Frontier

Frontier

Frontier Showcasing the creative talents of uea Celebrating the great literature of the world Editors Ana Dukakis Joe Fitzsimmons Jay Stonestreet

Illustration & Design Dougie Dodds

With Thanks To Katy Daly Dan ‘Dot’ Falvey Brett Mottram

Cover Illustration: Dougie Dodds

02

A frontier is simultaneously ever expanding and constantly in retreat. As we push against the boundaries of what we are comfortable with, we are inevitably brought into contact with the unfamiliar. It is in this instance, rather than retreating or isolating ourselves, that we find ourselves opening up to more possibilities than we had before . An open mind can only be brought about by a broad experience of these multitude of cultures. To simply experience or perform them, though, can often be insufficient. It is only through empathy, a common understanding, or connection that these relationships are able to

form, and the boundaries between something of our own culture and individuals are able to be broken circumstances. In our collection down. of reviews, we discover what is valued and praised in situations In this supplement, we hope to we may not be familiar with. We explore the great multitude of experience mind-sets on a truly ways in which world literature global scale. Exploring the famous moves into our personal sphere, UNESCO Cities of Literature, constantly expanding our own we are able to surround ourselves horizons and pushing us further in in the environments that foster to the frontier of our experience. creativity in very different ways.

Interviewing renowned translators In creating this supplement, we Don Bartlett and Alex Valente, have attempted to forge common we find that in translating works connections that branched out from cultures very different from wider, exploring our own place our own, we often find elements in the wider world of literature. of ourselves reflected in the work In doing so we hope that we will of others. We begin to see how, have a better understanding of through our own interpretation our place within these cultural of the words of others, we reveal frontiers.

Cut the Mustard

Conditions

An Interview With Don Bartlett

A Collection Of UEA Creative Writing

Joe Fitzsimmons 04-07

A Way For Voices to Be Heard A profile of Alex Valente Denise Koblenz 08-11

Unesco Exploring the Various Cities of Literature Brett Mottram 12-15

Creative Critters A Collection of Creative Comics Niamh Jones 16-17

Jay Stonestreet Julian Canlas Carlo Saio Saraswathi Menon Julian Canlas 18-23

Found In Translation International Book Reviews Dan Falvey Ana Dukakis Joe Fitzsimmons Dougie Dodds Savannah Brown 24-29

Too French Reflections On A Literary Translation Workshop Rachel Noelle 30-31

03

The Role Of The Translator Language barriers present a huge problem for the reader in thier attempt to widen thier literary horizons. Years, or even decades learning a langauge may not even be enough to fully understand texts in all thier complexity without the advantage of a native langauge. To this end, the translator plays a vital role in the experience of reaching a wider sphere of literature.

Working to reside within the liminal space of two different languages, the translator is responsible for bringing art from one collective, to another.

04

Cut the Mustard An Interview with Literary Translator Don Bartlett Joe Fitzsimmons

Residing in rural Norfolk, but with work that stretches across Europe, Don Bartlett is an acclaimed translator of Norwegian fiction. Over the past several years, he has dedicated much of his time to translating Karl Ove Knausgaard’s weighty series My Struggle, which is now in its fifth volume in English. He introduces his work saying: “I’ve done the five so far, the fifth one is finished and just going through editing now. In 2017 we have number six to work on, which is eleven hundred pages.

[Knausgaard] has split it into two parts so there are two of us working on it. Each of us will take a chapter. I've got a very tight work programme until April and then I've got a bit of a break”.

Asked whether the two of them have worked closely together on this collaborative translation, Don seems relaxed about having to share his work, explaining, “I've done all the other five, so I haven’t had to worry about all that. This time we've taken a bit of care choosing the translator, I imagine he

Artist credit: Ana Dukakis

05

will talk to me about how he's going to do it. He’s read all the books in Norwegian, and he’s read the English translation so he knows the tone he’s got to keep to”, a tone Don himself admits to having set. Talking about his work, Don explains his process for beginning to tackle such a monumental task. When coming to a novel for the first time: “the general process is to read the original, probably once, just so I've got an idea of the problems, then I start nervously translating the first draft. I try and get through that as quickly as possible. I know it’s full of errors and still sounds quite Norwegian in places, so the real work that takes place is after the first draft. I just go through it again and again making sure I've got the tone right. In the second draft I would check against the Norwegian for accuracy.

Third, forth, and fifth drafts are just making sure it all hangs together and the characters sound right. There’s a little bit of space I usually leave before the fourth and the fifth draft, just so I can let it settle, and I can move away from it then come back with fresh eyes. You tend to be caught in your own ideas”.

Don has a rather interesting method for getting his work down on the page. His writing

takes on a very methodical form. “Sentence by sentence, I go through it very slowly. sometimes I try and give myself a quota of so many thousand words a day, but generally speaking it doesn't work”. Don admits that this is a position almost unique in the role of the translator. “I think if I were [writing] the [novel] myself I would work in scenes, constructing it bit by bit. You tend to work, I suppose, by taking one little story, stopping and going back, but I suppose you don’t in this case. I think the first draft is really nervous, I want something down on paper that I can work on and then I know that if anything goes wrong I've got something on the paper”.

Of course, in approaching a text this way, it is entirely possible that some themes may get lost in the minutia of the language. However, Don hasn’t yet encountered any of these problems in his latest project.

“All authors are different, some might [disagree]. In this case [Knausgaard] said at the beginning he didn't want to be involved in the translation at all. I said ‘OK, lets just set a few rules’. When I started the first one, because the novel concerns real people, I was very worried about getting the tone right. I said to him: ‘the

first 50 pages – would he mind reading it just so he feels that it still has his voice?’ ” He said it was fine and from then on, I've only really contacted him if there’s been some kind of major problem. In fact we’ve barely spoken. Really, if there have been problems I've tried to crack them on my own.

From his point of view, if he’s got 15 translators contacting him every day, its going to get on his nerves”. The grasp of the relationship with the author and their many translators, is something that Don himself has had to manage.

The success of the novel has led to its publication in North America, which has required a translation in to American English. This presents the possibility of some of both Don and Knausgaard’s work getting lost in the multitude of translations, but Don seems confident that this isn’t a pressing issue. “I know the editor of the American version and she's been very good. A bit like the author himself, if I went through the American conversion it would just be too time consuming. There are all sorts of things of little instances where you instantly feel that that’s not right, but you've just got to turn a blind eye to them. She's very good the editor, a very soft touch.

06

In fact she's left quite a British feel to it. I can still feel it’s what I did”.

Moving away from his current work, Don discusses his role as a translator in a more abstract sense. Talking about people in education now, who may be considering literary translation as a career, he is an advocate of the benefits of ‘living’ a culture, rather than just speaking it.

“It’s not an academic exercise: this is the real thing so you really need to know how the culture works, how the people think. I imagine it is possible to live that life, but certainly you loose something by not going there. For this work I obviously was in Norway for quite a bit of time getting to know how the institutions work. I can’t imagine translating without living in the country.

“There are lots of very neat ways Norwegians have of describing certain things that are part of their lives. It’s not that they don’t exist in English, they do, it’s just that in translating it what you find yourself doing is explaining it.

As soon as you start doing that you've lost the style, so you cant do it. So what you’ve got to do is find something that captures the original in some way so the British reader doesn't miss it, and sometimes that means

leaving the word in Norwegian.

It’s no good knowing it in abstract, you've got to have seen it and know how it works, and then make sure nothing is lost”.

There are even instances where Don sometimes struggles to bridge the gap between the two cultures in his translation works. “I have spent hours on certain puns trying to find a way. Sometimes, by some sort of fluke, you manage to get a translation that encapualstes the pun and it’s still more or less funny. I can think of one instance where itss not worked at all. Even though I spent a lot of time trying to think of something equally good, in the end I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I lost it, and that was after a discussion with the editor where I showed him my options; we agreed it’s just a waste of time. Sometimes you give up and sometimes you're really lucky – and sometimes you have to work like hell to get something to work. You just don’t know”.

