Mexico and he found it so frightening, the amount of death and torture, that he has ‘hung up his boots’. It’s not that he does not care or feel any more, but he has ‘commitment fatigue’. He thinks it’s time to come back to the UK and do some ‘foreign reporting’ here.

These are reports from people who were there and saw what went on. Who can relate the stories of what people have gone through, who can give a voice to people who do not have one, people who have disappeared, or have been murdered, shelled, tortured, raped, imprisoned. Without them, we would know very little, and that little would probably be a mass of rumour and counter rumour and we would not know who to believe. We can certainly believe these people for their observations are skilled and articulate, their compassion and commitment is very clear.

Among Janine di Giovanni’s other books are Madness Visible, about the war in Kosovo

 

and The Quick and the Dead about the war in Bosnia.

 

Overview and excerpts from Ed Vulliamy’s book.

Morelle Smith

Marché de la Poésie Saint Sulpice, Paris, June 2012

It’s the 30^th Marché de la Poésie and it takes place in the tree shaded square by the newly renovated church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. There are hundreds of publishing houses represented here, some well known, some small, all selling volumes of poetry - though there are also a few works of prose to be found. The canvas covered stalls often have more than one publisher sharing a marquee. They flank the elegant stone fountain in the middle of the square, and are bordered by trees on three sides. This gives a sheltered and intimate feeling to the space, drawing booksellers and the wandering public into a complicity with the rustling leaves and warm summer sunshine. 

 

After the official opening, where speeches were made on the small stage, a crowd of people were milling around, drinking wine, talking to stall holders and each other. People who have made purchases dangle clearly marked Marché de la Poésie bags from their wrists. I sat on a bench for a while, watching the superbly elegant women, colourful and striking, and well dressed or bohemian chic gentlemen, several of the older ones sporting grey or white pony tails. I then headed off to the stall of LaTraductière,the literary magazine that publishes and translates poetry and essays into English and French. 

 

Jacques Rancourt is the editor of the magazine and has set up Festrad,Festival de la Poésiefranco-anglaise, part of the Marché de la Poésie. He has been dedicated to this for over two decades, and has also brought in artists and musicians, working around the varied themes which are presented each year. This year’s theme was ‘The Poetic Attention.' Fifty poems and 20 essays are included in the latest issue of La Traductiere, by writers from several different countries.  Several poets from Singapore were among the invitedguests and read from their work in the evenings, on the central stage close to the carved lions of the stone fountain. 

 

These readings were in an exciting and exotic mixture of languages. Singapore has four official languages, English, Chinese, Tamil and Malay and poets writing in all of these languages were represented. When I listened to Zou Lu, for example, whose native language is Chinese, I didn’t understand one word, but her presentation was arresting and dramatic. Her translator then read her work in French.

One of the poems she read, unfortunately not printed in the magazine, began as a poem about getting lost out in the country where there were several roads to take but not knowing which one was the right one. But, she says, addressing the reader, do not be concerned for us, for se perdre c’est notre terre natale (to be lost, that is home territory for us) 

Zou Lu and her translators

 

Included in this year’s edition of la Traductière, the 30^th, as well as the poems and essays, there are illustrations of some of the poems, by different artists. The original art works are exhibited in the gallery and theatre Nesle, in the tiny rue de Nesle. It is tucked away between an arched alleyway leading away from the busy Boulevard flanking the river, and that part of the left bank around rue de Seine that’s stuffed with art galleries. 

Galerie Nesle seen through the door onto the courtyard

 

InStefaan van den Bremt’s essay – The Poetic Attention – he begins:

Poetry is everywhere but it comes from elsewhere. Its kingdom is not this world with its so familiar horizons....Poetry disturbs. It demands from us a particular attention, one which consists of seeing in our daily life something other than the familiar, in capturing a unique experience from the everyday. Poetry is another way of reading reality.

He quotes Paul Claudel and Martinus Nijhoff who both, at different times, and in different languages, link poetry with the act of breathing air into the lungs.

Martinus Nijhoff - Poetry wants you to breathe in places that are alive and

...[one] feels, when reading or listening to prose, in the human world...but poetry does not give you that sensation of closeness to the human world. It hurtles you out into the universe.

In the small tree lined square by Saint Sulpice, the air is certainly alive – with the evening scents of trees and plants, as well as with the animated sounds of human exchange. After being ‘hurtled out into the universe’ from listening to poetry from different parts of the world, it is a pleasure to circulate among lovers of words, languages and books, to talk to people, to return to a sensation of closeness to the human world.

Morelle Smith

 

 

 

The Joys of Translation

Carl von Linné – or Linnaeus as the world outside Sweden remembers him – was what we would now call a “control-freak”. And like all control-freaks, he was often frustrated by the unwillingness of people, animals and the natural world in general to do as they were told. Even as a boy, he would order his younger siblings around:

“Follow me! Do as I do! … Copy me! Say after me! …”

But his brothers and sisters would go about their business unheeding.

The future taxonomist’s curiosity about the natural world had started at a young age:

“Earlier, there was another, smaller garden and a boy’s passionate interest in plants.

“What’s that called?” “What’s that called?”

Carl walked in that garden with his father.

“What’s that?” “What’s that?”

His father, pleased by the boy’s thirst for knowledge but tired of his forgetfulness, spoke harshly to him and issued a threat: that he would never again tell the boy the names of the plants if he forgot them after they had once been named.”

