Interventions
LAHTI INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ REUNION 2009
Intervention by Mr. Christian Futscher
14.6.2009
IN OTHER WORDS
When I was a child my teacher told us that only poets are allowed to write just as they like. These impressive words the teacher repeated again and again, always when someone of us made a mistake. It was the first time I got an idea of the poet’s freedom.
To be more serious:
Preoccupation with literature in a theoretical way is not my favorite activity. I don’t really like to write about my writing or the writing of other writers, nevertheless i wrote a theoretical essay (my one and only) about poems long time ago. It is published in one of my first books, written in very simple words, i try to translate:
About Poems
An Essay
Poems must be read. If you dont\'t read them, they stay inside the book and cry, because they are alone. If you read them, they are in the head. And when the poems are there, they laugh, because they are happy, because they are not alone and forsaken any more.
Poems are the best, what a man can do. Without poems the world would be a sad world. I talk about the good poems. The bad ones you can forget. They can cry as much as they want. I don\'t care if they are sad.
I love poems, the good lonesome little poems in the books. Since I read poems and since I learn them by heart my life is much better than it was before, when i didn\'t read poems and didn\'t learn them by heart. My life has become richer and more filled and more beautiful.
I want to do something for poems. They shouldn\'t be alone and forsaken. They should play a big part in life. They should be happy.
Unfortunately people read to less poems and to much bullshit.
Maybe i can contribute with my essay to change this. Then my work would not have been senseless.
To be much more serious:
“ugly can be beautiful, pretty never”, Paul Gaugin said in other but similar words.
Kurt Schwitters felt sorry for the nonsense, he wanted to give poor nonsense more attention, because it was always in the shadow of the admired sense.
One of my favorite quotation is from Andreas Okopenko, I like to quote him at every opportunity: “Everything except poetry is madness.”
I like confusion muddleheadedness and mistakes, I feel sorry for all the clumsy nasty ugly sentences, which were corrected changed or even eliminated from the merciless lectors and correctors of the publishers for instance. They all want to have perfect sentences, straightend or planed with kind of a pressing iron.
I like to leave clumsy ugly sentences with dubious meaning in my books, I like to make mistakes of any kind. Sometimes when I tell lies or give wrong statements I correct them later in the text, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes the mistake happens and I don’t eliminate it, sometimes the mistake is on purpose and I leave it as well.
My first published poem, where a mistake plays an important role, is also my one and only poem written in english:
one too three four
five six seven
eight nine ten
eleven eleven
Without doubt a singular masterpiece of poetry! You have to see the poem to notice it’s subtle sophistication, the mistake: instead of “two” I wrote “too”, so you really have to speak: one also three four and so on. I’d like to have this poem translated in every language of the world… “Go on dreaming!”, my son repeats again and again.
To get even more serious and also reapting myself:
I like the incorrect speaking and writing of children, when they create new words, expressions, a new context – beautiful surprising mistakes…
(I have a list of words and sentences which my son used, when he learned to speak)
I like in some way the language of brainsick people or even drunk people, when everything gets mixed up, sometimes with strange and unmasking results…
(Joachim Ringelnatz has written several poems, where the influence of alcohol is evident, although I’m sure that he was sober when he wrote them)
I like to use the language of non-native speakers, not first language but second: it is somehow fresh or unconsumed, opens up several possibilities…
(I’m influenced by Ernst Jandl, who is one of my favorites. He used a language he called “heruntergekommene Sprache” what means degenerated language, close to the speech of Serbian or Turkish people in Vienna. I’m working on a long story just written in the language of a Czech man talking german, it has a very special sound and of course it’s full of beautiful mistakes)
I use all this for my literature, mistakes of any kind play an important role in my writing, even playing tricks on the readers. Words like cockiness or maybe better exuberance or friskiness (I never used these words before) I want to associate with this kind of writing as well. Expression of high spirits…
Since I remember my first version or first draft of a story was often better than the last one after a lot of work – it took me a long time to handle with this. Now I don’t really publish first versions, but I try to keep the charm of it, and as I noticed before if you remember, sometimes I leave mistakes or clumsy sentences for example. A lot of my works were written down very fast in an endless and breakless way, free overwhelming flowing without any fears or intentions...
One of my best works, a small novel about a trip to Greece Nidri. Urlaub total (Nidri. Absolute Holiday), was more or less written during the trip – what was meant just to be the material for a novel about the holiday of a couple became the novel itself. When I started to read my notes I was very surprised and fascinated so I shouted out: That’s it, no need for ironing or pressing! – Later I added explanatory notes… The editor wanted to see the original version and he was a little bit disappointed, when he saw that I haven’t had really a lot of work with the book. He thought it was much more composed… Then something strange happened: he took some sentences from the original version, which I had cancelled, into the book…
About my novel Pfeil im Auge (Arrow in the Eye), which was published last year an editor wrote: “…It is about the rebellion against the domination of the perfect, the completed, the whole opus, refreshing, formulated with shifty and crafty words. This accumulation of errors, failures, half-measure, bad style, minor, insignificant, authentically – the rebellion of life against the work of art (but as we can see: the work of art always wins!). and this happens because of your undisguised but nevertheless well calculated expression of emotion, feelings, self, fear brought to the point, such enormous directness is suggested, that it’s very astonishing!...” I’d really like to know how my clumsy translation sounds in the ears of a native speaker. I hope you got a glimpse of what the editor really wrote about my writing.
Some more serious notes to the issue:
I love to play with words, I don’t want to work with them all the time.
I don’t like the daily pressure to perfection or faultlessness. People are also somehow asked to stay young and be beautiful, birthday presents for young girls are becoming more and more new noses or bigger breasts – an alarming and mainly sad development in my eyes.
Another reason for my special kind of writing full of mistakes is maybe, that I am just not able to write in a perfect and handsome way, so I make the best of it… Nasty critics with their sharp tongues!
I wrote a poem with the title “Muttertagsgedicht” (Mother’s Day Poem) – it deals with pure simplicity, at first sight it sounds like the stammer of a man who is not able to write in a “poetic way”, who has just a few and poor means. But exactly that makes the poem to a special poem, I think, a moving or touching one – dealing with love and death in an almost childlike way…
Sometimes I also like to kick the dead earnest in his pale ass, making jokes about almost everything. I like to write about grave subjects in a way that makes laughing possible, liberating laughing for instance. Me as a loving father I even wrote about the pleasure to torture a child – funny and bloody expression of deep love, expression of high spirits, in other words: the cruel poem is the result of loud laughing while playing a wild game with a beloved child – it’s sometimes necessary to read between and even behind the lines, to use this commonplace platitude…
And mentioning my child leads me to quotation, which is also an important part of my writing, not even in prose but also in poetry. My son likes to say, that most of my writing is not from me, but stolen from other writers or even from him. In other words I am also a thief, who doesn’t feel embarrassed at all about stealing bright and shiny words wherever he can…
“All but poetry ist madness” or in other words: “Everything except lyrik is madness”.
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Ms. Riina Katajavuori
14.6.2009
HANSEL AND GRETEL, IN OTHER WORDS, GRETEL AND HANSEL
I didn’t start working with my latest book of poems, Gretel and Hansel (Kerttu ja Hannu, Tammi 2007), before when I had something to write. A mere lingual joy (or lingual worries) was not enough of a push for me to create a book. I was in the middle of a bad prosaic jam and could not understand why one should even write poetry, those shattered lines, fragmented notions about the world, pompous notions, that is. What was poetry, what is poetry? I could not convince myself to strike a poetic pose of any kind. My sentences sounded flat, if I even came up with any.
As I wrote a few poems about Gretel and Hansel on the spur of the moment, I realized that I had to write about a sister and a brother and that I wanted to write about them in the language of poems. The things I wanted to say were inexpressible in prose. Poetry was the only way out; the only path leading into the deep dark forest and back again.
So, I needed a text to create my fifth book of poems. The text, Hansel and Gretel, which was originally published in a fairy tale collection edited by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1857, had been hiding inside me for over 30 years – somewhere in the basement, behind all those dusty, yet very usable jars of jam. The first poems about Gretel and Hansel were created without re-reading the fairy tales of Grimm. The story I had heard as a child and many times afterwards was still deep inside me (in my body, in my amygdala, in my emotional memory). And this is, by the way, a thing that parents and educators should be aware of. (I wonder how the modern children will put their emotional Play Station -reserves to use in 30 years’ time?!) Hansel and Gretel among other similar arch types form a cultural capital that digs its way back up when needed, offering a way to deal with a gnawing dilemma by gaining an insight.
I spent 18 months in the woods with small children. It was a gloomy, yet meaningful period of time. We were lost, it was cold, the trees were tall and we had no sense of direction, no idea where the loving adults were. What there was, however, was a unique connection between Hansel and Gretel. I realized there were things I was so interested in that I was willing to curl up under a tree, to shiver, to be hopeless, to find out.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was writing about. The forest opened itself up in me; I was there for the woodcutter’s children who needed me. I raised them up and made them adults, imperfect human beings, I told their story.
THE SIBLINGS
In the Grimm’s fairy tale it is told that Hansel and Gretel wander around the woods for three days before the white bird leads them to the gingerbread house. Three days of wandering about, of fragmented sleep, of hunger.
I clung to this detail, the three days and nights that the storyteller passes as a minor and uneventful still period of time.
I was disturbed by the fact that the part where Hansel and Gretel lost their way was described in such a laconic and short manner. According to the story, it was three days that they just walked, slept and starved. Yet they had just found out that their parents had let them down. The noise they thought to be the noise of the parents cutting trees as the children were sitting by the fire was nothing but a branch the parents had tied up in a tree, clattering against the trunk of the lonesome tree. A big hoax, that is, and all they had was a tiny piece of bread. What a moment of panic! Parents abandoning their children, leaving them to die alone.
I wanted to write about the things that are not mentioned in the fairy tale. In three days, there’s lots of room for many kinds of atmosphere, conversation, words, testing one’s trust. Above all, I was intrigued to find out how such a distress would affect the relationship between the siblings. What’s the dynamics between the siblings like, how do they interact? I liked to see them as the siblings in the Charles Laughton movie The Night of the Hunter (1955), going on a mythical journey. You might remember the dream-like night scene of the film, a scene where the children are drifting along a mystical current. It’s another story of children losing their trust in adults. Children carrying their very existence by themselves.
It could be the hunger that is making Hansel and Gretel hallucinate, making them sense the world more precise than ever before. Maybe they can hear a meaning in everything. The wind is soughing, branches are rustling under their feet, an owl is hooting, birds are chirping at the break of dawn.