When asked if he’d ever considered using his talents the opposite way, and translate a work of English for the Norwegian market, he laughed as he responded: “That would be hopeless, I'm just not good enough. I think

even if an English person had lived in Norway for 30 years they would be nervous about doing that. It should really go into your mother tongue”. In fact, Don remains incredibly humble about his abilities; he even jokes about the possibility of encountering a work that he is just incapable of translating at all. “That’s close to reality.

It has never happened but I've always feared it. It can only really happen if you've signed on to a book without reading it first: that can very easily happen. I've often wondered what happens when a translator gets to a book and they get to a point where they say ‘I can’t!’

I don't know anybody who has got to that point but it must have happened”.

Before he had to leave, Don had some time to think about the role of education in translation, particular the place of UEA in the discipline.

“It is very valuable, although you have so many different students of different languages there you may find no ability practice. The good thing about the course though, is you have these talks from people within the field, that can guide the students. You still don’t know if you can cut the mustard though, it is quite frightening.

You just don’t know until you do”.

07

Translation - A Way For Voices To Be Heard A portrait of Literary Translator Alex Valente Denise Koblenz

As the world seems to be getting smaller, with social media allowing us to work internationally, making us aware that there is more than just our little western society, translation gains more importance in the literary world, an aspect that has often been ignored. To get a more international view and to signify this importance, I met up with UEA tutor and literary translator Alex Valente, and asked him about his view on literary translation.

Italy. He says of himself that he was pretty much an Italian kid until moving to the UK to start his undergraduate course in English Language and Literature at Sheffield University in 2008, after which he did an MA and PhD in Literary Translation. Apart from English and Italian Alex also speaks French, which he learned in school, and is attempting to learn Spanish ,of which he has a basic understanding at the moment.

Additionally Alex is also working with Latin and old English.

foreign languages, it was not necessarily finding out what exactly they were saying but finding out how this language worked that got his interest.

As he says himself he “always had a strange linguistic interest in languages rather than a communication interest�. At times, different languages are more closely connected thansome might think, and finding similar patterns and similar sounding words can be quite exciting when learning a new language. Being able to speak at least three languages Being half Italian and half fluently, I wondered whether English, Alex Valente was there was a language he raised bilingual, speaking As might be obvious by now, feels more at home with mostly English to his mother Alex Valente is quite passionate speaking. He replied that, for and her side of the family, languages but where does him, there is not much of a reading English books and this passion come from? For difference, other than feeling comics whilst growing up in him, meeting people speaking more comfortable swearing

08

in Italian, as probably not a lot of people in England will understand what he is saying.

Alex realised that, between English and Italian, it does not really matter what language he is speaking. As soon as he is back in Italy or England, he finds himself readapting to that environment.

has already a basis for the new translated text which he can go back to when encountering a problem. When translating, Alex’s aim is to create a text that sounds like it only exists in that one language, so that readers are not necessarily aware of it being a translation.

The translated text should be a work in its own right and As Alex is not exclusively readers should not be able to translating other works but “reverse engineer” it. also writing his own pieces as well, I wanted to know how However, this does not mean different the process of writing that Alex renounces the your own piece and translating original. Before starting to write someone else’s work is. My a translation, the one key aspect thought was that it might is research. Although wanting be more interesting to write his translation to be able to your own piece as you have stand on its own, Alex explained no guidelines and complete that he would not attempt a freedom. However, for Alex, translation without knowing the opposite is the case, as he the author’s style or without

having at least read some of his work, just to see how their style of writing might have changed or if there are certain recurring images. Research can also vary depending on the origin of the author: whilst researching English authors and their work is quite straightforward, as there are a lot of online resources to choose from researching, Italian writers and their work might be more difficult; there are not as many resources online and a lot of Italian works are published independently.

In this case, the translator actually has to get in touch with authors and publishers, in order to find pieces important for his research. This difficulty in finding Italian works online moved Alex to set out his own project of translating Artist credit: Dougie Dodds

09

contemporary Italian writers Regarding the translation of into English as there is not a lot non-fiction there is one specific available to English readers. difficulty that came to mind: the fact that Italian critics seem Alex works with different kinds to avoid repetition as much as of texts as a translator and possible, prefering to create a all of them can pose different very complex sentence, rather difficulties, be they non-fiction, than repeating a word. prose, poetry, or comics.

Although never having officially Whilst Alex personally would translated the latter before, go for the most straightforward Alex discussed this matter solution of simply repeating in depth in his PhD thesis, certain phrases, in context of which gives a critical manual these non-fiction translations, on the translation of comics. he has to somewhat copy the Translating comics comes with author’s style. In the case of the most restrictions compared critical works, the readers are to prose or poetry, as the text aware of the original author has to match the picture, along and of the fact that what they with the matter of restricted are reading is a translation. space: the text has to fit on the As Alex himself says: “if page, in the panel, as well as in the author is a pompous, thought or speech bubbles. pretentious writer, I will make sure that the English is a Translating poetry might not pompous pretentious English”. pose as many restrictions as Keeping the translation so the translation of comics, but close to the original, even if it there still are a few constraints means the syntax in the target a translator has to look out for, language might seem a bit especially regarding traditional alienating to the new readers, poetry with a set rhyme scheme, is called foreignization. When rhythm and a certain number translating, authors have to of lines. Whilst enjoying decide whether to translate so translating comics, Alex tries that it completely blends in to avoid sonnets in particular. with the target language and He says he prefers to translate culture, or whether to keep work that is more innovative certain elements of the original from a linguistic point of view, so readers are aware of the rather than simply following the original work. instructions of rhyme scheme and rhythm.

As mentioned before, Alex usually wants to create Apart from working with prose, translations that stand on their poetry and comics, Alex is also own, a work in their own right. translating non-fiction work for Translating critical essays, the website www.booksinitaly. in which the author and his it; a website promoting Italian opinion are in focus, compel the publishing, language and translator to keep the author’s culture. In cooperation with main writing characteristics. this, Alex is translating reviews, critical essays, extracts from Another problem translators upcoming novels and interviews. might encounter are the

cultural aspects of a text and their connotations. There are certain cultural references, and frameworks that work in the original but do not necessarily work in the target culture of the translation. To showcase this, Alex described a difficulty he encountered when translating poems by Italian poet Stefano Benni. Set in 1980s Italy, his poems are full of connotations especially regarding the way women are described, that could be seen sexist in our culture. In this case, Alex tries to change certain aspects that might seem offensive without changing it drastically. Alex found that in these instances, he had to compromise, “what I believe as an English writer and what he’s writing as an Italian writer”. In the end he left a translators’ note, explaining the environment the original was written in and the connotations that come with it.

In cases such as this, when a translator has to decide whether to change certain aspects to make it more acceptable for the target culture, some might think that the translator has to ask the author for permission to do so. However, as Alex explained to me, during the process of translation, the translator has more contact with the editor and publisher than with the author himself. If the translator does have questions, he asks the editor, who functions as a mediator and forwards these to the author. Nonetheless, in general, the translator does not have to ask the author for permission to change certain aspects, as the editor has already given this permission.

10

In most cases, whilst the translation is still in process author and translator do not have any contact, but as Alex explained, once the translation has been published, most authors get in touch with him through social media. To give credit to the original, and for readers wanting to find out more about the author and his work, Alex, links the author’s social media contacts to his translation, especially when publishing online.

A further aspect for translators to be aware of is the possibility of a work having been translated before. In this case, Alex likes to look at the previous translations, to see how others might have tackled a problem in a way he had not thought of. Nevertheless, before researching other translations he likes to make a first draft of his own translation so that he does not unconsciously plagiarise someone else’s work.

After having discussed the act of translation and everything it involves, we now turned to the importance of translation today. Some might argue that, as a consequence of everything being translated for them, readers are not encouraged to find out more about different languages or cultures. However Alex argues that translations give people the chance to be introduced to new work, and some might like the translation so much that they research the author and his or her work, something Alex encourages.

