Europe does not exist. It’s an idea that only makes sense on the paper of maps. The continent is an amalgam of languages, faces, voices, accents, alphabets, cultures, traditions, stories, legends. A molten mass of humanity that this week can be perceived in the halls of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), coordinates so far from the old world and so close to the publishing industry. Literary globalization becomes flesh in the most important event of Hispanic literature, which this year welcomes a piece of the atlas marked by difference: the 27 countries of the European Union —with a nod included to Ukraine, a new suitor for the dance —.
When talking about European literature, the mind quickly goes to the great French, Italian or English authors. On the margins are the letters from two dozen countries with high-caliber literary traditions that often pass through the publishing market with more pain than glory due to language barriers, translation or a less consolidated industry. This week is an opportunity to immerse yourself in the literature of the other Europe: in the work of the Turkish Cypriot poet Zeki Ali, the Portuguese Lídia Jorge, the Irish Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin, the Latvian Nora Ikstena, the Bulgarian Ilija Trojanow or the Slovak María Ferencuhová, among dozens more. This selection of four voices is just a small sample that does not pretend to be representative of that enormous literary periphery:
Ersi Sotiropoulos, the punk prophet
Ersi Sotiropoulos poses for the portraits with a look of not wanting to be here and the attitude of a punk prophet of the end of the world on a hungover morning. She is wearing all black: an old T-shirt with some stains and several sizes too big, espadrilles, straw bangs that fall in her eyes, marked veins on a fine body. The first thing she does is talk about the dark ghost of fascism that is haunting Europe again. She does it with a hoarse, deep, smoky voice. When she discovers that they don’t let her smoke in the press room, she asks to do the interview on the street, sitting on the sidewalk. She drinks coffee, lights a cigarette.
Sotiropoulos (70 years old) is one of the most nonconformist voices in Greek literature. “I like books that are unexpected, that’s why I never write if I know from the beginning what the ending is going to be, I would get bored. I need to surprise myself.” With a handful of novels, short stories and poetry collections behind her, in 2017 she won the Mediterranean Literature Prize with What’s left of the night (Sixth Floor, 2018). He says that he is not a pessimist, but his vision of the future—the literary and the human—is rather dark: “I am afraid that we are heading towards a literature that is very well written, but that is no longer free. When I was little there was censorship by the dictatorship, now it is infiltrated within the work itself. It is the result of politically correct terrorism: the witch hunt on social networks.” She is concerned about artificial intelligence, the lack of a truly representative democracy, climate change: “I have a two-year-old granddaughter. I read in the New York Times some data about what the water reserves and temperature in the world will be like when she is 40. I can’t be happy if I think about that. Honestly, I try not to think about it.”
Some 12 million people in the world speak Greek; less than those who live in Mexico City and its metropolitan area. Writing in such a minority language, for Sotiropoulos making his way into the market has not been easy: “There are very good authors in Greece, but we need more help to translate, it is a small language. I don’t like to think in categories, but I feel like a Greek rather than a European author, although, of course, in a more general sense I belong to European literature. Although the borders are not very important. The most important thing is the language and my language is Greek. Every time I try to write in Italian or French it is fine, it is not bad, but it sounds false to me, there is no emotion, it embarrasses me.”
Tatiana Țîbuleac: “I am a very peripheral voice: Moldova is in the middle of nowhere”
Tatiana Țîbuleac has that Soviet blonde hair and glacial blue eyes. She was born in a country younger than her, Moldova. She grew up with two languages, Romanian from her parents and the obligatory Russian that she was taught in a school in the same Soviet Union that locked her grandparents in a gulag. She worked for a few years as a journalist and moved to Paris for love, which must be the main reason for moving to Paris. Perhaps because of this life story crossed by different languages, geographies and crumbling empires, he learned to hate borders: “When we talk about literature, music, creativity, we should not think in border terms, that only makes it more difficult for books travel “It would erase all borders.” Of course: like Sotiropoulos, when it comes to writing she only wants to do it in Romanian: “I don’t feel that my voice is honest when I write in other languages.”