The story of Hansel and Gretel teaches a child to trust their peers and become separate from their parents. The children are taking turns in saving each other.
At first, Hansel with his white pebbles and breadcrumbs is the leading force of the story. Then he becomes passive and Gretel becomes the active force, pushing the witch into the oven, setting Hansel free and figuring out a way to cross the lake as Hansel is paralyzed and about to give in.
(This, I believe, is the power of good relationships. There are no stable, given roles but both parties are allowed to take turns in being weak, strong, and inventive, the quitter, and the encourager. The main thing is that the roles and characteristics have the space and the chance to change, to transform, to evolve.)
I am pleased that the little sister, at first so fragile and in tears, becomes stronger as the story progresses and sorts the witch out in the end. Gretel pushes the old woman deep into the oven, closing it behind her. The witch screams horridly and burns to a crisp.
Wouldn’t her yell be echoing in Gretel’s ears forever?
As I had written the first poems about Gretel and Hansel, they immediately became existent to me; I knew them as if I had known them forever, better than the characters in the fairy tale. I knew what they were in relation to each other, I could feel their distress. But I did not know everything. The fairy tale had blank spots that were tingling me. What happened after the fairy tale, after the happy ending? Was everything forgotten and forgiven in the blink of an eye? No hard feelings?
”I don’t know if Gretel spent time on some trauma couches, I certainly didn’t,” says Hansel in one of my poems where he is reminiscing what happened afterwards, as an adult. Gretel, on the other hand, “confessed, looking guilty, that there were times when she missed all that, the milk and the pancakes, the apples and the nuts.” (BFF, p. 93)
They say that after a happy ending the reader feels relieved and at ease. My childhood experiences of reading Hansel and Gretel were, however, different. The fairy tale made me anxious, it made me wonder.
To be rescued is only halfway of recovering. What are the consequences? The amount of emotional suffering? I was certain that whatever would happen in one’s life it would leave a mark, that the child would become traumatized, that one would see nightmares after a narrow escape, that the one who survives the sunken ferry boat Estonia or the tsunami would feel guilty, depressed.
What intrigues me most about Hansel and Gretel is the sense of sisterhood and brotherhood. The different ways in which the big brother and the little sister experience a state of emergency. Hansel constantly promises to take care of Gretel, he calms her down and quietens her, he spreads stones and breadcrumbs on his way. He has a plan, while little Gretel keeps on weeping. At first, the situation is more stressful on Hansel than it is on Gretel. It is only later that Gretel has feelings of anxiety and guilt.
In my book, I place the focus mainly on Gretel’s perspective. She senses the responsibility weighing heavy on Hansel’s shoulders, she can see behind Hansel’s silence.
I am a concrete person, even as a poet. I want to know, to see, to picture the way those dark nights in the middle of the woods went. And since I’m a poet, I can find out.
I knew Gretel and Hansel had a wonderful time together; they were mute together. It is rarely that one experiences such an intimate silence, but amongst siblings, it is possible. Time stops being linear.
“[…] you should trust me
always and forever.
I’m the only one in this forest who knows you.” (BFF, p. 93)
I gave Gretel and Hansel youth and adulthood. In my poems, they are given the opportunity to look back, to reminiscence their sensational adventure that was turned into screaming tabloid headlines. They had dreams that were shattered. Hansel and Gretel grew apart; they handle or cease to handle their past in different ways.
Gretel sets out to publicity, obediently agrees to do personal interviews and describes the witch’s gross nose hair to the reporters. Hansel chooses another way. He falls silent and sets his phone on mute. Even as an adult, Gretel does not see Hansel the way everyone else sees; instead of a husky grown man all she sees is a skinny little boy.
An essential part of the story is crossing the lake as the children are on their way home from the gingerbread house. In the fairy tale the duck takes the children over the lake one by one. Thus the other one is forced to wait alone, to trust that the bird will return.
“The duck swam towards us. I sat on its back and left some room in front of me. Gretel disagreed. It can’t carry both of us at once, she said. we have to make separate trips.
Well, I did see that it couldn’t carry both of us. It felt terrible to stay there alone on the silent shore. I would have liked to go with her. Even at the risk of falling.” (BFF, p. 94)
As I was writing Gretel and Hansel, I asked my publisher: based on this material, would someone else have written a novel? Should I write this into a novel, the kind of tall and narrow one that people published a lot in the 1980s? Little text, lots of meaning, you know. For these are very long and broad texts to be poems – even though the press was discussing the boom of Finnish prose poetry.
The poems became longer and longer; I had a lot to say. There were, however, times when I shook the words of the Contrition in a hat, words that troubled and fascinated me, words like: Your grace, no more, I, you, place to run, no other. They seemed to have something to do with the subject – the world of abandoned children and the creatures they became when they grew up – just like the children killed in the Beslan massacre, one whom I wrote a poem about in this book.
It was poetry, and poetry alone that gave me the opportunity and the tools to work on the subject the way I wanted to. With gaps, a bit here and there, jumping around, peeking into the matter through poetry. Had I written prose, had I been tied up in a story, in beginnings and ends and middle passages in a whole other way, but I was interested in finding a poetic truth of my own in the story, a poem truthfulness, whatever that is.
I tossed the children into different time frames. In the book, there is a deliberate lack of chronology and inconsistencies that would not function well in prose. It is, for example, told about the childhood of Gretel and Hansel that there was a box of wine by the table foot in their house. In Finland the wine packed in cardboard boxes did not become popular until the turn of the millennium. The small human beings that grew up in the shadow of wine boxes have not matured yet as my Gretel and Hansel have – they grow up in the book, they pair, they have children, they separate. In present time, today. There are several Hansels and Gretels in the book – in parallel, simultaneously. There is hanselness and gretelness.
THE WITCH
In addition to the lost children, I wanted to give a voice to the gorgon, to the witch. My witch resembles Baba Yaga, the witch from the Russian folklore, who lives “in the untouched backwoods, where leaves whisper”, “ablaze with life, no lie, no pretence” and gets around in a flying mortar. The hut of Baba Yaga is “made of bones: shin bones, thigh bones for door frames, vertebrae bolts and a jawbone for a knocker.” (P/P, p. 30) Baba Yaga lives densely; her house is tall and narrow. She has to cram into her house to fit in and she sleeps with her nose touching the ceiling. The mythological explanation for the weird apartment is that Baba Yaga actually lives in a coffin.
In my second poem it is revealed that the witch has a past. She has been a mother, too; lived once in a cramped two-room flat with a brood of children, a jellyfish for a man, and her in-laws. There was no mirror in her home, nor was there time to look at oneself in a mirror.
She has a room of her own only in the maternity hospital. “There was a mirror in the room. What did I see? In the mirror I saw a young girl with black hair. She had bare feet. We smelled good. We were alone. We were hungry.” (BFF, p. 92)
In the beginning of life the most important creature in the world of a child is its mother – with the benevolent and loving as well as the threatening sides to her.
A gingerbread house that one can eat is a metaphor of a mother feeding a child off her body. Gulping down a gingerbread house is, however, regressing in a dangerous way.
What happened in the woodcutter’s house and in the witch’s hut are two sides of one experience. At first the witch is a rewarding mother figure who is serving treats for the children. The next day, the granny has turned into a wicked witch. In every childhood home there is a rewarding as well as a disappointing side.
After the book was finished and published, I got lost in the woods. This time for real, in the real world. The dense pine forest on a hot afternoon was inexplicable and impenetrable, even threatening for me, a city dweller. I had a small baby with me. As I was breaking a sweat and overwhelmed by an unpleasant feeling of losing control, I took the crying baby out of the pram, sat down on a stub of a tree on the path covered with crossing roots and started nursing my child in the midst of tall trees. Was I Gretel without Hansel or was I the mother witch, the witch mother that in the story first denies food from the children as a step mother and then, as a witch, feeds the children, imperfect, multidimensional. I did not mean to delude the child into the woods but got lost with the baby, causing both the child (and me) discomfort. As I was lost and nursing I felt undone and almighty at the same time.
When I finally found my way out of the woods I reflected upon my two experiences of being lost and the differences between them. For months I was lost with Gretel and Hansel. Now I had been in a real forest for a couple of hours with no sense of direction, with no phone, with no map or compass.
How did these experiences relate to each other? I could only come to the conclusion that in some twisted way I deserved to get lost because I had written about getting lost in the woods in such a knowing way, downright, as it had been my day job.
WHAT DID I GAIN FROM RE-WRITING?
The fairy tale world is a patch separate from the everyday reality. I sculpted these patches into poems, prose poems. For a child, the fairy tale world is a way of structuring the reality; through a fairy tale, a child can experience different feelings, such as fear. I, a grown-up, a poet, got to experience solitude and connection as I was writing about Gretel and Hansel. Liberation, as well.
As a child, one of my favourite Grimm’s fairy tales was ‘The Three Little Men in the Wood’. In the fairy tale, the main character is given an impossible task: to pick ripe, fresh strawberries from beneath the snow. As often happens in fairy tales, the main character succeeds in completing the task.
This is what writing Gretel and Hansel, getting to know them, expanding their characters over times and spaces was at its best: picking ripe strawberries from beneath the snow.
English translation by Oona Nyström.
Poem translations:
BFF: English translation by Anselm Hollo, published in Books from Finland 2/2008.
P/P: English translation by Andy Willoughby, Kalle Niinikangas and Leena Routti, published in Peripheries/Periferioita, Ek Zuban 2006.
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Mr. Igor Štiks
14.6.2009
The Unbearable Lightness of Words*
In 1989, the Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European satellites put an end to the communist regime and the long decades of that particular interaction of state censorship and literature, the intensity of which depended on the alternating conditions of political “thaw” and “freeze.” The primary focus of censorship in these countries was to control the production, distribution, import, and consumption of books viewed as challenging official dogma, which was itself defined by a canon of exemplary works. The result was a system of rewards and punishments for writers that obeyed or disobeyed the rules of the game. The regime made it clear that government censors, backed by a vast police apparatus, closely watched books and manuscripts and the public activities of those writing them. If evaluated as politically subversive or dangerous, the writers could find themselves in serious troubles, which assumed such frightful shapes as prison, exile, the Gulag, or even the firing squad.
As a response to this repressive situation, the alternative system of samizdat — the underground publication and distribution of the prohibited books — was developed. To write those books, to be involved in their production and distribution, or even only to have them at home was seen as a risky act of civic courage and political opposition. This was possible for one simple reason: that books under communism mattered! Books generally play a considerable political role in societies that are based on a clearly defined set of ideas or (religious) beliefs. In such regimes, some books (or, more ominously, a single book) are venerated, whereas other, different books are perceived as threats in what amounts to the continuous war of ideas.