Furthermore, translation is one of the best ways we can access literature from different cultures and minority languages,

enabling access to something that wouldn’t be necessarily represented otherwise. Finally the author himself is able to gain a wider audience; voices can be heard.

Considering all of these possibilities, it is sad to hear that, compared to other countries, England and the Anglophone industry in general has very little to offer in terms of translation; whilst Italy’s literature consists to 40-60 % of translated works, translated works in the UK only make up 5-7%. As the publishing industry seems to be changing, promoting translations more and more, there is hope that this might change, so that English readers can be introduced to more international literature.

Equally whilst translations seem to be gaining more importance in the literary world, so does the role of the translator.

Often viewed as a thankless job, staying unrecognised in the background, translators seem finally to be gaining more recognition; for example, literature prizes are shared between author and translator, and some publishers give recognition by putting the translator’s name on the front cover as well as the inside cover.

is getting more recognition, it is no surprise that Alex plans to focus on making translation his main source of income. At the moment, however, he loves teaching and enjoys the fact that he can discuss translations with students and show them how they can do something useful with their passion for language.

Originally Alex wanted to go into teaching and only work on translations in his free time, as he admits himself that translation itself does not guarantee a living, and that many translators have multiple jobs.

Alex also explains that it is not easy to make a name for yourself as a literary translator; much of it is due to meeting the right people at the right time, but there are also a fewsteps you can take yourself, in order to gain valuable contact in the translation industry. Alex suggests events such as the Frankfurt book fair, networking groups, and the website www. emergingtranslatorsnetwork. wordpress.com, which was set up by a UEA student and helps emerging translators to form contacts, to guide them through contracts and to get them into the Translator’s Association, a professional body that looks after translators in the UK.

This is a new development and Alex seemed pleased to say that “the importance of translators is being more recognised as the publishing industry catches up with the fact that we are in 2015”.

Alex admits that it is hard to find your way in the translation industry but it is easy to start translating. If translation is a passion for you as it is for Alex, you shouldn’t give it up because it seems too difficult. Alex’s advice sums it up: “You should Having talked about his passion not be scared of getting into for language and translation, as translation but you shouldn’t well as the fact that translation rely on it as a career”.

11

UNESCO Exploring the various cities of literature Brett Mottram

Norwich is England’s only United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) City of Literature, with a rich history of literature and publishing. It had the first provincial library in the UK and the first provincial newspaper outside London, and it was the first city to implement the 1850 Public Libraries Act. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations by Divine Love was the first book to be written in English by a woman when it was published in 1395, and in the 16th century Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, composed the first English blank verse poem. Sir Thomas Browne, whose statue, beside a small statue of his brain, is in the Haymarket in the city.

Joining him is St Peter Mancroft,

a seventeenth century Norwich writer whose work is unique and sometimes wonderfully strange.

UEA was the first university to offer an MA in Creative Writing, and its alumni, even after Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, continue to see wide acclaim, sometimes even appearing at UEA’s own Literary Festival. The theatres, museums, Cathedrals, Castle, Forum, cobbled streets, pubs and quirky shops (including numerous bookstores) all continue to maintain and develop this cultural life. And, as the signs say, this is a fine city.

launched its Creative Cities Network in 2004, the Cities of Literature program aimed to “promote the social, economic and cultural development of cities in both the developed and the developing world”. All the cities were to foster dynamic public-private partnerships, by encouraging small creative enterprises to develop and thrive.

This is demonstrated through the quality, quantity and diversity of their publishing outlets, educational programmes, libraries, bookshops, cultural centres, literary festivals, and Looking further afield though, events. They are cities where there are cities celebrated as fiction, poetry and drama thrive, centres of literary excellence the and where literature is the very air world over. When UNESCO you breathe.

Artist credit: Niamh Jones

12

Dublin: Ireland The thought of Dublin no doubt conjures up images of Joyce. The city served as his muse, even when he was in self-imposed exile from it. Dublin isn’t only the setting of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; it’s also the city of Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker,

Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Roddy Doyle. In fact, it is a kind of hotbed of Irish genius. It has a lively theatre scene too, and even in the year 800 C.E, it was producing beautiful books: the lavishly illuminated Gospel Book

of Kells is on display at Dublin’s Trinity College. There are the art galleries and museums you would expect of any respectable cultural centre, and overall, it amply deserves its status as a UNESCO City of Literature.

Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament are other highlights.

But when it comes to literature, the lights are shining from a greater altitude, and you find yourself gazing at a constellation of writers. Adam Smith, David Hume, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Irvine Welsh, Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin,

Alexander McCall Smith, and J.K. Rowling have all lived and worked in Edinburgh. If a list were compiled of notable scientists and engineers, it would be no less remarkable. These literary figures conjure up a host of characters, from Long John Silver to Sherlock Holmes, and from Miss Jean Brodie to Albus Dumbledore. A City of Literature indeed.

Municipal House, respectively.

Prague also has over ten major museums, not to mention galleries and historical landmarks such as the castle, the town square, and even a medieval astronomical clock. Franz Kafka was born in its Jewish Quarter, Alphonse Mucha settled and worked in the city, and Milan Kundera set his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being during the 1968 Prague Spring, when people in Czechoslovakia opposed Soviet domination and fought for political liberalisation.

This involved freedom of speech,

and W.H. Auden’s short poem about the subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia analyses this point well. He observed that the Soviet ‘ogre’, while being able to swagger around performing brutish “Deeds quite impossible for man”, “cannot master speech”. In reality and on the page, only “drivel gushes from his lips”. By contrast, a group of perspicacious and eloquent writers and activists can see through the miasma of propaganda and begin to deal with the real world which is visible on the other side.

Edinburgh: Scotland Home to several famous festivals, from the Fringe to the International Book, Edinburgh is also a dynamic city of culture. Although, you might feel when walking its windlashed, cobbled streets on an autumn morning. It has all the museums and galleries you could hope for, as well as a university, and a castle perched impressively on a rock. The Royal Mile,

Prague: Czech Republic Lying at the heart of Europe, and having ridden the crests and troughs of over a thousand years’ worth of political, economic and cultural waves, Prague is now the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. More importantly, it is also the historical capital of Bohemia. Its National Theatre and Estates Theatre are famous venues (Mozart conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni at the latter), and the Czech Philharmonic and Prague Symphony orchestras are housed in the Rudolfinum and the

13

Kraków: Poland Kraków has had a turbulent history, despite its cultural achievements.

Its buildings showcase several centuries of changing architectural styles, and it has one of the oldest universities in the world, the Jagiellonian, founded in 1364.

But as well as witnessing a ‘Golden Age’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it suffered the atrocities of the Nazis in the

twentieth. Roman Polanski was a survivor of the city’s ghetto, and Oskar Schindler selected some of his workers from there.

By 2000 though, the city was experiencing a new Renaissance as the EU’s European Capital of Culture. Polish Nobel laureates in literature Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz have both lived here. The Wawel Castle and the Kraków National Museum

house some of the world’s most admired works of art, including Leonardo’s ‘Lady with an Ermine’.

The Historical Museum is so vast it is spread throughout the city.

Kraków also has theatres and festivals galore, and apparently, a thriving nightlife, especially in the form of live music pubs and bars. These play all sorts of genres, but if you enjoy jazz, you really are in luck.

Heidelberg adds into the mix an international Easter egg market, a classical music festival, summertime fireworks and a Christmas market, which sells a chocolate called a Heidelberger Studentenkuss (Student Kiss).

That might give some indication

of the city’s ambience. If more reasons were needed for its UNESCO status, especially literary ones, Heidelberg was the centre of German Romanticism, and a scenic Philosophers’ Walk remains on the Heiligenberg, overlooking the city.

widest range of bookshops. Of course, there are literary festivals such as the Melbourne Writers Festival, and prizes such as the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, both major prizes, are open to local writers.