Țîbuleac (45 years old) jokes: “I am a very peripheral voice: Moldova is in the middle of nowhere.” Despite this, his novel The summer my mother had green eyes (Impediment, 2019) was a publishing success in Europe and part of Latin America. The author rejects the labels and limitations of cartography. “I don’t consider myself a European writer because I don’t know what it means. I don’t think we should restrict a writer to her geography. In that case, I could only write about the collapse of the Soviet Union or about wine, and I’m not too interested in those topics. When you write a story you just hope that it is understood or loved or hated, any feeling is good for a writer, but I don’t really have a European audience in front of my eyes. I come here and see that people basically also want to know about love, death, forgiveness. I think that when we talk about literature things become simpler: it doesn’t matter what language you write in, they are the same themes, with different stories.”
Even so, the writer recognizes that for young authors in her country to eat what they write is quite a feat. The difficulties of a work written in Romanian being translated and made known outside the region are enormous. Țîbuleac did not launch into fiction until some time after moving to France. In Moldova she worked as a social affairs reporter and “when she came home, she didn’t want to continue writing about other topics.” But when she settled in Paris she began to miss its language, its sound, its everyday conversations. She discovered that writing brought her closer to home. “And that’s how I started writing books: because I missed my language.”
András Forgách, the son of the spy
András Forgách’s mother died 30 years before her son discovered that she was a spy for the Hungarian communist regime of János Kádár. When he was 61 years old, hundreds of documents about the woman’s clandestine activities as an informant fell into the writer’s hands, which the author poured into My mother’s file (Anagram, 2019), the novel that earned him international recognition and the hatred of part of his family. Her sister spent years telling him that she should die because of what she had written until, during the coronavirus and scared that her brother might actually die, she reconciled with him.
Forgách (71 years old) appears on the last morning of November, towering above the crowd, tall and burly, with pale blue eyes and long gray hair. The night before he tried mezcal for the first time and hasn’t been able to sleep much. He is not a big fan of drinking or big literary events: “Fairs are not a place for writers, they are more for people who buy and sell books, for those who want to learn about them. The writer here is just a stranger. “Writing alone is about a piece of paper, a pen, and a room you can be alone in, not about being in the middle of chaos,” he pontificates in an affable tone. Deep down, what happens to him is that he is “a lonely guy” who loves to isolate himself and dedicate himself to his books, his films, his plays: “I can be silent for weeks, it’s better for my soul.”
Before My mother’s file, Forgách published several novels that were well received nationally, but did not achieve the notoriety of his story of spies, state sewers and family secrets. In his country he was a respected figure since the 1970s as part of the countercultural movement; as a playwright and film scriptwriter, where he has also ventured as an actor. But as in the rest of European countries with minority languages, finding a place in the international literary scene writing in Hungarian is almost a miracle. “Being a writer in Hungary is a privilege. Before the novel I was published in some anthology, but no one talked about translating my books. It changed everything for me. You have to be there, you have to be ready and when destiny knocks on the door, open it. Do not be afraid”.
Olja Savičević: “The only thing we know about Croatia is the war”
In his first novel, Goodbye, cowboy (sun dance, 2013), Olja Savičević (49 years old) portrayed her hometown, Split, a “shitty place”, dusty and forgotten on the Croatian Adriatic coast. The book is a kind of western Balkan, a photograph of the generation that grew up with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the war and a post-war period marked by hatred and reconstruction from the ashes of a devastated country. “A glorious new European voice has arrived,” he wrote. Guardian in your review. Savičević, however, is barely known to the general public outside Croatia. Until this year, in which she has obtained a scholarship that will allow her to focus on writing her next work, she survived in that common circuit of the precarious literary world: writing articles, editing others, collaborating in anthologies. A little of everything.
Savičević arrives at the interview, short hair, red lips, a faltering English accent, and says that writing from Croatia is a battle: “It’s easier for Western European authors, not just writers, in many other things too . That is the great lesson for the people, the governments, even the artists of Western Europe: that they do not put us on the margins all the time, we are always on the margins of Europe. It is important that we get more translations, it is harder for us to publish books outside our country because we come from minority languages.”
The author vindicates the value of views from the periphery: “I have always thought that people on the margins can give us new perspectives of humanity; “Writers from my country can open new perspectives on European issues.” Savičević does not like to talk about the war she experienced when she was a child (1991-1995): it is still a painful topic. She is tired of the pressure on her generation of authors to write about the wounds of that conflict and that, internationally, it seems that the only thing Croatia has to contribute to the world is the learning of the years between bombs and shots: “It “The only thing they know about us is war.” And she calls to embrace the diversity of voices on the continent and in the world, to use literature as a bridge: “If we read our stories among ourselves, we will understand each other better.”
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