Now, the little boy is a professor at Uppsala where, God-like, he names the flora and fauna and everything in Creation and tells his students, the “disciples”, that nothing has changed and nothing new has developed since God created the world. But his students bring him strange hybrids they have found on their nature walks, and his uneducated gardener has insights into Nature that leave Linnæus at a loss for words:

“The gardener points to a tree.

“A pine,” says Linnæus.

The gardener points to another tree.

“A spruce,” says Linnæus.

The gardener points to another tree, which resembles a pine and resembles a spruce.

Linnæus tries to see if the tree is a pine or a spruce.

It’s an intermediate form. Linnæus is silent, unwilling to discuss this with a gardener. Such things are uncertain.

The gardener asks if the pine and the spruce haven’t interbred.

“Like a horse and a donkey make a mule.”

The gardener likes to sit in the garden on hot days and make music on his rather unusual stringed instrument. His friends simply enjoy the music, but Linnæus the taxonomist is tortured by the need to classify, to name:

“When the sounds reach Linnæus’s window, he usually comes down and asks the gardener to tell him how the instrument came into his possession and how the sounding-board comes to have seventeen strings.

Linnæus also usually asks the gardener after a little while to explain how the relationship between the melody strings and the drones is to be understood and why the latter cannot be shortened.

After a while, Linnæus also usually asks whether the instrument is called a zither or a dulcimer …”

Linnæus plants a Siberian garden, which attracts the unwelcome attentions of a neighbour’s goats. He has a stone wall built round it, but the goats vault it at night. He runs down in his night-things with a whip and chases them away, but when he is back in bed he hears them in the garden again:

“Late August. The goats seem to relish the Siberian peony and the Siberian aster. At night the Siberian garden is full of goats.”

He dispatches his “disciples” around the world with instructions to send him samples of all the exotic flora and fauna they encounter. Only Rolander comes back, ill and spitting blood, with news of his fellow-students and their various fates:

“Sparschuh? Fell downstairs, dead. Wetterman? Burnt to death. Grufberg? Cut his throat with a razor, dead. Baeckner? Died of fever in Paris … Gisler? Mad, murdered three people. Edvall? Buried in Canton … Björnståhl? Died of plague at Litocoro, Greece. Lundborg? Drowned. Salomon? Drowned. Luut? Drowned. Wennerberg? Drowned. Söderberg? Drowned.”

Finally, Linnæus is felled by a mystery illness resembling a stroke and, with dreadful irony, the supremely articulate and knowledgeable scientist who tried to name and define the created world is reduced to an incoherent wreck:

“Yet Lövberg understands. Linnæus has his own words in place of the usual ones. He has forgotten all the usual ones, one after the other. … First, the nouns. Monandria and Tetradynamia, gone. Buttons, buttonholes, waistcoats, gone. Weasel, fish, knife, cheese – gone. … Now Linnæus is saying nothing but “To ti! To ti!”

*   *

Linné/Linnæus is the central character in Magnus Florin’s quirky little novel Trädgården (The Garden), which was published in Sweden in 1995. Shortly afterwards I was commissioned to translate extracts for Swedish Book Review and the now defunct cultural magazine Artes International. I always assumed that someone would finish the job and that the book would be published in this country or in the USA, but it hasn’t happened, so I’ve finished the job myself and shown the translation to a couple of publishers. One lives in hope!

The book has had another incarnation, as an opera performed in the beautiful Drottningholm Palace Theatre – the best-preserved 18^th-century theatre in the world. The palace of Drottningholm, on the island of that name in Lake Mälar, near Stockholm, is the permanent residence of the Swedish royal family.

 

The author Magnus Florin is a well-known novelist and playwright in Sweden and also works as chefdramaturg – roughly, literary director – at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, a post once held by Ingmar Bergman.

Magnus Florin

 

When I first translated extracts from this book, back in the 1990s, I felt a bit handicapped by my ignorance of horticulture, botany and zoology. However, we now live in the age of Google, God bless it, and I soon found that Googling an unfamiliar, often dialectal word used by Florin for some Swedish plant would yield a Latin name which I could then Google in its turn to get an equivalent English name. I’m still not exactly a candidate for Gardener’s Question Time but my ignorance of horticulture is perhaps not quite so complete as it was.

 

While I wait to hear whether The Garden will make it into Britain’s bookshops or not, I’m bracing myself for the next assignment. IB Tauris have just commissioned me to translate a brand-new biography of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat abducted in Hungary at the end of WWII and allegedly imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, although the Soviets denied this throughout the Cold War, poisoning relations with Sweden. The author, Bengt Jangfeldt, is a specialist in Russian language and culture, and has had access to hitherto secret KGB files, so his book should be an interesting read. It hasn’t even appeared in Sweden yet, so IB Tauris are obviously keen to cash in on any publicity it gets there when it appears later this year.

I have already translated several of Bengt’s books, including a prize-winning biography of Axel Munthe – author of The Story of San Michele and supposedly “the most famous Swede of all time” – and more recently a literary biography of the Russian Futurist poet V. V. Mayakovsky (still awaiting a British or American publisher). 

 

 

Being a translator means being on a permanent learning curve. The Munthe book taught me more about the island of Capri than I ever expected to know, and one of the perks of doing the translation was a week’s free holiday at Easter-time in the Villa San Michele itself, with spectacular views over the Bay of Naples.

Thanks to reading and translating the Mayakovsky blockbuster, I became an overnight authority on the literary culture of the Bolshevik revolution (most of which I have managed to forget since), and I now look forward to becoming an instant expert, at least for the duration of this translation, on the Cold War in the Baltic region.

Harry D. Watson