C. J. Dennis, Germaine Greer, and Peter Carey are among the literary names associated with Melbourne. Many classic novels have been set in the city, including Christos Tsiolkas’ 2009 Booker Prize listed, The Slap.

Heidelberg: Germany Any small city located in the south west of Germany which hosts a vampire-themed costume ball in February, and an Autumn Festival featuring a medieval market and music ranging from rock to samba has to be a UNESCO City of Literature. Germany’s

Melbourne: Australia Melbourne, Victoria, has a diverse and lively cultural scene, whether you’re looking for art, comedy, musicals, drama, film, television or literature. It is home to the State Library of Victoria ,one of the oldest cultral buildings in Australia, and the country’s

Artist credit: Niamh Jones

14

Iowa City: U.S.

Dunedin: New Zealand

Reykjavîk: Iceland

Iowa City is the only UNESCO City of Literature in North or South America. Notably, it has the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk. Here, bronze panels featuring authors’ words, together with other quotations along the pavement about books and writing, reflect the city’s literary history. The walk features 49 writers, including William Shirer, Amy Clampitt, Kurt Vonnegut, and Flannery O’Connor, all of whom have links to Iowa. The city also looks to the literary future, with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The second largest city of the south island, Dunedin in New Zealand seems to be ticking all the criteria boxes, due to its thriving community. Abundant in writers, publishers, theatres, libraries, literary events and lyricists for a city of its size, the city is also famed for its multicultural heritage. The Denedin Public Library, opened in 1908, was the first free public library in New Zealand. As well as being a city obsessed with literature, it is home to numerous dance companies and choirs.

The cultural achievement of Reykjavík, can be seen in its Culture House (or Safnahúsið).

This allows visitors to explore some of the wealth of Iceland’s cultural history, as it features exhibits from the country’s National Museum, National Gallery, Museum of Natural History, National Archives, National and University Library, and the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Highlights include original manuscripts of Icelandic Sagas and the Poetic Edda.

and the Charterhouse monastery is located on the site of a former Muslim almúnya, flowing with fresh water and abundant with fruit trees. Granada has channelled this atmosphere into tangible literary form through a string of writers. The twelfthcentury physician Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon translated literary works into Hebrew. In the next century the geographer, historian and poet Ibn Sa’id alMaghribi compiled important collections of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Andalusian verse. Much later, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, although a fairly mediocre statesman, and a derivative dramatist, succeeded in pioneering the romantic drama in Spain through his play La Conjuracíon de Venecia in 1834. Ángel Ganivet in the latter half of the nineteenth century had more success as a writer and diplomat.

In more modern times, Melchor

Fernández Almagro, Federico García Lorca and Francisco Ayala, living in a climate of great artistic and political unrest, explored modernist ideas against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Then, poet and essayist Luis Rosales Camacho, and Javier Egea, one of the most important Spanish poets in recent times, bring us up to the present day.

The principal literary figure now in Granada is Luis García Montero. A poet and professor at the University of Granada, he is associated with the group La Otra Setimentalidad, with whom Egea was also involved, and the two collaborated on the poetic Manifiesto Albertista in 1982.

Some of his comments in defence of poets such as Francisco Ayala and Rafael Alberti, have − perhaps rightly − gone beyond the usual bounds of academic disagreement. Granada’s literary culture still seems to be thriving.

Granada: Spain This is perhaps most famous for its architecture and heritage sites, such as the Alhambra, surrounded by the gardens and orchards of El Generalife.

This site, the palace of the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, the Nasrids, who ruled the Emirate of Granada until 1492, is the emblematic symbol of the city. A literary link could take the form of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, where – in the midst of various other recollections − she remembers being kissed “under the Moorish wall” in Gibraltar. Although the exact location is slightly different, it is hard to deny the romanticism of this area of Iberia which was once known as ‘Al-Andalus’. Its character and cultural achievements have been extremely influential: the Royal Chapel and Cathedral are built over the Great Mosque constructed under the Nasrids,

15

16

Artist credit: Niamh Jones

17

The Alchemy of Condition Carlo Saio

When I was nine, my brother left. Around about when I hit my head and fell into the stair’s end.

Thoughts jar danced zig-zags until the weight of this slink to come to rest in memory, my body’s double.

That’s when the kaleidoscopic parachutes came dawning billows in my mind. I think.

You see beaks pick-weave the empty nest of my head. Neck swing swung between states wresting oneiric in sleep to wake me. Hypnotized by the moon’s pendulum, light is a dark cavity. And I hollow in the potholes of my bones, unglove the river black backing of the night and fluctuate through the onset of this aura. Scented light of reflection stalks to send me back down to the branching journey of time, past layers of synaptic clusters. Bursting and burning holes in the gauntlet of my lunar soul, where all the names that have paved from the Milky divide, deer jump and fade to shadow powder the cleft in my brain.

Divergent hemispheres lurk alone and below no direction. Latitude is the bow flex of the world, met in a circle. Two twin arms stretched like banks trying to encompass the river run ocean. On this tightrope, a child puppeteers the channelled screen of rain, plays with its slant and makes sure no two blots swell into a whole.

I flip flit in and out of singed flesh memory. Screams unstitch an unending silence. Twitching lesions bury within the eddy of a vacuum, wherein my psyche flutters static clarity. Luminescent debris spark ripple-fires in the end trails of my brain. Mesmerized by the display, I stray gaze at shards of marpaths.

Eclectic prisms pour forth to fleck my vision. Their constellated ennui pollinate a tail-biting elenchus. I chase their flare sails as they disperse in the rise and dive of an underwave.

The surging infolds of insanity.

Somewhere, landlocked throbs rack in bloodclot being. Chimeric variations pale and light froths, emptiness. Colour rheums to the waterless grey-grief of fish scale sight. In linger-light’s fluster, I spell how to remember, but forget. Elliptical canals douse the lit whispers of language lost to the eye. Lapsed rain sheds smudge scars on the bedding of night, my subconscious tundra of wet blueprints. Out of the planets of my pupils I see an infinite nothing. A blind blink.

- Isn’t it funny how in death, fixed stars seam-flake and we moment their movement for the first time? And it sounds so true, so real in my mind, that I found myself replying I wish they would slow, but it’s another voice speaking into my own. A stone’s raw undertoneI cracked the egg we said, it fell into being the sky, a pocket, lining the universe I piece it back together its shell laid walls underground, crevices you began, but never quite left off.

Body let me speak silence without being absent. Within me, in the crowded clouds a boy weighs younger than time. A child rested afloat the bottom of my skin. The water we sleep our feet in feeds reflection from the bottom’s slow mouthful of blue echo. They wish wallow inside me as if the world were uncurling at once. Blue pools of breath ripple outward from their centre and then ebb, clung to a surface that dribbles

18

into us like a winded web.

We are underwater, watching the raindrops as they blotch our eyes in the black bliss of breathlessness. I feel him with the slipperiness of an eel. Want to hold, but he glides like easy air carrying under a feather. We call out in the dark, but sound seeps. I open my eyes. Find I am dry of movement, by a river of tarmac. Spume on mouth, dipping hands to sift in the asphalt’s oily mirage. I see him float flowing below, and I belong there too.

But there is a vacancy in the word there. In the black hum of his lost stare, and though I drowned that day, these words keep telling me it was him.

In the bitumen lies the waterlogged night. Stars are clams are turbid eyes. The surface is perpetual.

Images stutter on its tips, intermittent accents mood through the bend of distance.

- is he ok?

- I think so, probably drunk…

- and his body? It’s distorted...

- because his mind is possessed - the astrologer’s crafts?

- Yes - Check his pockets They warble the netted contours of my being. Where I flail, they pin prod and I murk out of shape.

- Check his pockets I can’t distinguish between faces, nor their centering, nor the elemental consciousness from my own anymore, but I can always be felt by them. Passed over in disbelief, I look up to where I’ve been left by timeless onlookers.

My pockets are empty. They always have been. Water tells me this. Tells me they have taken it all. Why would they bother waking me with it if they hadn’t?

