International Translation Day took place at London’s Free Word Centre last week. It was a fascinating happening, interpreting translation and its values – its ability to represent the world, its power to revitalise, regenerate, teach, exercise, enthuse, convey one apex of language into another – from plenty of angles. There was a touch of interlocking fire about it: wherever you turned, you were caught. There was, for one thing, a great emphasis on mentoring which I particularly liked in an age when we’re constantly losing continuity. Another part of the day was the launch of the report of the Global Translation Initiative, which for two years has been exploring literary translation and its possible future. The GTI full report, Taking Flight, can be downloaded here. My own contribution to the report, “A brief history of intercultural awareness”, is printed below:

In the dry brown town of El Toboso in La Mancha, early morning and late afternoon, the streets are full of sheep, trotting tangily past with a clamour of bells; the descendants of those same sheep that a sixteenth-century knight of fiction once rode into with his lance, believing them to be an army of his mortal enemies who only looked like sheep because a sorcerer had changed their shape. To a twenty-first-century city-dweller the sight is still simultaneously prosaic and enchanted: read more »

I’ve just finished a piece for Prospect about how European literature is changing: how it’s been changing since the Berlin Wall came down, but because deep change is so slow we’re only just becoming aware that there is a redistribution of literary priorities occurring. It is, as all the best changes are, ahead of the politicians; it’s also ahead of the high table of western Europe’s writers, ahead of the journalists, ahead of the satisfied model of EU expansion and its model of consumer democracy. The change is taking root out of the old centre of Europe. Even though almost all of those countries’ leaders rushed them out of the Soviet sphere and into EU membership, their writers did not tend to follow: writers such as (the list is very partial) Imre Kertész, Dubravka Ugrešić, Yuriy Andrukovych, Péter Nádas, Jáchym Topol, and Andrzej Stasiuk.

Stasiuk, a Pole, especially embodies the vividness of this alteration, because he is – for better and worse – an extremist. In his recent books published in English, Fado and On the Road to Babadag, he gives us a new view of Europe and gives us it whole. Barely political, contrarian, melancholy, addicted to the poetry and physicality of place, avoiding big cities and the big material questions – “screw where we’re headed, I’m only interested in where we came from” – his writing, a mixture of travel and streamed meditation, is existential rather than sequential, stubborn rather than analytical, inconsistent rather than pretending any objectivity, but systematic in its interest in something western Europe’s writers have paid little attention to for decades: the human condition. read more »