After the annus mirabilis of 1989, Eastern European writers found themselves for the first time in modern history of their region pushed out of their traditional societal position. These “fathers of the nation” had been of paramount importance during the nation-building period. Albeit under a different ideological arrangement, writers continued to enjoy this dubious privilege under communism, too: as “engineers of human souls,” whether loyal to the regime or as dissidents. In the confusing and never-ending period of transition to market capitalism, writers quickly had to come to terms with the fact that in a liberal democratic setting they now had to struggle for social and political relevance.
In Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (2006), the accomplished American scholar of Eastern Europe Andrew Wachtel eloquently describes this transformation. He compellingly analyzes the strategies that writers have used in order to “remain relevant” not only as literati, but as social and political figures. Simply stated, under free market conditions, a writer who wanted to keep his readership and eventually get paid for his work was forced to reconsider his literary credo. As post-communist societies have made painfully evident, neither “aestheticism” nor “anti-communist dissent” have any attraction left. Both of these hitherto popular literary styles have ceased to pay off. In order to remain present on the public scene and, moreover, to earn a living, writers have had a limited set of options to choose from: politics, journalism, an international career, or pulp literature. From this vantage point it becomes clear that many writers have tried to make the most of the symbolic capital they accumulated during communism. As a rule, they’ve attempted to fill vacated places in the new power arrangements. Thus it comes as no surprise that many writers in post-communist countries have become politicians, a few of them even heads of state or of political parties, many of them on the extreme right wing. Others have assumed high-powered editorial positions in national newspapers, become bestselling authors of pulp fiction, or risen to international literary stardom by selling to Western readers their often humorous stories about life under communism.
Eastern European writers thus entered a world in which their Western colleagues had been operating for a long time. Despite the lack of clearly marked borders of the region itself, it used to be easy to know that you were in Eastern Europe, Wachtel reminds us with his rather original definition of the region: “Eastern Europe is that part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally been overvalued.” This is, alas, no longer the case. Eastern Europe is now part of the democratic world of free market economics, where books are just another commodity, just another form of media for expressing one’s creativity and opinions, or just another form of entertainment. In a nutshell, books have ceased to be among the most important channels of social and political communication.
Ray Bradbury, the author of the famous novel Fahrenheit 451 and a recipient of the 2007 special citation by Pulitzer Award committee, complained as recently as May 30, 2007, in LA Weekly, that people did not understand his book. He defied the generally accepted opinion that Fahrenheit 451 is about government censorship. No, Bradbury argues, it is neither about censorship nor about totalitarian regimes, nor is it about McCarthy’s witch-hunt. It is about the disastrous effects television has on reading and books. Bradbury wrote his popular novel as a cry against the mass media’s successful removal of books from the everyday life of large segments of population.
Despite Bradbury’s illumination of his own work, Fahrenheit 451 is and will continue to be read as a dystopian portrait of totalitarian regimes; it is the novel about book censorship. It remains somewhat puzzling that Bradbury‘s expressed intention to write a critique of his own contemporary “society of the spectacle” has been generally misunderstood. Let’s therefore follow Bradbury’s initial motivation in writing about books that are mutilated, silenced and, finally, destroyed, done in by the images that saturate liberal-democratic societies governed by the rules of the global free market.
I would argue that the original misunderstanding of Bradbury’s work has contributed to the erosion of Fahrenheit 451’s critical and subversive potential. To describe it, sell it, and teach it first and foremost as a novel about censorship significantly diminishes the force of the book’s polemical argument against the mass media-driven devaluation of books in democratic societies. When Fahrenheit 451 was published, American and Western European readers had little difficulty recognizing it as an allegory of censorship practices on the other side of the Iron Curtain, or, albeit less frequently, for McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt. But there is “more than one way to burn books,” as Bradbury reminds us, and this ultimately reductive reading has inhibited debate about different types of censorship, not only those performed by state censors and the police. Such a debate would tackle the perhaps more perfidious forms of censorship developed by the imperative of profit maximization and its fire-captains in the publishing industry.
It’s no longer a question of what you write, but whether what you write can sell. To write outside of what is deemed publishable today, that is, to write outside of what must be at least minimally cost-effective, is to not exist. And yet, even a book that does get published, and is thus thrown onto the market alongside thousands of others, has few guarantees of survival. High numbers of new titles disappear without notice soon after their publication date, and the only hope for these books is to figure in the databases of large on-line booksellers and to end up, possibly, on the shelves of better research libraries. Those best-selling books that manage to reach the majority of readers are generally published by large publishing conglomerates. They first pass through editorial departments trained not to lose money, and then through marketing departments trained to make it.
Outside the so-called “rogue states” and China, book censorship in the rest of the world has grown considerably more opaque in a post-cold war period. It is increasingly difficult to identify the censors; governments deny any surveillance of books, while the publishing industry claims to be apolitical. The circulation of ideas appears to be left to the merciless market and the supposed “free choice” of readers. I, however, remain skeptical of the image of writer in front of a white sheet and of the illusion that the writer is free to express his unrestrained, uncorrupted, and genuine creativity without being influenced by the habits of everyday life and death of books on the free market. The writer’s sheet is never that white. I also reserve the right to doubt that any literary work can pass through the Procrustean bed of contemporary publishing and eventually reach equally innocent readers without deformation. On the other hand, I cannot but admire the influence of a general impression that censorship has been expelled from our lives. The censor’s greatest trick — allow me to paraphrase the famous saying about the devil — is to convince us that he doesn’t exist (in the world of books)!
In some other worlds, however, such as TV, radio, film and the Internet, the censors do not even hide their existence. Their business is the control of visual media, which have obvious social, political, and pedagogical importance. As for the field of education, it is important for all of us, readers and writers of books, to face the fact while national parliaments long ago debated the corrupting influence of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, today no one would even rate it “R-13” or “read with parental guidance.” Make no mistake: I am not arguing that books are unimportant. Instead, I think I’m stating the obvious when I say that today books simply do not have the subversive potential to jeopardize the education of future citizens in the allegedly non-ideological society of advanced capitalism.
There is little consolation left for books once they are classified as just another marketable product for mass consumption. Even when certain books openly disapprove of the fact that books have been made a socially and politically irrelevant commodity, it all amounts to a little more than pounding the velvet walls of your own prison: books cannot escape their modern fate as merchandise. The capitalist market obviously rewards every sellable attitude, even a mocking critique of itself. Naomi Klein’s well-known book No Logo eventually went on to become a commercially successful item, the logo of those opposed to the world of logos. It is thus necessary, if bitter, to acknowledge that books have serious political weight only when they are placed outside the commodity chain, that is, when they circulate from hand to hand, without copyright or ISBN number, without fees and permissions, only when they are clandestinely copied in someone’s cellar. Only, and here is the irony, in societies that respect and fear written words so much that books outside their ideological or religious canon are worthy of censorship and destruction.
* Note: This text is part of a larger essay on literature, censorship and political correctness.
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Ms. Fflurr Dafydd
14.6.2009
I am a bilingual writer. What this means, in my own personal cultural context is that I write in both Welsh and in English, Welsh for me being the mother tongue – the language of hearth and home, the language of friendship, and of love; with English being a different language entirely – the language of academia and professionalism, my international lingua franca, and also, inescapably, the language of colonisation. However, without English, I would not have the means of explaining my predicament to the outside world, and without the coloniser’s tongue, I would not have the power to challenge the authority of those who have colonised me. In other words, I am always speaking in tongue when I speak in English, for it carries the charge and the weight of another cultural experience – when speaking in English I am choosing to speak in other words, other voices in order for other, hidden voices, to be heard.
Welsh is the oldest surviving language in Europe, and is spoken by over half a million people within Wales, which constitutes roughly 20% of the population. It is a widespread language worldwide, in many respects, as it is also spoken in communities of ex-pats in England, America and Australia. There is also a small bilingual Welsh-Spanish community in Patagonia, in the Chubut province of Argentina, established back in 1865, when a group of Welsh people, having become frustrated by the increasing Anglicisation of Wales, emigrated there in order to form a colony and live independent lives in Welsh.
The Welsh were originally known as the Brythoniaid (the original ‘British’ being a term for the Celts), and later, after the invasion of the Germanic tribes, Cymry, derived from the word Combrogos, which means ‘comrades’ or fellow countrymen. The word ‘Wales’ derived from the Germanic name for foreigners or outsiders, and thus presents us with the linguistic root of the age-old tension between the Cymry Cymraeg (the speakers of the Welsh language) and the Welsh (the non-Welsh speakers of Wales.) As the statistics testify, the majority of people in Welsh do not speak the language, and yet the language itself is very much a presence in Wales, and perceived as an integral part of the Welsh identity for many. It is a growing, evolving language, despite its constant oppression and colonising by outside influences, and in particular, by Anglo-American culture. For many, the survival of Welsh, and its ability to hold its head up high today as a modern, European language, is nothing short of miraculous.
The language itself has gone through many transformations over the centuries. It was originally an Indo European language, which then evolved into the Celtic language. From the Brythonic branch of Celtic then evolved Welsh, Cornish and Breton, while Scottish and Irish Gaelic, and the Manx language, are derivative from the Goedelic or Q-Celtic languages. It is perhaps often a common misconception, from outsiders as well as insiders, that all the Celtic tongues are mutually intelligible, and while it is true that there is often to be seen a mutual solidarity between the Celtic nations (especially so when any of the Celtic teams play against England), their languages can seem as alien to one another as any other foreign tongue, despite there being common words between them, especially in the case of Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
The Welsh language remained the language of the majority of the people of Wales until the act of Union in 1536, however, had a direct impact on the growth of the language. This was a brutal form of assimilation on behalf of the English government, who laid down the law that English should be the only language of the courts in Wales, and that the use of Welsh would prohibit contribution to the administration of the country. This was of course the worst kind of colonisation, and a very deliberate attempt to eradicate the difference between Wales and England, thus easing the notion of them being one homogeneous nation, governed by the English government. The English language, therefore, was commonly propounded as the language of advancement and commerce, and the Welsh language as the language of debasement and backwardness; and although the Welsh language has come a long way since then, traces of this attitude can still be seen today.