Slow, like rhythms undulating into the choral call of harmony, comes the sounding of the mosque. It’s dusk.

Play time to shadow. People are shrinking into one mass as they walk away into the chaos of the main road, where the boda-boda’s1 and matatu’s2 chant the road home. From beneath the depth of the muezzin’s songs, I hear what reminds me of birdcall, but it could be internal, it could be the reflux of my heart for what feels like the first time in weeks.

Light is blizzard split. Not quite the temporal intensity of the sun, but its afterglow swimming in the tundra behind your eyes. How a blind man would feel the sun. But I am not blind; I have just given up seeing. What I find in this life makes me lost to others.

They steal all the goods from my mkokoteni3 before the week is up, and I never know when it is up, without the money for medication.

An ant seems to be looking at me, with his antennae dowsing me out of this concentric loss. Level with my left eye, he sits larger than anything, yet diminished somehow; like me and the puddle of saliva that he looks back at me from. He is drinking, crouched like a giraffe over a watering pool...that perspective will sometimes do to you.

I am dancing on the heartbeat of the ridiculous and the sublime, suspended by society, what I feel keeps me drifting further into the inconceivable. What is relational to sense is irrational, dull, but the underlying sense itself. And shy-spiralling, in the subconscious seeming of a second, day petals into night.

The depth of the sea is sky once again. Fire, fire, miss-fire. Stem scorch shivers over my jagged spine, the cortical nerve of mind. Dislocate and spasm. Throw 1 Swahili slang for a motorbike (as a taxi), name originated from ferrying people across no man’s land from border to border-boda boda.

2 A matatu is a 14 seater public transport vehicle, it is cramped and overcrowded and the most common means of travel.

3 Mkokoteni is the name given to an improvised hand cart, with old car tyres as the wheels. It is a common means of carrying goods in a cost effective but strenuous manner.

19

matchstick rust down to kindle a chasm and become seers. Sorry, sears. Blissful burning tears.

But one can only get so far alone. In the desolation of an island of I, the eye cannot hold the horizon without escaping into the galactic butterfly of existence. An ant is no longer form and the world becomes the unreason it conditions.

The years lapsed into a seizure of minutes, of seconds. The years wound winding this abyss, rip-wrap a voice that carries like mist. It comes like blood rapture, like mother. The somethingcomingtogether-falling apart. Who you are in a face that won’t fit.

-What did you say? It asks, when? I reply.

-Before you fell over?

-About my brother leaving? How long has he been here?

No, no after that?

I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Who are you? I think I thought you would have seen by now. Why is it so easy to be afraid of our history?

Our history?

Yes, don’t you remember the story you are telling?

Was the ant talking to me?

When I regain my body, it’s in flux. Rolling on stream. On road. The trees above mottle and amalgamate mosaics- leaf spilling into one another. They resemble kaleidoscopes. Where am I going?

You had a fit again, I›m taking you to the clinic...last time you said it was cheaper. A man lips from the handles of my mkototeni. I am lying on its empty floor. Half palsied I crook one side then the other; half pat my bare thread legs and resign. They took my papers, I can’t get medication.

Why do you need it when you tell me it keeps me from you?

Who are you? I ask aloud.

In the mana of silence, I matter. The grain dot moss of our impressions overlay.

I am the blind navigation of distance gauged by the silence met in other’s company. I am the veins laid under the tender palm of the earth. My death has taught you to perceive only the pressure flea flicking tick-beat-time against the flats of your skull. The world is a dandelion distraction in which you have forgotten us. Forgotten yourself.

It has taken centuries to trace all the spectral shades of ourselves, to uncoil the fingerprints left on the window of being, the sacred orchard of our olive-pip hearts. To hold onto the delay whirling in the stars, and squeeze that feeling into mortality, but I find in death, the birth of poetry. A serpent’s fork tongue of reality, in the fractal cast of a visage, and the alchemist’s porthole to the immortal; My name is myth, is shiam. To a world that chooses not to see me. Hiding in the rifts, I am the presence clinging to what I cannot be in identity, but in your story remain. We were both ideas born eclipsed by the Hermetic solace of sun, asymmetric versions of twin meaning. Equivocations.

Then how can we exist out of the water’s breath? We ask.

And hear ourselves laugh in the fledging leaves of childhood. Sisal swinging from the trees, weightless dreams collapse as they hatch; bouncing outwards from the surface’s wake, hang the laws of the gravity we lost to auroral imagination.

You dove too deep, for too long, became stone, rolling down the riverbed to hop and crack into the fleeting sediment of memory, that floods inside my body. You see, I finally see our trauma as the torn state of our nation, the arrhythmia of the septum cleft in my brain. You are my brother kept from being, and I

20

cannot heal until I am no longer seen as delusional for seeing you in a hallucination.

The invisible real and the known unreal are two moments in chrysalis of one subliminal spectrum.

In a cataract’s continuum, everyone is passing, taking. Leaving, circles releasing circles. But you are an open waiting in the limbic solace of abstraction.

Can›t you see, nothing ends, but lays fleshed out.

Beintehaan - Limitlessly Saraswathi Menon Do you remember that time when we used to run out to the front deck to take pictures of the sunset?

The backwater would mirror the sky and all that was in front of us was painted by the colours of dusk. Orange, purple, pink smeared onto our eyes. We felt so small. ‘Beintehaan’, like you would say in Urdu, limitlessness. The limitlessness of the waters, of the sky, of all the beauty that these small eyes could behold, but most of all, your love. I saw it for the first time, when your eyes began to rain after seeing the tears in my eyes. “Who does he think he is? Give me the phone,” you said. You were just 15, much wiser than me. I know that I was supposed to be smarter but life taught me otherwise, the older ones are hamsters. We make the mistakes, the heartbreaks, just so that you’d know better. You knew that. You never used it against me, not for a second. Even when we used to reminisce by the garden and look up at the night sky that looked like amma’s saree, bits of glitter confetti on Prussian blue velvet. We laughed about how we had braces and you had a crush on that weird what’s his name guy, our Biology teacher who would say ‘pharanix and laranix’ instead of pharynx and larynx. You never pressed my bruises. Not even when we fought about my behaviour or your puberty or when we drifted apart because I was busy trying to ‘fit in’. ‘Beintehaan’ like you said, your patience and your affection for an older sister was just as unending and nourishing as the first monsoon in Kerala. The kind of rain that would cause thunder to announce it’s arrival, the kind that would mix with the earth to create a perfume that reminds me of home, that reminds me of you. For all those times, we’d fight, we’d laugh and we’d grow and grey, each time, time and again. We’d watch the first monsoon burst onto the pond, the swimming pool, the backwaters. Infinity pools, like you said. Blood is thicker than water. What could be stronger than rain? We don’t share the same blood. We share the pieces from the soul. We share the same love. Limitlessly.

Artist credit: Saraswathi Menon

21

Woolf and I, and Where We Went Jay Stonestreet

At first we visit France; my France, the south with its dark seas and crystal waves and linear lavender, and we are curving through mountain lanes with speed now, following continuous white lines that bisect the intricate course through the olive shades winding down, and then up further again to a perched villa on a hill with a view. The shutters are open when we arrive, and I have a room of my own. Up here and all around, the smells of dark wood, the kind of must and dampness that brings to the fore the depth of the earth below, how far it runs and runs, how shallow my sandalled footfalls in the dry summer dust. Virginia lifts her head and inhales these things as I do. She is stealing it all, storing it up under her hat for her next venture in airy compartments, enclosing her internal state within individual cocoons of sense-perception.

Her doubt, lost inside the distant darkling cypresses, her confidence of expression locked safe up in the eaves of this great house.

I think sometimes that she is as sturdy as a house. She doesn’t like to say that she is writing a book.

