Every year at about this time I think: but why didn’t I get myself to the PEN World Voices Festival? The festival took place all of last week in New York, with a wealth of readings and discussions with writers, critics, translators, and journalists from around the world: Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Elif Shafak, Carmen Boullosa, Ian Buruma, Vladimir Sorokin… the list goes on, and includes many great writers maybe you haven’t heard of yet. In this interview with PBS Newshour, festival director Laszlo Jakab Orsos describes PEN World Voices as “a literary festival with a very strict political agenda,” which the interview goes on to discuss:
JEFFREY BROWN: A strict political agenda?
LASZLO JAKAB ORSOS: Strict, yeah. I assume you I heard, I put the emphasis on strict. Ours is the only literary festival around the world–there are six major literary festivals in the world, and ours is the only one with a political commitment. This is PEN America’s literary festival and PEN’s core mission is freedom of speech, freedom of expression. And we’re using the festival for not only promoting literature in general, but also spreading the word and promoting this mission. And curating the festival, this is my job to make this mission visible and tangible throughout the week of happenings.
JEFFREY BROWN: I read that you’ve said that in curating, you want to make literature more a part of contemporary culture, I think is how you put it.
LASZLO JAKAB ORSOS: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: Explain what you mean–are you worried that it has become too divorced, or is there a special need now?
LASZLO JAKAB ORSOS: I don’t think that there is a special need, but we have to reconfigure literature in a sense. We have to make sure, and we have to explain it to our audience, not to mention our writers, that literature, believe it or not, you want it or not, is playing a very substantial role in our lives. We just have to look at literature from a different perspective. And in a festival like ours, the way how I can project this idea is to curate programs bringing people from all over the world who are reacting to the most burning issues of our lives. So, in other words, when we are doing a festival like this, we have to be very, very flexible during the curatorial procedure. For example tonight at the 92nd Street Y, we are going to have an event called Revolutionaries in the Arab World. In December I hadn’t planned anything for it. In mid-January I was starting to think about it. By early February I was talking to bloggers from Cairo. And by early March we had the program ready to discuss the role of social media and actually people’s involvement, ordinary people’s involvement in history. This is huge, and this is literature to me.
You can read blog coverage of the festival’s events here, and see audio, video, and photos here. The events are too many and too rich to do justice to in one blog post, but I’ll mention again the panel on Revolutionaries in the Arab World, and the festival’s famous “translation slam,” where translators compete to translate poetry–this year, the work of Am??lie Nothomb and Fahmida Riaz, in French and Urdu respectively.
And if you’re wishing all this ended in a recommended reading list, for those of us who can only visit online: well, the 2011 Best Translated Book Award was awarded there. The fiction winner was Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (NYRB Classics page here), and the poetry winner was Ale?? ? teger’s The Book of Things, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry (BOA Editions page here). The Best Translated Book Award has offered creative write-ups and reviews of its full long-list for the past couple months. A few dozen of the best recent translations into English–a great place to start your summer reading list…
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But how can I offer such a reading list without also noting that Words Without Borders (whose new issue, just up, features Writing from Afghanistan) has been running a great series on reviewing translations, offering advice for critics and readers on how to discuss and evaluate works in translation as, well, translations, even when you don’t read the original language. The series includes contributions from Edith Grossman, Susan Bernofsky, Lorraine Adams, Scott Esposito, and others.
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And lastly–if a blog is an online Wunderkammer, how can I resist slipping just one more Wunder in?–if all this gets you thinking about how you read literature and news from elsewhere, why not think about how you eat, too? Jenn Mar has a wonderful essay in the online epicurean journal the Farmer General, “Chicken Vindaloo Made Easy: Outsourcing Memories from the Heritage Factory” (parts one, two, and three), using Gourmet‘s TV show Diary of a Foodie as a jumping-off point to discuss Americans and how we perceive, and commodify, international cuisine. The essay is thought-provoking but still mouth-watering–a wicked combination.