While such an ‘Act’ would have been the nail in the coffin for many a language and culture, Welsh, while being an unofficial language, found great strength and courage in becoming a subversive language, albeit within an acceptable mould. The translation and publication of the Bible in Welsh in 1588 by Bishop William Morgan enabled Welsh to become a powerful language of worship, and the highly literary quality of the translation enabled a good version of spoken Welsh to flourish, preserving the language in the communities and avoiding the pitfall of Welsh turning into a casual, disrespected dialect used only by the lower orders. Although these translations were part of the English government’s plan to further colonise the Welsh, they succeeded in providing the Welsh with the one linguistic tool that would enable their cultural freedom and longevity.
And yet even though the Welsh language overcame this hurdle, the colonisation continued. The Industrial Revolution also took its toll, for although it succeeded in developing the language within an urban community as opposed to the traditional rural society, it also saw more and more people migrating into Wales, and English becoming the common language of many a society. In 1864, an incident known as the ‘Treason of the Blue Books’ was carried out, a public inspection, by Englishmen, on the state of Nonconformist schools in Wales, which again laid the blame on the Welsh tongue for what they perceived to be the morally unacceptable state of education and society. In the wake of the Blue Books, English was viewed once again as the only adequate language of education and society, and in came the “Welsh Not,” a supposedly instructive form of punishment used in schools, whereby a wooden board was hung around the neck of any child found speaking Welsh, and on it the words “Welsh Not.” Similar colonising techniques were also used in Brittany and, as far afield as Kenya, where the minority language of Gikuyu was prohibited in schools, and children caught speaking it would have to wear their shame in the form of a metal placard which read ‘I am stupid,’ or ‘I am a donkey.’
And yet, despite all efforts on behalf of the English government, Welsh, like Gikuyu, succeeded in flourishing. Education became available in Welsh, with Welsh-medium schools being established from the 1940s onwards, and Welsh-language schools now exist in most areas in Wales, while it is also fast becoming the medium of instruction in many university courses and further education colleges. There has been also a turnaround in attitudes in many of the post-industrial communities of South Wales; whereas the previous generation would have urged their children to focus on English in order to ‘get on in the world,’ there is a now a heartening sense that many of these non-Welsh speaking parents want to see their children receiving their education solely through the medium Welsh ‘in order to get on,’ to get a better chance of thriving within the current bilingual climate.
Although Wales, throughout the centuries, never succeeded in regaining its presence as a majority language, it has nevertheless succeeded in winning many a colossal victory, which has led us to the ‘bilingual’ Wales of the present day. Though bilingualism is perceived as many as a compromise (i.e. bilingualism ultimately one works one way; in favour of the English-speaking), it is also possible to see the increasing bilingualism of the country as putting Wales in a relatively strong position. Thanks to the incessant, unshaken, radical campaigning and activism of the Welsh Language Society in the 60s and 70s, which continues into the present day, the language is now an ‘official’ language, and there is a substantial increase in those learning the language. While it remains a language in crisis, as in the case of all minority cultures which face the ever encroaching tide of Anglo-Americanism, and there are constant cries for a reformed Welsh Language Act, it is nevertheless a language that has prevailed against all odds, one which boasts a rich tradition and history, and one with a divergent youth culture. Though linguistically, it is always playing ‘catch up’, it has succeeded, over the past few years, to make its presence felt worldwide, having a dominant presence on the web, broadcasting its television programme and radio broadcasts worldwide. Welsh language literature, through translation, enables Welsh writers to travel all over the world through the medium of their mother tongue, and there a Welsh-language ‘version’ of everything from designer underwear to Harry Potter.
And it is perhaps in response to the new confidence in Wales surrounding bilingualism, the heightened status of bilingualism as a valid means of expressing yourself as a Welsh writer, that I am now writing in English in order to express what I feel to be an unique Welsh experience. I am predominantly a Welsh-language writer, and feel that in writing in Welsh I am also contributing to a very rich and complex body of work that goes back as far as the sixth century. We have a long literary tradition, which stems primarily, like with so many other cultures, from the oral tradition, and in particular our tradition of composing poetry in the strict metre of cynganedd – which literally means harmony – getting the words to harmonise with one another in terms of their sound and rhythm. Even though I no longer write poetry, such a rhythm stays in my prose, and pushes it along, and when it comes to writing in English, it is perhaps inevitable that some elements of this tradition are also carried across to that language – so that the way I compose my sentences on the page is perhaps directly influenced by my own tradition, my mother tongue. And again, it is part of the great liberty of the colonised writer who has learnt the coloniser’s tongue that he or she can re-imagine and appropriate that language, make it resound with new meaning, make it sing in a way it’s never been sung before.
And with this in mind, I wanted to try to convey some of my Welsh language experience through the medium of English, so that my experience could travel beyond the borders of Wales, beyond England even – and to connect with other minority cultures worldwide. And in order to do this, I knew I had to start by adapting something that had in first been written in Welsh – something that had cultural charge which would carry across the linguistic barrier. But can you write the same book twice? That is the question which hounded me as I embarked on the process of translating my Welsh-language novel Atyniad into English. The novel, set on Bardsey Island, was the fruit of a six-week residency on Bardsey Island in North Wales, a fictional account based on my unforgettable experiences on this tiny island off the peninsula of North West Wales. It was a novel written in a whirlwind of emotional recollection, in three intense months, as I geared myself up to finish it by the deadline of the Prose Medal competition in the National Eisteddfod in 2006. By then, I had already travelled four years away from my experience, and was writing from distant memories, squinting to decipher diary entries scrawled in handwriting I no longer recognised, and trying to formulate a coherent voice from the distorted echoes of the past. Before I barely had time to think about what I had written, it had sailed away from me in a brown envelope, later returning in a hardback cover as my award for winning the competition. I was ecstatic, the novel was out, and suddenly I had responses; readers. Readers had their usual probing concerns: was the character of the writer based on myself? Was it my story? Yes of course and no, not at all, was the usual answer. Reading the novel now, I see that the writing is characterised by the immediacy with which it was written; it is urgent, pressing, passionate, distilling memories while also changing the very nature of those memories through committing them to fiction. I also know that Atyniad belongs very much to the time in which it was written, to the self by whom it was written, and as that self sailed two more years away from her experience, I felt further removed from those memories than ever before. It’s only then I realised that you can write the same book twice, but only if you are the same person.
With this in mind, I started working not on a translation of Atyniad but on a new novel entirely, which would be located on the same island, but would host a different cast of characters, who would tell a different story. While remaining true to the island’s landscape and its buildings, its wildlife and geography, I decided to experiment with the narrative; to create both a thriller and love-story, and also a meditation on language. When you write in Welsh, of course, the entire work is that meditation; now I had an opportunity to reflect from the inside out, to literally bring the island to the mainland.
I gave myself complete freedom, therefore, to begin from the beginning. I became blood-thirsty, killing off those characters that had already served their purpose, and made structural changes that changed the pace of the novel, turning the plot on its head. Rather than propel the narrative forward through a myriad of different viewpoints, I scaled down to four main narratives, and gave birth to new protagonists. Mererid, the writer-in-residence, was a kind of haunting of the anonymous author’s first-person narration in Atyniad, and yet having a name to play with, along with a third-person narration this time, enabled me to envisage her, finally, as someone other than myself. Deian, the archaeologist, seemed to take his cue from a former fictional archaeologist, and yet he was pursued by a more troubling story; the mystery of his missing mother, who had disappeared on the island during his childhood.
There were some characters that seemed to come from nowhere, strutting on to the page as if they had always been there. The foremost of these was Sister Vivian, an activist-turned-nun who, as the novel opens, finds herself reluctantly hosting the rather absurd conference of hermits. Even though she tries to keep quiet about her rebellious past, her truth is soon exposed when the boat brings one threatening figure to challenge her; a character who appeared only in a photo frame in Atyniad, yet who bursts through the glass to take centre stage in Twenty Thousand Saints.
But the island itself remains a character, as does the ever-encroaching tide. As Brenda Chamberlain, the island most famous resident – artist and poet - said of Bardsey: “Life on this, as on every small island, is governed by moods of the sea; its tides, its gifts, its deprivations,” and as these characters are left stranded for days on end, their story, too, becomes as dark as the brooding waters that surround them.
And it is with this in mind that I return to the notion of bilingualism, of what it enables the writer of the island, the minority, to do. It allows them to leave the island, to travel to the mainland, with their language, their identity intact. But they will always return to their island, as it is the island that gives them the unique life view and perspective that they can share with the rest of the world. And it is precisely through staying on the small island, through shouting about it, through sending out those constant messages in the bottle, that the island becomes slowly more visible, less peripheral, and one of the unique fragments of the world. And through staying on the island, and accepting, as Brenda Chamberlain says, the tides, the gifts, the deprivations of that life, only then will someone truly appreciate the new and exciting things that are washed ashore with the turn of the tide.
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LIWRE 2009
Interventions by Dubravka Ugresic
14.6.2009
Dangerous Liaisons
Upton Sinclair, author of the novel Oil, would have stayed half-forgotten as a classic of American literature had there not been a film adaptation of the novel There Will Be Blood with entrancing Daniel Day-Lewis in the main role, which briefly blew the dust off of Sinclair’s name for a moment.
Having seen the movie, I thought back to the shelf of books in my mother’s apartment and the book cover of the first Yugoslav edition of Oil! There were pencil drawings all over the inside: those, said my mother, were my first childish scribbling. It was the time of post-war poverty and the cover of a book doubled as a drawing pad. Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, Maxim Gorky’s The Mother, and Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy were not perhaps Mother’s favorite books, but they sold in the bookstores of post-war, socialist Yugoslavia. These and a few others were the first titles in the home library of my young parents.
I don’t remember whether I ever actually read Oil. But if I did, back when I was a student – earnestly dedicated to comparative literature – I wouldn’t have dared say so out loud. At that time, defense of the “autonomy of literature” was something nearly sacred to every student of comparative literature, and I perceived myself as battling on the front lines. In my student days “literary autonomy” was closely tied to literary taste. In simple terms, we felt that good writers did not embark on politics, or write about life in overly real terms. Real life was left to the bad writers and those who flirted with politics. The fashion of the day was “literariness” of literature. The Yugoslav writers were never seriously infected with the virus of socialist realism, which does not mean, of course, that there weren’t those who compromised. But resistance to the tendency to ideologize and politicize in literature, despite the poetic lines penned to glorify Tito, lasted unusually long after the enemy, socialist realism, was dead and buried. There were many good writers, thanks to this, who wrote fine books; there were bad writers, on the other hand, who were labeled “good” because they “didn’t get caught up in politics”; just as many good writers were deemed bad because they had no bone to pick with the regime, or at least they didn’t do so publicly; just as there were bad writers who were deemed good only because they had taken a public stand against the regime.