We go in and say little to one another. I watch her observe the dinner table, smooth her hands along its surface as she thinks of who she would seat there in one of her novels. I get bored of watching her languishing and step out onto the poolside. It’s perfectly white in this agonising sun, torturing bare feet. I put up the rickety umbrella with a wrestle and lay myself across the beds to nap, and there it is ahead in the abstract just before the sun, a sky writing aeroplane trailing smoke over the Alpes-Maritimes. The garden flowers cause me to sniff and I turn away onto my side. Before I dream, I am aware that she is once again standing and watching.

Egypt’s markets; the trinkets are fascinating to her, the flowing skirts of the seller’s robes, the Japanese tourists sweltering in their jackets and scarves, and the stone. Of course the long white stone of five thousand years. She is mesmerised by this antique culture under her hands. If she could just contain it all enough to clear the fog. We stroll the bazaar. She finds it curious, and I am just showing her around.

I shake hands with a man who has just sold me an alabaster bowl. She will not believe the gold of King Tut’s mask. Lily Briscoe’s paintings could not do it justice. She says that it is too much for her. The heat, the stifle, all of it another existence, just as continuous but nothing remotely similar to her life back in Richmond. She is an alien here. The men frown at her pallid skin and hooked nose. Sometimes I want to act as her apology. We return to the hotel and she is asleep before three.

She says the air in Mexico is even more unbearable. “This strong Pacific breeze lifts the damp blanket every now and then, and sometimes even a tropical storm shakes my spirit so hard it is most excitable, and I forget myself for a second, and then it is passed and the rolling of the thunder rolls back over the horizon and the pink lightning flashes are indistinguishable from the twinkling of the lighthouse in the puerto.” I see that she is most alive during these times. Those great illuminations, however brief, act like the filling of a vase with liquid light. The dry flowers revive. The petals perk up. I see the film in her eyes peeled back whilst she stands on the beach in the midst of a great scene. The violence of it all, sweeping up thousands of miles from the east. There is an old Spanish galleon moving over what I discern to be the split between sea and sky. I can pick out each lantern fluttering on the ship, but I think my companion feels the heaviness of the night storm all too much to appreciate any sign of hope. All is dark, and the warm tropics riling their waters seem as if they bubble their intentions up from Hell itself. We link hands and stand to face this dread. I blink at the meteorological monstrosity.

And now we are at an outside table on a Greek island, and she is lost somewhere in the smallness of everything sitting at the chequered table, pen in hand, curling characters and scribing the conversations that have been happening in her head all this time. I pluck another salty olive from the bowl. We haven’t spoken for an hour, but I don’t feel offended for there is no need to say anything. I know she is as content

22

as she could be, compressing and straining and releasing the temperate stream of thought collected like Egyptian trinkets. Out pours the writing in the sky, the bustle of the bazaar, the tropic storm, the pins of perception sticking in her like needles exacting pressure where they must. I stand and move to the edge.

How fantastic I think it must be to feel so much.

There is a sheer drop of about a hundred feet to the cyan shallows. The Mediterranean light is so clear I can pick out each jag and jut on one of the larger crags. Small children are playing. I worry about their feet. They traverse their dangers barefoot in the hope that if it is done quickly enough they will escape the cuts. I take one last look back and she is gone inside out of the sun. The notebook flaps in a clifftop breeze and threatens to fall shut.

Karna

Diaspora

Saraswathi Menon

Julian Canlas

On a midsummer’s day, you and I crouched our monkey limbs behind a wall on the terrace.

We peered below and my little sister was walking in circles calling out our names.

We sunk onto the side of the wall, a break from hide and seek for you to tell me ‘My mom is not my real mom, I’m adopted.’

I was eight, you were nine, I barely understood what you meant.

blood from those crimson murders & ash stain these homes wiped out from the peripheries. i am hollow as a blast, dead-eyed & tongue-slit. paratrooper, my sin—in those disillusions, your voice— gunshots—sealed in wounds wrung from tiny gods. i speak from the fringes of my necropolis, the scent of the dead-alive belying like a hiss. this no-land is flesh, from which echoes of Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov are born— those artillery cries without language, without flags that hiss nationalism dripping blood & money. reiterate the thoughts. these image-makers! these combustions from nobodies! these holy youths! sufferings flare up in funeral pyres—a nightly cadence of fireflies. while leaning against wired fences, or sinking in muddy trenches, i make-believe that i am not null, that i am not done with patched extinctions that worship the past.

I went back home and asked Ma, ‘Are you my real mom? Did I come from your tummy?’

She looked at me and knew what I had been told, She replied- ‘Infants are bundles of light, Fireworks seen during daytime- they celebrate the spirit of existence.

No one is ever abandoned or alone.

We are all children of the sun, Karna, each and everyone.’

23

International book reviews Key to any experience of literature is to read widely.

For the naive reader, the book award is the ideal starting point to delve into the experience of challenging texts that can braoden insight and ensure a worthwhile reading experience.

However, this is not to say that the concept of the award is without its problems. Too often, we fall back on the familiar ‘big name’ prizes, which are often dominated by native English speakers and the established

clique of literary names. In the spirit of Frontier, we wanted to see what contemporary writers from different parts of the world are concerned with, and whether their culture influences their writing in a discernable way. Although not all authors have explicitly written about their country of origin, each text has a distinct flavour and is fascinating in its own way.

It provides us with the chance to re-examine our canonised literature by reflecting on other

prizes’ merit.

We have award-winning books from Europe, America, Asia and Africa, but sadly we could not cover every continent or a wider range of countries. Use this section as a starting point, rather than an authorative guide.

Although our selection of novels only captures a small sample of the wealth of books out there, we hope nonetheless that it celebrates, in some small way, the huge diversity of literature.

Artist credit: Saraswathi Menon 24

Baboon

Naja Marie Aidt (author), Denise Newman (translator) Country of Origin: Denmark Winner of: 2015 PEN Translation Prize Dougie Dodds If I were to sum up Danish author Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon in one word it would be “unsettling”.

The characters portrayed in the 15 short stories Aidt gives us are disturbed, far removed from any social normality we as readers may be used to. This however does not make them un-relatable.

The characters represent, in the most basic sense, the extremes of human emotion and experience; focusing in minute detail the elements of ourselves we are too afraid to accept. If you’re looking for a book that will simultaneously repulse and enchant you in a sort of morbid curiosity, then this is the book for you.

One story that struck me was in the first in the collection, ‘Bulbjerg’, where Aidt presents the tale of a married couple and their slow decent into maddening unhappiness with their small child Sebastian. The narrator character describes his sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (something I refrain from quoting as it may make for some uncomfortable reading). It’s overly graphic, and it’s supposed to be. The character is fulfilling a perverse human desire, not only in his sexual activities but also in the context of how he is telling it. He is talking to his wife; he is watching her suffer and takes pleasure from it.

This almost Freudian reading of Aidt’s stories is what makes them fantastic; they are simple on the surface, seemingly presenting a short story, but the more the reader delves into the twisted allegory the more meaning, and dare I say self reflection, they derive from it.

This human perversion towards drawing pleasure for another’s

unhappiness is a key element to Baboon. As this supplement is all about translation, it seems apt to bring in the German word ‘schadenfreude’, an untranslatable term that refers to the pleasure that is derived from another person's misfortune. The stories are first and foremost upsetting, but there is something that just makes you want to read on, to find out how far Aidt takes us down the rabbit hole of disturbed imagery. Schadenfreude pulls us in, but Aidt’s literary power keeps us there.

The translator of Baboon must also step into the spotlight. Published poet Denise Newman, writer of The New Make Believe (The PostApollo Press, 2010), Wild Goods (Apogee Press, 2008), and Human Forest (Apogee Press, 2000), did an impressive job in translating Aidt’s work, retaining the same poetic and figurative language apparent in the original. She has not shied away from the words, not changed them to sound more socially acceptable or morally correct. Her work has not gone unnoticed either; the translated book won the PEN Translation Prize this year and is in the longlist for Best Translated Book 2015.

