Freeing Stoke Newington
Last Wednesday I sat in the audience at the British Book Awards listening to Khaled Hosseini graciously accept his award for A Thousand Splendid Suns. Well, he sort of accepted it. What he actually said was that he’d accept it for now, in the hope that it wouldn’t be too long before many other Afghans were nominated for such prizes – and that his highest hope would be for one of those nominees to be a woman. That ceremony may still seem a long way off but one of the most active groups in trying to bring it about is International PEN. This weekend (including today) they held their inaugural festival of world literature, Free the Word!, across several London locations.
On Saturday I bumped into John Simmons of recent Penguin Blog fame at a conversation between Yang Lian and Tze Ming Mok at the South Bank Centre. Now let’s be honest, Saturday afternoon spent listening to a pair of Chinese poets talk about translation probably isn’t going to challenge Stamford Bridge in the mass spectacle stakes any time soon (although one of my motives for attending this particular event was that I wouldn’t have to follow Wolves’ fortunes at Bristol City as closely as I normally would, as the football season nears ‘the business end’) – but in fact, the occasion was both enlightening and truly entertaining (apparently a quantity as foreign at the Bridge this season as most of the players).
If jailing writers was an Olympic sport China would win the overall gold, and both Yang Lian and Tze Ming Mok are currently in exile, in London and New Zealand respectively. Both cite Tiananmen Square as a turning point in their poetic and political lives. Saturday was not only the first time the pair had met, it was also the day they made public an experiment in translation they’d been running between them by email. First Yang Lian read his poem about his ‘manor’, Stoke Newington, initially in the original Chinese, then the English translation by New Zealand academic Jacob Edmond – and both were beautiful in different ways. Then Tze Ming Mok read her English mistranslation of the same poem using her imperfect grasp of Chinese (a Chinese Diasporan, she uses that distance in her work and in her humour), before Yang Lian translated that mistranslation back into Chinese. To finish, Mr Edmond tried to make sense of it all, gave up, did his own thing and in so doing bore out Yang Lian’s assertion that in order to translate poetry, translators must themselves be poets. Confused yet? So was I, at least a little bit, but it really didn’t matter. I didn’t need to understand much of what I’d heard to remember how much I once loved reading and listening to poetry. It demands a slowing down and a quality of attention that for whatever reason, I find difficult to achieve these days. But like Colin on his recent course, Saturday reminded me that the investment is invariably worthwhile.
The experiment was a success and the discussion that followed fascinating. I believed Yang Lian when he said that the best way to read is to translate, because it requires you to ‘cut in to’ the language. He described translations of his poetry not as his own work but as trees growing from the same ground (understandable as apparently someone once turned his ‘peacock’ into a ‘squirrel’); despite the well publicised loss of ‘something’ in translation, both poets were keen to make the point that much is also gained. Like the poets’ experiment, like Tze Ming Mok’s ongoing battle with her language and like the festival itself, I left understanding that the attempt to connect is what really matters.
International PEN hopes to make the festival an annual event and I very much hope they succeed. Oh, and Wolves drew 0-0. I missed nothing.
Rob Williams
Creative Director
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