Today, of course, I know that the connection between literature and “ideology” has been around since the beginnings of literacy. The Bible is not just a grandiose work of literary history; it is a grandiose work of ideology. The history of the bond between literature and ideology is long, complex and dramatic. The history of the relations between emperors and poets, between leaders and court fools, between those who order literature and those who comply with the orders is too gory, the episodes of book burning and censorship too frequent, the number of writers’ lives given for the freedom of speech, for an idea or even just a dream is too vast to allow taking this fatal historical “alloy” lightly. The notion of literary autonomy served too often as an alibi for it to enjoy full validity: when they thought they had something to gain by it, there were writers who stepped into politics; others took on politics even when doing so led to symbolic or real suicide. Some, when they looking to save their skins, sought the shield of literary autonomy, while others paid for their literary autonomy with their skins.
The tension between the two opposing poles – a writer’s political engagement and a writer’s autonomy - was particularly dramatic in the literatures of the former Eastern Europe. Even today, surprising as this may seem, it has still not lost its hold, although the context has changed in terms of the politics, ideas and culture. The East European literary environments were much more rigid than the West European ones, in the East European literary zones careers were destroyed because of the written word or conversely the writer was elevated to government minister. This is no different today, though it may seem to be different: state institutions continue to play the part of literary patron, albeit a bad and stingy patron, but there is barely any independent territory left. The writer in post-communist states is still treated as the “voice of his people” or as a “traitor.” Why? For the simple reason that communism in transitional countries has been replaced by nationalism, and both systems have their eyes on writers. The literary marketplace is too small for the writer to maintain his belief that he is independent. The recent incident with Milan Kundera only confirms that the model for traumatic back-and-forth between literature and ideology is unchanged.
The question arises: is it possible to step out of the hellish circle, where the autonomy of a literary text is only another name for politicization, and politicization is only another name for autonomy? How does the relationship to a text change when the context changes?
Exile is a change of context in the literal sense. Exile implies the personal experience, which would be difficult to subsume under the terms that are stubbornly endorsed by literary critics from the writer’s home base and the hosting environment. The terms – émigré, immigrant, exile, nomad, minority, ethnic, hybrid literature – are discriminative, but also affirmative. With these terms the home base expels the writer, while the host environment to thrust the writer into an ethnic niche uses the same terms. The home base makes assumptions of monoculturalism and exclusivity, while the host environment make assumptions of multiculturalism and inclusivity, but both are essentially working with dusty labels of ethnicity and the politics of otherness. Even if I were to write a text about the desolation of frozen landscapes at the North Pole, I would still generally be labeled as a Croatian writer, or as a Croatian writer in exile writing about the desolation of the frozen landscapes at the North Pole. Reviewers would promptly populate the frozen wasteland of my text with concepts such as exile, Croatia, ex-Yugoslavia, post-communism, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Slavic world, Balkan feminism or perhaps Balkan eco-feminism, while journalists would ask me whether I had the opportunity while up in the frozen wasteland to run into the Croatian diaspora, and how did I perceive the situation in Kosovo from the frozen vantage point. If an English writer writes his or her version of a visit to the North Pole, Englishness will not likely serve as the framework within which his or her text is read. This attitude of the host environment to writer-newcomers springs from an always-vital relations between the periphery and the center. The concepts of periphery and center are, however, elastic; I am sure that Serbs feel closer to the center than do the Bulgarians, and the Bulgarians feel closer to the center than do the Turks. Feelings, however, are one thing and real relations of power are something else. The real center of power is America, or rather Anglo-American culture, whose cultural domination marked the twentieth century. We are still looking to that center with equal fascination today. Anglo-American culture is the dominant field of reference, while, at the same time, it is the most powerful, if not the most just, mediator of cultural values. In other words, if certain Chinese writers are not translated into English, it is unlikely that any Serbian or Croatian reader, with the exception of the occasional lone Sinologist, will ever hear of them.
The relationship to a literary text changes, of course, with a change of language. There are many examples of writers who embraced the language of their host-country, yet by doing so they did not manage to protect their texts from manipulative readings, but there is an even larger number of writers who, writing in the language of the host country, seek a special ethnic-religious hybrid status for themselves because only this status will afford them a recognizable, profitable niche. All in all, an opposition asserts itself here, this time the opposition between the autonomy of the literary text and its critical reception in the new context of the internationalization of literature and transnational literature. This is still the realm of literature, as we know it, with its tradition, canons, apparatus, and institutions, with its system of values. Here we still know, or at least we approximately know, what it is we are talking about when we speak of literature.
As it leaps from the national to the international, literature enters its third context, the powerful global zone of the mass media. In that context literature, or rather its assumptions, dissolve, vanish, or transmute into something else. Bookstores are full of books, the chains are reminiscent of supermarkets, there are more translations of books than ever before, more literary awards than ever before, literary festivals are suddenly key points for the popularization of books, there are writers being lauded like pop stars – all of which suggests that things have never been better for writing. However, the literature as we have known it is on the wane. The space in the papers given over to reviews is disappearing, just as the papers themselves are. Literature is moving onto the Internet having a parallel life of its own. The book circulates through movies (movie screen plays published as books sell better than the books they are based on), through audio recordings, mobile phones. “Wild literature” is democratic, unstructured, extra-institutional, rejecting hierarchy, functioning in the digitalized literary realm, and this powerful literary underground will push literature, as we have known it, with all the attendant apparatus, even further out onto the margins. Keitai shosetsu, the cell phone novel or mobile phone novel, has millions of followers in Japan, and the authors are mainly anonymous. Perhaps, in the digital galaxy, a redefined novel will arise which erases authorship, national and linguistic borders, ethnic identities, hierarchies of evaluation and literary tradition. Or maybe it won’t. The book has long since become merchandise like any other; it’s just that we have been pretending for too long that we don’t notice that happening.
Writers and the people, who publish books, will have to face the change in status. Many writers rush off to the last remaining shelter, the national Academies of Science and Art, which provide a secure institution for national values and a slightly more secure life in retirement. Such writers are about to become extinct, but they are not necessarily the ones who lose out in the end. All of us, the writers, those who are popular and those who are not, those who are famous and those who are unknown, are in a new, self-centered time in which a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading.1
1 Colin Robinson, "Diary," London Review of Books, 26 February 2009.
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Mr. George Elliott Clarke
14.6.2009
In Other Words Too
Language is always a system of freedom, of entertaining endless alternatives and infinite possibilities. Hence, every tyranny and every dogmatic ideology must try to limit language and limit those who use it creatively and expressively. But all such attempts will fail because of the plasticity and elasticity of language: You try to impose a monologue, the sound of dictatorship, and the language resolves into skits and jests and (black) comedies, acid with irony and ascerbic surrealism. Every code of laws is always on the verge of becoming either Alice in Wonderland or Animal Farm. (The writer does not hold a mirror up to society or reality: he or she pushes the society or reality through the looking glass.)
For these reasons, the act of terror is always a grotesque fantasy, and that is why it must always strive for spectacular effects: to behead a man on camera, to dynamite onself in a crowded marketplace, to incarcerate and torture untold numbers of civilians, without charge, in ”the name of democracy,” et cetera. Yet, terrorism cannot triumph because it is based on illusion: the idea that fear can displace reason, that positive policy can be dictated by gunpoint or with a bomb detonator in hand.
The problem for all monologic endeavours is that language is always polyphonous with other ideas. When some insist, ”We must invade Iraq,” or ”We must blast Iran,” we may say the language allows other possibilities. When some argue, ”Capitalism is based on greed, i.e. human nature, and so we just have to accept that occasionally widespread fraud will bankrupt the system,” we may answer that capitalism can be regulated so as to prevent the robbery of the people.
In other words, there are always possibilities, other ways of doing, thinking, being, and behaving. The Book of Life is not yet closed….
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Mr. Petri Tamminen
15.6.2009
Everyone who has passed even the premises of a university knows how old-fashioned it is to separate people into men and women. Gender is just an experience, a state of mind, a segment of a line on which we continuously change position. Everything else is a myth; all the features we believed to distinguish manliness from femininity are now supposed to be learned and artificial. May be so. But if the post-gender hippie hanging out in the campus cafeteria now starts to think the fight is over and the myths have been dismantled, it would be well worth it to make a trip to the countryside and come to where we live.
Where we live a man has to be expressionless and sure of himself like the pilot of a small aircraft: “I fly this plane, whatever happens.” This demand is impossible, interesting and amusing. You should’nt dismantle gender myths, it is like taking the national team away from the sports enthusiast, like saying that from now on nationality is just an experience, and everyone must play only for himself.
At the time when cars were still bad and people had little money, our family used to spend summers together. The women sat in the house talking about past summers, and the men stood out in the yard not talking about anything. A child could run between these two realities and be invisible. I found that exciting. Thinking back, it was exciting in the same way that records excite us: inside the house one saw how woman a person could be, and out in the yard how man.
I’m still running between the house and the yard. I am not familiar with the latest research on the minute differences of male and female language, but my own research says men and women speak different languages. Men and women where we live, I mean.
Where we live only women say: “where we live”. A man says: “my house, my yard, my son, my grandson”. He says this even if he has lived in the same house with his wife for 40 years.
Where we live, women define themselves from the outside. They name a group or some personality feature, and then they tell whether they belong to it or not. The most suprising definition of this kind that I have heard was: “I’m not really one of those shoe-box people.” This sentence can not be translated into male language, it is hopelessly lost in translation. But another sentence in the same vein that goes: “I’m not one of those Christmas people” translates perfectly well: “Christmas just doesn’t work.”
Where we live a man doesn’t define himself but the world.
Where we live women use the word “maybe” amazingly lightly, just as lightly as men use expressions like “certainly” and “no way”. In an office around where we live women were thinking how they could get their male boss to listen. They came up with the idea that they should finish their every speech with “And this is a fact, one hundred per cent”.
A woman can take attention and has the courage to give it, too: “Isn’t that a lovely colour you have in your hair, it really suits you.” This is an authentic statement, heard in a bus where we live. If men would ride in buses where we live, they would not praise each other’s hair. If they did praise each other at all, they’d do it so they won’t get caught doing it: “You gonna sell that car, the way you fixin’ it up so fine.”
Women create reality by talking. As for the men, reality has already been created. They’d like to compress this reality, its emotions and what happens in it in a sentence that would end the ongoing conversation, and all conversations to come. Antero Mertaranta, the living legend of Finnish sportscasting, has come close to this kind of an all-embracing crystallization: “There it is.” Still closer, to the very metaphysical borders of holiness, has come Teppo Numminen, the living legend of Finnish ice-hockey, who said after a defeat in the Olympic final: “That’s it.”