Baboon is supposed to challenge the social norms and be the literary ‘other’ when it comes to discussing topics we would rather leave unmentioned. Life is gritty and unfair, disturbing and at times horrific, something I feel Newman understands. While other writers talk about the beauty, (which let me say does exist; I’m not all doom and gloom) Aidt brings the reverse into the light.

Although her work focuses on

the socially unacceptable, it is not unpopular. In 2008 Aidt won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, Denmark’s highest literary honor, as well as the Danish Critics Prize in 2007. She has been described as ‘Exceptional, Kafkaesque and Delightfully bizarre’, as having the ability to make the most banal things effective devises in suspense, building tension through what would usually seems like the most trivial of events.

The story ‘Blackcurrant’ is the perfect example. It tells the story of a lesbian couple making dinner together; at the start nothing happens, but the way in which Aidt phrases certain passages and after reading the previous stories, we know something is going to happen, something dramatic and horrible. Readers expect something to happen to them, but the story ends quite differently, surprising us with the seemingly unrelated voyeurism of the neighbor’s son. He is, to put it delicately, experimenting in the barn (and yes, you’ll have to read it to find out what I mean). She does this on purpose, getting readers used to her style then suddenly dropping the stylistic bombshell of Blackcurrant.

To end with, I will leave you with an extract from the book, something I feel will entice you to read her collection: ‘He was tall and dressed in rags.

He had obviously been living out in the wild for a long time. A savage. Eva had read somewhere that you can find out everything about a person by how he or she reacts in a panic situation. Tim did something strange: he sped up and drove right at the man’.

Artist credit: Dougie Dodds 25

The Last Lover Can Xue (author), Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (translator) Country of Origin: China Winner of: 2015 Best Translated Book Award Ana Dukakis

Can Xue’s, The Last Lover, begins with Joe, a seemingly average office worker living in generic Western country, ‘Country A’.

Soon enough, however, the reader is swept away into the fantastical, where reality becomes questionable and dreams believable. There are electric cats, bear-faced people, and invisible lovers. If the novel begins in a place of normality, that is not the place in which it ends.

view of anything, be it of each other (Vincent laments how he “can’t understand even a little of what is in [Lisa’s] heart?”), or of themselves – when Reagan looks in the mirror, all he sees is a “blurring mist”, which “no matter how he wiped… he couldn’t get… clean”. Similarly for the reader, it is impossible to determine whether a character is in a dream or awake, whether the person they’re talking to is real or not – or if, in the world of The Last Lover, The novel follows three couples: there is even a difference between Joe and Maria, Ida and Reagan, these binaries at all. and Vincent and Lisa. Joe is a sales manager at the Rose This haziness leaves the characters Clothing Company with a ‘mania finding non-physical ways to for reading’, while his wife connect with each other. Joe reads Maria weaves magical tapestries. stories that ‘tangled together’ with Reagan, a client Joe serves, is a his work/home life; Maria weaves plantation owner infatuated with tapestries that mirror the stories in Ida, one of his workers who looks Joe’s books; and Lisa dreams her like ‘an orangutan’. Finally there way into joining the long march. is Vincent, Joe’s boss, and his wife The fantastical nature of the novel Lisa, who is bizarrely fascinated draws the reader into finding even with the long march. Despite this more connections – suddenly the wide cast of characters neither snake on Reagan’s plantation they, nor any semblance of a plot, is biting other characters, and are most important to The Last a parrot in one city becomes a Lover – this avant-garde novel is parrot-like voice in another. In the more concerned with traceable end, when Vincent uses ‘his mind motifs and self-reflection. to make love’, this ends up feeling far more expected than any actual One recurring pattern is of acts of physical intimacy, which characters watching each other, are far more scarce than the whether it’s Joe watching Reagan, surreal connections throughout Maria watching her son, or the novel. anonymous eyes watching Ida. Maria states that ‘spectators have Out of all the connections, Joe’s the clearest view of what goes stories seem to be most important, on’, which is perhaps why the as they highlight The Last Lover’s characters are so obsessed with self-awareness. When Joe asks watching – yet no ‘spectator’ in Maria to “weave a story” that the novel seems to have a clear “contains all possible designs

where there’s nothing that can’t be worked in”, it seems as if the book is issuing a call of action to itself. When another character, Mark, announces “everything in the story” he is reading “is a trick”, one can’t help but see this as a subtle reference to The Last Lover’s own experimental structure.

The Last Lover is not an easy novel to read. The reader often feels like the characters, slumbering through in confusion. The book seems to want you to struggle – to ‘wrestle’ with it, as Joe does with his own books. Yet while the book requires some stamina to journey through, it bears the sentiment noted by Lisa: “although [the] steps appeared careless… every step was along some invisible trajectory”. Do not read The Last Lover for a coherent plot, or distinctive characters. Read it for an experimental descent into magical realism, and a myriad of beautiful, interweaving connections.

Artist credit: Ana Dukakis 26

Lusaka Punk and Other Stories Various authors Countries of Origin: Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Malawi Winner of: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2015 Savannah Brown

It’s the type of book I often ignore in a bookstore. Not that I mean to do it; it’s simply that these types of books don’t usually catch my attention. When it comes to a good read, I’m looking for something slightly different, a bit quirky, with a good story, and characters that I can’t easily forget. This compilation features stories that are stuck in my head, swimming around in an ocean of thoughts.

This anthology has 17 short stories written by different African writers; five of these stories were shortlisted in the Caine Prize competition and the other 12 were written during the Caine Prize writers’ workshop. The result is a collection of diverse stories, some of them better than others, but all of them are interesting in terms of the way they are written and the way the story and characters are presented. Most of the stories I fell in love with instantly; others slightly confused me in the unconventional way in which they were written, and a few stories I didn’t understand or didn’t like and I found to be disturbing.

Diversity in this anthology is one of its strengths. In one of the stories, The Folded Leaf by Segun Afolabi, you follow the journey of a girl and her family as they go on a pilgrimage in order to be healed of their various afflictions; we gradually learn that the narrator is blind. Meanwhile, #Yennenga

by Jemila Abdulai, follows the story of a celebrity-turnedcriminal who had murdered her boyfriend. In another story

Lusaka Punk by Efemia Chela, you become involved in the story of two friends who want to start their own punk rock band. Burial

by Akwaeke Emerzi, follows the footsteps of a girl grieving for her father. in another story of a completely different genre, Wahala Lizard by Nkiacha Atemnkeng, you get a humorous take on panic as people on a plane worry that one passenger has Ebola; later a lizard is set loose and is running around the plane. In Blood Match

by Jonathan Mbuna, you read about a couple where the wife has just found out that her kidney is failing and needs a transplant.

Racism, secret societies, abuse, and grief are just some of the different themes.

rounded and complex. You can never really make up your mind if she is a self-obsessed social climber or a misunderstood, surprisingly kind woman who cares for others and for her country. She is a mixture of the good and bad, which is exactly what you want from characters.

One of the main goals of this anthology which it achieves, is to have a wide and rich variety of cultural stories and characters.

Most of them, jump out at you, demand that you listen, and the only choice left is to stop and pay attention to what these stories have to say.

Some of these stories are trying to be artistic, so much so that sometimes they are hard to follow and too much of them can be distracting. One story neglects quotations marks for when the characters are speaking, sometimes I am not a big fan of. However, going beyond the story, the characters and the little pet peeves, the writers in this anthology have begun to master their craft. The writing in each story, though each one is different in style and feel, flows easily and yet arrests you with a certain image or creative thought. In its own individual way, the writing in each story sets out to startle you.

The story I enjoyed most in this compilation is #Yennenga. Not only is the plot itself interesting, but the main character, Yennenga, is wellArtist credit: Ana Dukakis 27

The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri Country of Origin: U.S.A Winner of: DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 Joe Fitzsimmons

The bond between an individual and their country can be strenuous.

As individuals displace themselves, the common connections that they once had with their home may become agitated, or distorted. In needing to operate on the liminal space of two different, often opposing, cultures, individuals may find themselves caught between the identity they are expected to adopt, and the one in which they feel valid in assuming.

