A name most frequently brought up in relation to the theory is Kazuo Ishiguro, who has admitted he aims to write a plainer kind of prose that translates easily; I fear he may have instigated this whole shebang. Other prime examples are Orhan Pamuk who has been accused of neatly condensing and packaging Turkishness for a foreign audience (in cahoots with his translator, apparently) and Salman Rushdie who might have capitalised on a version of Indianness aimed to exoticise and to sell books. Both these writers are seen as writing for a global audience, moving away from the local and specific, sometimes provoking political controversy by being ‘unfaithful to’ or ‘betraying’ their roots.

Tim Parks who teaches at IULM, has also proposed lesser-known writers for this trend, such as the excellent Swiss and Dutch writers, Peter Stamm and Gerbrand Bakker, because of their pared-down writing style and lack of culture-specific politics. I guess he would add Flemish writer Peter Terrin, recently published in English by MacLehose Press, if he read him. His claustrophobic, existential novel The Guard is set in a non-specific European urban apartment building in the near future and written in a wilfully clinical style. It subtly references Camus, Beckett and the Belgian surrealists, but always remains compelling and direct.

The obvious counter-argument is that the market might select precisely those books that do speak to an international readership and translate un-problematically (i.e. do not require explanatory footnotes). It is certainly the view I hold and matches my experience of pitching Dutch books to foreign editors. Editors like books which give a sense of the place they are set in without the reader getting bogged down in specifics. They also look for accessibility and universal themes. Commerce dictates a particular formula. Look at the kinds of novels that have proved hugely successful in translation, in particular the crime wave from Scandinavia: Stieg Larsson, Hening Mankell, Karin Fossum, Jo Nesbo, plot-driven thrillers with a cool, slightly spooky setting.

Peter Stamm was at the conference and was given the chance to air his views on the subject. He began by explaining that being Swiss means having a complex, diffuse identity. The Swiss do not need a national literature to define who they are. ‘Books don’t take place in nations, but in the mind.’ On his style, he said that he deliberately avoids Helveticisms, he likes neutral language with no colouring so that images can easily form in the readers’ minds. He travels a lot and so his novels are set in other Western locations – Paris, Munich, Chicago and Norway, yet ‘Swiss life’ is contained in most of his books in some way.

Some of Stamm’s thoughts were echoed by Mexican writer, Jorge Volpi, who claimed similarly that, ‘all novels take place in imaginary space’. His own novels are set in Germany, France and the US. It was only when he was published in Spain that he realised, to his great surprise, that he was considered ‘an exotic Mexican writer’. He repeatedly had to defend himself against the question – why had a Mexican written about Germany. The only possible answer was: why not? This points to a second requirement, potentially at odds with the globalisation trend – authenticity. Apparently one can only write authentically about what one knows. Commercially successful literature might then walk a tightrope between the local and the global, packaging the local as universal. What this means for Volpi and others daring to write about things not connected to their ‘roots’ remains to be seen.

About the Author

Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

The post Walking the Tightrope: Globalisation and Localism appeared first on English PEN.

PEN editor Tasja Dorkofikis asked me to consider how international poetry is and over the past days I’ve been thinking about this. If international is taken to mean universal and accessible to all, there are a few stumbling blocks. A haiku is not the same as a sonnet is not the same as badi, but cultural context is just as complex as form. The accomplished poet K. Satchidanandan, one of the festival’s big names this year, writes in Malayalam and weaves elements from classical Indian mythology and verse form into his work, while retaining a modern style. How will a European audience respond to this? The reader/listener’s knowledge or ignorance of a foreign culture is just as limiting to the transmission of literature as a translator’s inability to pick up and carry across all of the layers of meaning, without footnotes.

During the course of the symposium, I learn that K. Satchidanandan has translated his own work into beautiful English and in doing so, he has opted to cut out cultural references which might disturb the Western reading process, for example, ‘rain from the Hindu Treta Yuga period’ has become ‘rain from a bygone age’. Is this globalisation that Tim Parks keeps writing about on the NYR blog at work? Have the poets been invited precisely because they write the kind of neutral, non-culturally specific poetry that translates and travels easily? I decide to ask festival programmer Correen Dekker about this. Where does the festival find its poets? What does the selection process involve?

Well, she tells me, she reads a lot – individual collections which are sent in, anthologies, multilingual magazines, she visits festivals (most recently St Andrews and Berlin), talks to PI Web magazine’s international editors and studies festival lists worldwide. She laments the fact that what she looks at is limited to what is translated into English or German and would love to consider new poets off the beaten track. She also consciously tries to avoid being limited by the festival circuit which works like a kind of international fellowship programme. In response to my question as to whether she would give preference to ‘more easily translatable’ poets, she agrees; what’s more, translators are more willing to work on texts which allow for a successful end product. The festival’s selection aims to be as broad as possible, to cater to all tastes, and the opening programme in the form of a pageant gives me the chance to sample this.

There is Brazilian performance poet Márcio-Andé whose radical digital poetry is made up of a few very basic words (stone, water, diamond) recited over and over again and the poet himself playing an electric violin. For me the experience has more in common with music and art and only seems to operate on the very boundaries of linguistic expression. Headliner Ron Silliman, one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, reads work that is playful and incomprehensible. Does he get away with this because he writes in English and refers to the dominant culture? He doesn’t have to be translated to be considered. British Pakistani poet Sascha Aurora Aktar’selusive, associative work, also written in English would support this theory too. Are the most complex and impenetrable poets here the ones who write in English?

The same point actually came up earlier in the day during the translation symposium when the wonderful Dutch writer and translator J. Bernlef explained how Tomas Tranströmer’s use of the ‘objective correlative’ meant his work leant itself to translation. His images and metaphors would produce an emotional reaction in any language. Poets whose work experimented with register or language or cultural narratives would not. But still, although the selection of poets here is limited to what is available in English or German, and caters to Western tastes, there is enough diversity for the festival to offer a revelatory experience: from the eloquent young Australian L.K. Holt at her first foreign festival,tothesurprisingand fascinating Armenian talent Vahe Arsen, orPalestinian Najwan Darwish, whose familiar political agenda is presented in alluring new clothes.

About the Author
Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

Additional Information
43rd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam

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