Where we live, men would rather not say anything at all. They grumble inwardly and say to themselves: “Tomorrow I ain’t gonna say anyone anything except hello and goodbye.” These decisions are never followed through, because the world always sets a new trap for men, coaxes them into answering questions and explaining, even into chattering.
It is these very traps men escape by going fishing, attending horse races and football matches, going into the forest, all those places where it makes sense not to talk. Young men get in their cars and drive, just drive, without destination. The most eager ones drive so long they end up in rallies or formula races. They want to get away from it all, but end up in a press conference, telling millions of people how the race went and how they feel now.
A writer, too, must know how to talk. It is taken for granted that one is able to do it, that the writing of a book somehow qualifies one to talk about it.
I don’t know how to talk. I get nervous even in the most everyday conversations and start to get an ominous feeling that this is not going to end well. And it usually doesn’t: usually my sentences run into dead ends or simply fade away. On top of this I feel I am pretending: if the subject of the conversation is a simple one, I feel I’m pretending to be a man of the people, if it is philosophical, I feel I’m pretending to be smart. By talking, I have never been able to find the true self that we all would so much love to recognize in ouselves.
Writing is not talking. Sometimes writing seems to be an act of falling silent. Like playing Misére, a card game where you try to win as few tricks as possible.
The challenge of writing is not social but mathemathical or geometrical: thought is three-dimensional like a ball or a scenery, but the sentence is a segment of a line. That segment is where the thought should be stuffed. Not an easy feat. Most of my stories and themes disappear in this act of stuffing. I am left with mere slogans. With them I am supposed to be able to carry the story onwards.
This method of expression has its roots, its natural models.
Where we live, all gatherings and festivities sooner or later turn into drinking festivals. The organizer of the festivity may put together the most cultural program, but one thing must not be forgotten: drinking is the reason why everyone really turns up. And when the men drink, their expressive capacities are deepened into lyrical dimensions. Of course, their lyrical, aphoristic statements are still followed by a silence lasting easily ten minutes, punctuated only by strange coughing, hiccuping, sneezing, throat-clearing and burping.
In my books, I have often cited these sparsely talking men, who, when drunk, open up like flowers. Picking up these crystallizations is hard work; you have to put up with long lonely hours of the night and meet many awkward situations, visits of the police and the ambulance. Where we live, men don’t like to scuffle with amateurs, for that purpose they call professionals.
After many years of experience I have learned to imitate the expressions of silent men and produce corresponding thoughts myself, indoors. Writing is frightening, it scares me, but when I hear the echo of those quiet men’s voices from beneath my sentences, the text begins to feel simple enough for me to take heart and write it.
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Mr. Desmond Egan
15.6.2009
I looked at Christ transfigured without fear
The Light was very beautiful and kind
And where the Holy Ghost in flame had signed
I read it through the lenses of a tear
IN OTHER WORDS
because there always are other words there must be other words
other sounds other signs
for the face the thing the movement the whole moment
which lodges in us in each several one of us with its unsayableness
to leave us baffled again defeated again ready to begin again try again to
catch to snatch
life ah life unfolding unexpected from a window moving silently down the
echo road
and the queue slowing along away towards the no returning the
becoming real only memory
life life only life oh living oh faces oh voices as we leave
moving away away always
what matter the defining the explaining the hierarchies the fatal indulgence
where water alone a single drop is enough is too much
and its flat lake its heaving
not turmoil either not proof either but enough
and the maker still caught in creating yes this every single day to
wonder
to wonder
within the responsible
and flowers a forget-me-not a single one so much too much
one tiny frog two pinpricks eyeing from his lily pad
much less people the those whom you love and and cannot tell and can never
understand
while the tired leaves bounce soundlessly down
and midges circle endlessly silently over the velvet sky-touched pond or hawks
on a thermal beyond metaphor
tired people too old friends or unknown the adventure untold untellable even
to themselves in a newspaper of dreams
for Christ plays in ten thousand places
lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his
words a starling gapebeak and goldfleck trapped among books banging into
the window the beckoning unreachable light
sounds syllables
enough not enough
reachings bangings
dartings a grabbing even briefly even a little at the enormous something
starling trapped
a little
some little
this side of that
which comes and sweeps in crashing and slowing back to the brooding
unsayable
unimaginable unfaceable almost unfaceable
who could
cannot
the mind the brain co-called trapped confused
who
cannot bear
here out there where words
the worst the best the ever inadequate
other words
in other words
dart again hide again
and beyond the prison of glass
another day opens and opens
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Ms. Jayne Anne Phillips
15.6.2009
Here at LAHTI, writers from all over the world will speak in other words – between and across boundaries of nationality, time, and history. I was last at Lahti twenty-six years ago, just after publishing my first book, Black Tickets, and beginning a lifelong relationship with Tammi, my Finnish publishers, and with Finland. I am so honored to be here today, for I believe that storytellers carry culture itself forward in prose and verse, cradled in memory and desire, the desire to believe that our lives and deaths have meaning. Human story, from the beginning of recorded words, forms an arc of conscience within the realm of language that becomes as immortal as literature itself. The power of language means that when we in this room are gone, our work has a chance of continuing in the varied and beautiful languages of our cultures. I believe that literature is in fact the religion of this world, that story is the history of culture, and that the artist telling a story participates in religious practice, redeeming what might be lost or misunderstood, redeeming suffering itself.
The writer is a pilgrim, undertaking a journey that presents no guarantee. All of us write ‘in other words,’ and we know that writing presents insoluble problems. Novels are especially hard taskmasters: so many words, so much to sustain and invent, so many ways to go wrong. Writers know that novels are often created in stops and starts, fit in around paying jobs, families, emergencies and periods of doubt. The writing requires dogged faith, and the poems or novel forced to wait their time, do not wait quietly. They casts a shadow, whisper, beckon like dangerous lovers, and accompany the writer everywhere, mixing up memories and dreams, coming to mind in living color while the writer is driving in the dark.
Sometimes, writers cut the cord and (wisely) move on. I never do; I make it my practice to spend years on what seems a risky investment. Novels are all about risk— like life. How strange then, how unusual, when moments of kismet occur. Kismet is defined in my Encarta English Dictionary (conveniently located in my Tools menu) as: (1) "fate or destiny," or (2) "the will of Allah." Kismet is listed just above "kiss" and "kiss and tell." The listing is in itself a modest expression of kismet: The writer is "kissed" by fate in the form of image and language, perhaps delicately, like the brush of an eyelash on a cheek, or passionately, deeply, forever. Then, the writer tells, understands the metaphor, follows a revelation into the heart of the story.
I see my work as a continuum; one book leading to the other, informing the other, lighting a path barely seen. Lark and Termite, my new novel, is not so new, and the process of writing it has been filled with moments of kismet. It began nearly 30 years ago in my hometown, when I visited a high school friend whose second-story window looked out over a densely green grass alley whose narrow tire tracks were filled with white stones. Several modest houses fronted on the alley. There, just below us, sat a boy in a ’50s-style aluminum lawn chair, facing the empty alley. He sat with his legs folded under him, blowing on a long blue strip of plastic dry-cleaner bag that he held to his forehead, moving it with his breath. He seemed to be looking through the blue with total concentration. Who is that, I asked my friend, and what is he doing? "I don’t know," she said, "but he sits that way for hours."
His image burned itself into my consciousness. I didn\\\'t know it at the time, but I took him with me from that moment.
Birthdays figure into the secrets of Lark And Termite. Years later, I attended a birthday party given by an artist friend in Cambridge Massachusetts, because I happened to share her boyfriend\\\'s birthday. I admired a page from her sketchbook, and she ripped out the drawing and gave it to me -- for your birthday, she said. The moment I saw it, I recognized the boy, in profile, holding something transparent up to his face. "The Termite," my friend had written, almost illegibly, across the top. Now the boy had a name as mysterious as he. For me, the drawing became another image of Termite, nine years old, living in West Virginia on a grass alley in the 1959 suggested by that lawn chair. The drawing appears in Lark And Termite opposite the title page, as Lark’s drawing of Termite. Over the years, I became, in a sense, Lark, the protective 17-year-old half-sister who narrates their story in the novel. Termite doesn’t walk or talk, but he loves the big sounds of storms, and trains passing overhead, across the double railroad tunnel where the kids from the alley congregate summer and winter. The double tunnels are chiseled stone, built during the Depression years in West Virginia, when federal programs put men to work building roads and bridges. Lark tells us Termite’s father was killed just before he was born, early in the Korean War, that "they never got his body back" and held the service "around a flag that was folded up." She tells us, as she first told me, all the secrets kept from her, which are in turn knotted to the mysteries of the defining power of love, the bridging of death itself, the life of memory, trauma, and yearning, the power of what is hidden but continues to exert energy and force, the fact that love can defy death.
The novel was well along, narrated by Lark and Nonie and envisioned as a short, tight story in which the secret of the children’s parentage was revealed. Then, on September 30th, 1999, I opened the New York Times, to see a color photograph of the double railroad tunnel at No Gun Ri, South Korea, and the AP story documenting the atrocity that occurred there in July of 1950. The tunnels were concrete, but their tall arches, the deep adjacent space inside them, were unmistakable: the parallel world that lay behind every word of my novel. It seemed impossible but it was completely obvious. The way was revealed, and the path made doubly difficult. Kismet makes no promises: It’s a gesture, an opportunity, a phenomenon whose existence is inarguable, whose "kiss" remains with us, a secret we’re entrusted to tell. Coverage and revelation of No Gun Ri won a Pulitzer Prize for Martha Mendoza, Charles Hanley, and Sang-Hun Choe of the Associated Press. I worked with their series of articles, as well as other sources, and it was important to me that they read Lark and Termite, an entirely imagined world whose dark shadow truly existed. I met Martha in California when she hosted me at her book group. She loved the book, but she did have one concern. "You know," she told me, "it\\\'s so odd. One of our best sources of information on No Gun Ri was a veteran who talked to us on the condition that his name not be used. We promised never to reveal it." She paused. "His name was Levitt." Kismet cannot be explained. Lark and Termite creates its own mystery, and even, in Termite, its own mode of perception. He is a secret, living between words, repeating literal echoes as words disappear. Literature, in fact, repeats the echoes and syllables of human history, again and again, miraculous, mysterious and powerful, over years and years, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words, offering up to a forgetful ad violent planet, the parallel worlds of literature. That world mirrors and explains this world in which we live, and yet lives far beyond us, into the future of language, and the very heart of why we are here.
Thank you.