In much the same way, the relationship of the individual with their family or community can be wrought with tension.

When an individual is caught between obligations to themselves

and obligations to others, their decisions not only reflect their beliefs and priorities, but also shape the way in which they experience their environment.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland explores what happens when, caught between obligations to themselves, their country, their family, and their home, people find themselves making choices that define their identities and radically shape their futures.

The novel structures its narrative around the struggles of kinship, connection, and the bonds and ties of family. Its principal character, Subhash, begins the story with an inseparable bond between his older brother,

Udayan. As children growing up in Calcutta in the 50s and 60s, they experience the lingering effects of British colonialism, and the violent suppression of the Naxalbri uprising, which triggered political unrest in the country.

From this common beginning, the two brothers find themselves growing apart as they become more active in their very different lives. Subhash, quiet and methodical, finds comfort in his work in oceanographic studies, eventually moving to the United States to study at a top New England university. Udyan meanwhile, channels his impulsive nature in to his political activism in Calcutta, eventually becoming involved in an increasingly radicalised Naxalite movement. It is the commitment that Udayan makes to this movement, and the consequences of the actions he takes on their part, that the brothers have to test their loyalty to one another, and examine the familial bonds that both keep them together and define them as individuals.

The Lowland is, at its heart, a novel about the choices we make. For good or ill, the characters are made to face the realisation that the implications of seemingly small actions have long-lasting consequences which can affect those who we may never had considered. The Lowland is a brilliant example of a novel taking its characters the world over, and isolating them in a universal personal struggle.

Artist credit: Kirsty Mcalpine

28

All The Light We Cannot See Various authors Countries of Origin: Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Malawi Winner of: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2015 Dan Falvey

Anthony Doerr’s fourth novel and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2015, All the Light We Cannot See, is an easy page-turner that leaves the reader captivated by the sad everyday stories that existed on both sides of the Second World War. The American’s novel depicts parallel stories of two ordinary people caught up in the tragedy of war. Marie-Laure, a blind French girl from Paris, lives with her father, who works at the local museum. Following the Nazi occupation, the pair are forced to flee the capital, taking with them one of the museum’s most prized artefacts to save it being stolen. Travelling to Saint-Malo, a walled city by the sea, and home to her great uncle, MaurieLaure must learn her way around the new city and help the city in their subtle rebellion against the occupying forces through radio transmissions.

Rarely do authors of literature based around war illustrate the lives of ordinary individuals on both sides of the conflict. It is a great credit to Doerr that his novel not only provides captivating accounts of both the French and German perspective of the Second World War but that he leaves the reader empathising with both of the main characters. “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever” is a reoccurring sentence of speech throughout the book; the author invites his readers to look beyond the nationalities of the characters and see them purely as two human beings surrounded by a war they want little to do with.

Doerr is sensitive in his writing of those living in Nazi Germany,.

He leaves the reader caring about the wellbeing of Werner and his family and friends, feeling sorry for their situation, while not sympathising with their nation’s cause. “Your problem, Werner… is that you still believe you own your life” explains a friend to the German orphan part way through the book. The remarks act as a harrowing reminder to the reader that many Germans feared the Nazi regime as much as the French did.

Chapter to chapter, Doerr intertwines Marie-Laure’s story with that of Werner. A teenage German orphan teenager with an ability to fix radios, Werner is invited to study at one of the Hitler Youth’s National Political Institutes of Education, before being posted in the field, eventually ending up in the same However, Doerr’s novel is not town as Marie-Laure. perfect: the language used by the characters throughout the book is Inevitably meeting, Marie-Laure full of American idioms that stand and Werner demonstrate the out immediately. Attracting the good nature in all people as they reader’s attention these phrases put aside their differences to help temporarily taking away from the one another. author’s gripping story.

In spite of these interruptions Doerr’s novel is incredibly easy to read. The constant switching between Marie-Laure and Werner’s stories, as well as the interchanging of time periods, is no distraction to the reader; if anything, the frequent changes in the novel’s narrative and year encourage you to keep reading in your eagerness to unravel a bit more of the characters’ stories.

Doerr captures the reader’s attention from the very first chapter and he doesn’t let you put his book down until you have finished it.

It is of little surprise that All the Light We Cannot See has received such praise as Doerr has written a masterpiece. The author’s focus on two contrasting characters from both sides of the fight makes the story very different to your typical World War Two novel. The underlying theme of morality provides the reader with a heart-warming reminder of the goodness that exists within humanity.

Artist credit: Dougie Dodds 29

Reflections on a Literary Translation Workshop An Exploration of Translation Awards, a Translator's Duties, and Widening Perspectives Rachel Noelle

“He’s too French!” The room rippled with laughter as Daniel Medin, co-editor of the translation-infused magazine Music and Literature, expressed his initial doubt when he heard of an endeavour to translate Patrick Modiano.

The topic was prompted by one of the workshop’s attendees who criticised the English translation of the title for Modiano’s novella, Chien de Printemps.

Nailing the right title is one of the many challenges faced by the world of translation. On 20th November, I participated in a translations workshop where translators, writers, and tutors gathered to discuss issues and concerns that exist in the industry. Medin led the discussion and workshop alongside fellow UEA tutor Cecilia Rossi, who is also an expert of literary translation,

having won various awards for her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry.

Seated beside me was none other than Goldsmiths-Prizewinning novelist, Eimear McBride, who shared with me some insight on her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Apparently, because the novel was written in such an experimental style, the process of finding the right translator was slow. For one translation, they eventually landedw on someone who was brought up in Ireland and thus knew the world in which McBride’s story is set. This struck me as the ideal circumstance, given that most translators have, in this respect, only the expectation of understanding their text’s cultural context. However, there were still concerns, as McBride explained, since her writing was so abstract. Her

translator had to meet with her to get a better grasp of her style and, ultimately, understand what she was expressing in her writing.

Translation is debatably an interpretation of its text, rather than a form of transparency.

Medin mentioned how there are Germans who read Hegel in English because the translator has to re-articulate the ideas through re-interpretation.

Throughout this entire multistepped, collaborative process – determining the suitable translator, considering the text’s culture, the writer’s tone and background – there remains a question, brought into the room by Rossi: after the editing process, whose text is it?

When we were put into pairs to brainstorm the traits of a good translator, one participant

30

suggested that a good translator masks their voice to preserve the original text. A translator in the room acknowledged this to be more of a controversial claim. Medin reflected on being a judge for the Best Translated Book Award and how he questioned whether the focus was on the best translated book or the best translation.

Some translations are most admirable when compared to the original text, while others are better as purely autonomous, written works, not held in contrast to its original text. This presents an ethical concern: what do you do with a translator who has such a distinctive voice? Medin talked about one of his favourite translators and how he could read their translation and recognise their style, despite the fact that the original text is not their own.

Although, this concern was more discussed rather than resolved, it became clear to me that the transposition of text to another language is so multi-layered, it seems unlikely that the writer’s original style survives. After all, there are words that exist in one language but not another, puns that hold their power in purely the original language, and diction that can be misleading if unfamiliar to the reader.

If so much is “lost” in this procedure, why shouldn’t the translator have the freedom to “add?”

Moving on from that debate, Rossi related how students in her Latin American class discover writers of which they were unaware and thus develop a new fascination which also has undercurrents of self-anger, that feeling of “how have I never heard of this author

before?” Rossi marvelled over how someone so canonical in one culture can be invisible to another. Medin agreed, expressing how embarrassing it is to be such an ‘anglophile’.

Perhaps this speaks to one of the many aims of translation, which is to be enlightening. Not all readers have the linguistic flexibility to read texts in other languages, which sometimes results in reading works that are restricted to a single culture.

From the insight I gained during the workshop, it became evident to me that translation enables a wider scope of readership for global voices.

Translators provide a service to cross-culture relations; by breaking language boundaries and making international writing accessible to readers, they allow for more worldly perspectives to be given the attention that it deserves.

Artist credit: Ana Dukakis

31