1
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Ms. Heidi Köngäs
Literature is saying it in other words
For me, writing is saying it in other words, saying it in words, that is, recoding the unrecordable, something that really cannot be described. Words are pictures, or they become pictures and signs, but they are not a film. Words do not move, they do not fill up, they are not lit, but still they enlighten. Words are small black signs, through which I try to construct a continuity, a movie of words. Words are not music, but still they ring.
I am also a director, and I had written a number of scripts before I wrote my first novel. When I turned to prose, I hardly knew it myself. To be sure, I had written as long as I can remember, and I had all kinds of scetches, situations, citations and small pieces of dialogue in my drawer, but when working on one of these texts I suddenly realized it was a novel, not a script for a movie. When I saw where it was heading, I put it back in the drawer and left it there for six years. I didn’t even touch it, I never opened the 46 pages I had written while homesick. At that time, I was in London over the winter, and I started to feel homesick for the Finnish basic tastes like lingonberry, sourmilk, brose porridge, salted fish and sourbread. Having these tastes in my memory – or maybe I should say my tastebuds – I started to write a story about life in the previous century, somewhere deep in Finland, in a time before electricity, cars and streetlights, before everything I was seeing around me at that time. I lived in a metropolis and tried to look for something dark, tried to reach an era I had never known but felt an affinity towards. I thought about my family, of course, and in London in 1993 I realized that a hundred years before I would not have had any shoes, at least the protagonist of my book didn’t. The prose became a kind of a sheltered place, I familiarized myself with cows, creatures I had never even touched, since I am not a country girl. I grew up in small towns, always in the shadow of factory smokestacks.
It was only six years later that I took out those pages and wrote my first novel called Luvattu (“The promised one”). And thereby I opened a door that would not close again.
From the very beginning, prose was saying it in other words, but the descriptive writing and colourful language seemed foreign to me. I was used to writing scripts like this: A man comes in to the room. The woman leaves the cafeteria. Only a limited amount of words are needed in a script, so I was used to being sparse in that respect. A man and a woman fill up only when you blow life into the words, when actors and actresses fulfil the given specifications, do what is written, come and go with their faces, their hairs, their eyes, meet and separate in those rooms, in those cafeterias. Only later I have understood that it was some kind of a pen-camera I wrote my first three novels with, and I had seen everything as pictures, whose continuity I had recorded in the form of a novel. Only in my fourth novel, Jokin sinusta (“Something of You”) I started to get closer to traditional prose. I used the viewpoint technique, as in my earlier novels, but I distanced the text whenever it came close to myself. You could say I was slowly learning to tint, to use colours. But my second profession, all the years I had spent with pictures, still affects my writing and how I see things and events in pictures, which I then dismantle into words.
For me, saying it in other words, is to say it in words.
But why write? Why don’t I just make moving pictures? Why are words so important? I think it must be the very process of writing, the intimate nature of being a writer. A writer is alone with his of her subconscious, alone with all the personal memories, everything studied and experienced. When writing, all the tastes and smells are emphasized, or maybe it’s just that I started off in such a culinary manner.
I have learned to appreciate the voyage of writing, all those phases when one believes to be already there, only to find just another stage, another podium towards which to travel. I think it is closer to acting than to directing. A writer acts, experiences from the inside what an actor does in his mind while processing his role. As a writer, I am all the people I write about. I draw them inside myself, I give myself to them whatever they are like, whether they are acceptable or reprehensible. For a writer, as well as for an actor, the most interesting ones are those creations one doesn’t necessarily like, or whose actions one doesn’t accept. It is these very characters in a novel that one can develop very difficult love relationships with, loves that hold you in their grip and in the end teach you the most.
In my novel Jokin sinusta there is a woman called Soili, who leaves her two-month-old baby to her sister Mirja to be taken care of. Mirja, who is childless, learns to love the child, and the relationship develops into a life-long mother and child -relationship. The novel shows the events from the viewpoint of both sisters, and every now and then I use the child between these two as a narrator.
I was that child, the starting point of the story was me. Maybe that’s why describing Soili turned out to be the most important thing in the nove to me. I knew the experiences of my mother – Mirja in the novel, that is – and myself, of course, there was nothing new in them. What really was interesting was getting inside of that person, whom I detested as a child, and whose very existence I felt as a threat. I and the whole family were always terrified that Soili would come and take me with her abroad, because she wouldn’t permit an adoption.
When writing my novel from the point of view of Soili I think I may have come close to the work of an actor. Writing and acting as professions are conducted inside, in a manner of speaking, and they are full of invisible processes. Of course they are not identical. An actor communicates with the audience, but the encounter between the writer and the reader is always extremely intimate. It is always just two people, the writer and the reader, and every act of reading is unique, nothing else can come between them. Two minds meet, and if the text works, the reader gets something he or she didn’t know, understand or anticipate before. And I’m not speaking about the ready-made entertainment that also brings great pleasure to the reader, because that pleasure is completely based on predictability, and those kinds of books you tend to forget before you’ve ever finished them. There is nothing left for you.
I know that literature also breaths towards movies, when novels are dramatized into movies. It is interesting and challenging to make something in a new format, but it is also clear that Finnish moving pictures would never have been there at all without Finnish literature. The very first movies in this country were based on novels: Minna Canth’s Sylvi and Anna-Liisa were filmed early on, the same goes for Aleksis Kivi’s Kihlaus and Nummisuutarit, Juhani Aho’s Juha, Artturi Järviluoma’s Pohjalaisia, and Väinö Kataja’s Koskenlaskijan morsian.
Movies and literature go hand in hand, they breathe the same air when they tell stories. That’s why a good novel can be the beginning of a good movie, but the opposite can also be true. Sometimes the novel is more than the movie, sometimes a good movie can be based on a bad novel. The last time I thought about the relationship between a novel and a movie was when I had seen the film version of the fantastic novel The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. For me, the movie was a disappointment, even if Kate Winslett did a fine job playing the female protagonist. The biggest problem was the language, and the credibility gap that ensued thereof. I could not believe in the English-speaking Reader. Some part of history is embedded in language, and the world should be able to stomach that fact, especially those who finance films, and the movie-goers, too. You cannot transpose the rhythm of German into English, even if that clearly was what was attempted. But why didn’t the language bother me when I read the book translated into Finnish. I think the film was too tangible, too real. It is so much like reality itself. We see it in front of us with our own eyes. Compared with a film, the radio play is clearly a hotter vehicle, because it is strongly based on one sense only, the hearing. But literature is the best of them all, because it leaves everything to imagination, and imagination is always boundless.
So, when we speak about saying it in other words in literature, we speak about literature itself, the hard core of it. We speak about literature, that teaches us something we didn’t know before, litearature that lets us live so many lives and understand something more. A person who does not read literature fumbles in dark in a narrow corridor guided only by his own narrow experience. Reality television is not reality. Only through literature can we understand the history of the human mind, people’s esperiences and their lives. Good literature is genuinely global communication, at its best it also surpasses history. That is why we hear a human voice from a thousand years back in translation from the Chinese Chin Chia’s poem For my Wife:
Human life is like the morning dew,
The world is hard and full of worries.
Sorrows always come early,
Moments of joy so sadly late.
I remember the time I took up office,
And You became more distant by the day.
Then I sent a carriage to bring You here:
They left empty, and empty they came back.
I’m reading Your letter. My heart feels cold.
I cannot eat,
I sit alone in my empty room.
Who could give me courage?
Sleepless, I stay awake during the long nights,
I toss and turn with my head on the pillow,
Surrounded by sorrow. My heart is not a bedroll
Which you can wrap up and put away.
Literature is timeless, or time doesn’t exist. There is only man, one who writes down his or her thoughts and feelings, and we hear them and understand every word.
In Finland we now think in quartals, which is a formula to destroy literature. Finnish fiction only lives from autumn till Christmas. Everything happens between those two; competitions, prizes, newspaper reviews, fairs. During those few months a writer has to stretch like a bow, or the moment is gone and the book is done with. After Christmas the publishers don’t even send free copies to critics.
I know that writers relate to time, not to a moment, but the machinery around them presses the novel into a product, brands the writer almost to a trademark, works according to the prerequisites of the markets. This pressure from the marketplace has created a situation, where most of literature is left in the shadow, in a kind of quiet marginal, where it lives its own low-circulation life without the attention of the public. It is a hard spot for a writer, but at the same time, that’s where some of the most interesting thinkers in our literary life are. The experimental heart seeking new answers is there. I know that the number of new titles has risen, but this doesn’t explain the phenomenon. There is also less talk about literature, for example the main TV channels don’t have a weekly, not even a monthly programme with its main focus on literature. The cultural pages in our newspapers don’t promote literature the way they used to. Aamulehti, to give one example, has told us that it will stop rewieving new Finnish poetry altogether. At the same time in schools fewer and fewer books are read, and you can go through the whole school system reading practically no Finnish literature at all. You can graduate from high school without knowing a single book by, say, Minna Canth, Maria Jotuni, Joel Lehtonen, Aino Kallas or Juhani Aho, and without an inkling of who are Ilmari Kianto or F. E. Sillanpää. To say nothing of poets. I do not think Aleksis Kivi, J. L. Runeberg and Väinö Linna are the same thing as Finnish literature. And many young people leave our 12-year long school system with only these three names in their heads. If the youth are synonymous with the future, we are long gone from the time when we were a reading people. Maybe we don’t stay silent in two languages any more, because we chat, use the Messenger and send SMS-messages, in English, if possible. 4U.
Literature is saying it in other wordws, but we lack intermediators between readers and writers.
And that is a pity, no nation will survive without language. When the whole national identity is embedded in language, as in our case, we have to recognize the fact. No one can be strong without knowing who he is and where he comes from. Language is identity, literature is its memory. It is so simple, and I cannot think of a better platform for innovations. Language carries everything we need in modern life, it has rhythm and beat, that which certainly is our very own thousand-year-old heritage, our own voice.
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LIWRE 2009
Intervention by Ms. Carolyn Forché
16.6.2009
Poetry, Witness and Doubt
I am honored to be invited to be with you, and I wish to offer my deepest gratitude especially to the conveners of the Lahti Reunion, and to Mr. Elia Lennes and my friend, Johanna Venho for making it possible for me to come to Finland for the first time.
For many years, I have been gathering what I have called “The Poetry of Witness,” in an effort to understand the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination: what happens to the poets, and the languages of the poets, who have experienced warfare, military occupation, house arrest, forced exile, imprisonment and other forms of state imposed suffering? Many poets have endured these experiences during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries throughout the world. As these poets were marked by suffering, so, too, was their language, which also passed through violence, and I would argue that regardless of the content of their poems, this mark remains legible.
When I was asked to define a poet of witness by an editor in New York sixteen years ago, I told the story of Miklos Radnoti, foremost Hungarian poet of his generation, who, in 1944, was sent to do forced labor in what is now Yugoslavia. Once there, he was able to procure a notebook, into which he inscribed his last ten poems, as well as a message in Hungarian, Croatian, German, French and English:
...contains the poems of the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnóti...to Mr. Gyula Ortutay, Budapest University lecturer...Thank you in advance.
When it was clear that they would be defeated, the Germans decided to evacuate the camp and return the workers to Hungary. Radnóti, assuming that the first column would be the safest, volunteered for the march and recorded it in his poetry. Once in Hungary, the soldiers in charge, unable to find hospital rooms for these prisoners, took Radnóti and twenty-one others to a mass grave and executed them. Had Radnóti not volunteered to return to Hungary, he might have been saved by Marshal Tito’s partisans. However, the story does not end—as millions of such stories ended—with execution and the anonymity of a mass grave. After the war was over, Radnóti’s wife was among those who found and exhumed the grave in the village of Abda. The coroner’s report for corpse #12 read:
A visiting card with the name Dr. Miklos Radnóti printed on it. An
ID card stating the mother\'s name as Ilona Grosz. Father\'s name illegible. Born in Budapest, May 5, 1909. Cause of death: shot in the nape. In the back pocket of the trousers a small notebook was found soaked in the fluids of the body and blackened by wet earth. This was cleaned and dried in the sun.
In the notebook Bori notesz (Bor Notebook) were Radnóti\'s final poems, among them the Razglednici written during his imprisonment, which survived not only the poet\'s death, but also their burial with him for twenty months. Radnóti\'s story is simply an extreme version of the stories of many of twentieth-century poets. Radnoti’s final poems are among the exemplary works of the poetry of witness.
In an interview, Adam Czerniawski tells the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz that he is the poet “who has recorded the time of terror, disaster and agony. “To express this,” he says,” you have created a minimal poetry which has ranged itself against all poetry. For the last thirty years you have been running away from poetry. From the very beginning, you were saying that poetry is finished, that one could not be a poet in 1945,” a statement that echoes an oft-quoted and misunderstood proclamation from Theodor Adorno, that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Rozewicz responded by saying that he was of two minds, one belonging to the poet who valued and read Eliot and Auden, and the other a realist, who said to himself “Listen, don’t take any notice of what people have been writing, don’t bother writing yourself, this happens to be your present situation, you are living through a particular time, confronting certain events. Throw everything away. If you can’t create a poetry which will be a new form of human existence, the whole effort is not worth a candle. What he felt his times demanded was a “poetry of words that I actually knew…a vocabulary of someone who had finished secondary school and suddenly found himself in a situation for which he bore no responsibility…And not just two minds,” he continued, “but two hearts. On the one hand, the history of art, on the other, everything is shit.”
Despite this crisis of disillusionment, Rozewicz found a language for his radical cri de coeur [cry of the heart] in a honed, spare, and as has been said, almost whispered lyric. “They tell me,” he said, “that my poems are as spontaneous as the cry of a terrified man under Nazi occupation, that I have uttered a cry of despair on behalf of a whole generation. “Yes, I have uttered a cry, but before that I had worked upon the form that cry was to take.” His artistic rigor and discipline remained, and when asked about his seeming love-hate relationship with poetry, that is, the radical doubt to which he subjected everything, including his genre, he answered, “not just love and hate. There is also irony, sarcasm, contempt and indifference.” What he desired was a “poetry of absolute transparency, so that the dramatic material might be seen through the poem, just as in clear water you can see what is moving at the bottom…These are not philosophical poems,” he said, “they think with images.”
His compatriot, Zbigniew Herbert echoes this observation: “I avoid any commentary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts…” In his wakeful poems he too struggles toward a clear-eyed, dispassionate defense of morality and human dignity, creating as his survivor the figure of Mr. Cogito, perhaps a descendent of Valery’s M. Teste, but certainly a fellow sprung from Descartes, who admonished that we should begin by doubting everything. For Herbert, there would be no artistic or poetic pretension, no flowery language or elaborate rhetoric. There would not even be punctuation. He believed poetry to be, quite literally, “a struggle for breath.” His poetry begins by doubting everything, valuing objectivity and rigor, dispassionate thought, independence, evenhandedness, irony and imperviousness to cant. It manifests distaste for artistic pretension, and as with Rozecicz, seems to express almost a hatred for poetry itself. It is low-voiced in its proclamations, and yet it boldly calls for courage:
Go upright among those who are on their knees
Among those with their backs turned and those topped in the dust
You were saved not in order to live
You have little time you must give testimony
Be courageous when the mind deceives you be couragous
In the final account only this is important
[tr. by John and Bogdana Carpenter]
It is as if Herbert feels that he has nothing with which to work, and makes of that nothing an instrument:
he wanted to make it
an instrument of compassion
he wanted to understand to the very
end
and so to bring the dead back to life
to preserve the covenant
Mr. Cogito’s imagination
Has the motion of a pendulum
It crosses with precision
From suffering to suffering
There is no place in it
For the artificial fires of poetry
He would like to remain faithful
To uncertain clarity
This “uncertain clarity” is Herbert’s species of doubt. When asked if he believes in God he answered: “I had enormous doubts and yet I answered ‘yes, I do.” It was then that I started to believe. Przybos was puzzled. ‘You are so intellectual, “ he said. “Do you really believe in that crucified slave? You of all people, an aesthete, a lover of Greek gods.’ The more he blasphemed and disparaged, the stronger my faith grew. I think Pascal was right when he said that by assuming the existence of God we have more possibilities than if we suppose that there was no God.”
Wislawa Szymborska shares with her fellow poets an exacting scrutiny of the world, believing memory and imagination to have moral significance. She retrieves from the debris isolated moments and gestures, in perpetual wonder at the accident of being: She writes:
Why to excess then in one single person?
This one not that? and why am I here?
On a day that’s a Tuesday? In a house not a nest?
In skin not in scales? With a face not a leaf?
Why only once in my very own person?
Precisely on earth? Under this little star?
After so many eras of not being here?
She creates in her poems a different lyric self, not the “I” of the confessional lyric, or the autobiographical self on display in some American poetry, an enacted dramatization of personality, but a more protean one, born of many deaths of the self, who invites us to regard the world along with her, a world so fragile that all within it may momentarily be consigned to oblivion. And all is brought into question, even language. It is, Czeslaw Milosz has written, “as if she had found herself…in a play which changed the individual into nothing, an anonymus cipher, and in such circumstances to talk about oneself is not indicated.”
These are the poets of the “generation of doubt,” as our panel title suggests. Szymborska declares the position openly in her 1996 Nobel acceptance lecture: “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.” Ideologues, she remarks, “always know. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments…. “Poets, if they are genuine, must always keep repeating, “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate.” This hesitancy before the page is a species of necessary humility, achieved in the aftermath of world-death.
The Egyptian-born Jewish poet Edmond Jabès wrote, “To Adorno, the German philosopher, who has said that we cannot write after Auschwitz, I say that we must write. But we cannot write like before.” Adorno himself later acknowledging that “the abundance of suffering tolerates no forgetting…this suffering…is consciousness of adversity…[and] demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it. The most important artists of the age have realized this.”
Tadeuz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert are among the most important artists of that age, and they discovered, singly and collectively, a poetic language marked by the impress of extremity endured by them, and, as Czeslaw Milosz asserted, attempted in such language to “exorcize the past.” “Szymborska,,” he wrote, “ like Tadeuz Rozewicz and Zbigniew Herbert, writes in place of the generation of poets who made their debut during the war and did not survive.” Reaching adulthood at the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Poland, it is possible that these three poets did not survive as the selves they may once have become. Adorno speculates that such people “will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.” They swerved from the realm of dreams, however, for a clear-eyed appraisal of their milieu, and pared their poetry to a chiseled language in which moments are isolated and preserved, the lost and forgotten are attended, previous knowledge is unsettled, and memory and imagination have moral significance. It is a provisional kind of writing, embodying resistance to ideology and power through a necessary cultivation of doubt.
Doubt is what makes faith possible, according to the theologians; it is the “beacon of the wise,” and it is thought’s despair, it engenders the capacity for speculative thought, and fortifies us against the colonization of consciousness, openly or surreptitiously. As Gustav Flaubert proclaimed, “one must always hope when one is desperate and doubt when one hopes.” So it was that these three poets found themselves at the end of the war, desperate perhaps for hope, but finding no repository for this human aspiration. Six million people of a population of thirty million had been murdered; Warsaw had been depopulated and razed and countless villages destroyed. This was the reality in which and against which these poets lived and wrote, and in them, one discerns a self-distancing desire, a gesturing toward absences, the departed yes, but there is also a shift to the material world, to things overlooked or forgotten. Their work is characterized by a reflexive manner of thinking, a weighing and judging of thought itself. Such writing is perceived as an obligation, as an infinitely inexhaustible responsibility toward the other, toward thought, and toward justice. This poetry reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of compulsion. It seeks to register through indirections and interventions the ways in which the linguistic and moral universes have been disrupted by history, by the course of events. The patient heroism of such work is never futile nor without consequence. I am guided in this by Hannah Arendt\'s meditation on the self-justifications of collaboration with oppression, on the claim that the resistance of the single individual does not count in the face of the annihilating superiority of totalitarian regimes which make all resistance disappear into "holes of oblivion":
The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story..the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody\'s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not. . .Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
These poets would not comply, and they are among those who make living on earth into the present possible. “History teaches us,” Herbert has written, “that nations and their achievements can be destroyed in an almost total manner. During the war I saw the fire of a library. The same fire was devouring wise and stupid books, good and bad. Then I understood that it is nihilism which menaces culture the most. Nihilism of fire, stupidity, and hatred.” All of these are in abundant world supply in the early twenty-first century, and so we must be vigilant, aware of the fragility of civilizations and cultures including our own, and awake to the dangers of our own apathy and the portends of our complicity. The American poet, Charles Simic, born in the former Yugoslavia, stirred controversy when on December 29, 2001, he wrote in The New York Review of Books regarding his contemporaries: “’They wrote as if History had little to do with them.’ that’s how I imagine some future study of American poetry describing the work of our poets in the waning years of the twentieth century. Like millions of their fellow citizens, they believed they could, most of the time, shut their eyes to the world, busy themselves with their lives, and not give much thought to evil.” What compels me to read and honor the works of the poets under discussion today is that they cast doubt on the wisdom of such obliviousness.
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