I went to
the first day of Cardiff’s second Fiction Fiesta
– Saturday 18th May 2013.
Fiction Fiesta, they tell us, is:
An innovative programme of literary events celebrating international fiction and poetry in translation alongside home-grown talent.
Here are my thoughts on the day. The morning sessions were more academic, discussion-led, while the afternoon sessions were primarily readings. I hope some of this translates, as it were.
Preamble
I’ve been a student at Cardiff University since September. And this, shockingly,
is the first time I’ve set foot in the main building.
The room we’re in – The Council Chamber - is a little more formal than the
Humanities building – wooden panels and liver-spotted paintings of University-type
men (no women) looking very official and Chancellorific. Tomorrow will be in
Dempsey’s bar. They couldn’t book it for today.
There’s a stall being set up by Amy from Seren Books. Lots of lovely books. I would
buy a lot of them, but I don’t think I’ll get away with it.
I buy a pre-publication copy of New Welsh Review issue 100, and donate some
money to the charity we’re supporting today: Education For The Children, who
support the poorest of children in Guatemala and other Central American
countries.
Let the Fiesta commence!
oOo
I: The Translated
Life of Rebecca Jones
At about
twenty-past nine on this Saturday morning, after two weeks of trying to find
some time to read her book, Angharad Price broke my heart.
I wanted to
tell Angharad Price this, but she scarpered, straight after the morning
session, which was a great shame, as I’d loved to have had the chance to do
that awkward eavesdrop while she talks to someone of importance while I hover,
hoping to get her attention.
Anyway,
Angharad, in conversation wirh Jon Gower,was a very interesting. In speaking
about her novel The Life of Rebecca Jones / O! Tyn Y Gorchudd , she was very self-deprecating or reticent about her
‘authorship’ – instead pointing out that the book was fact, and she’d just
compiled the words. The eponymous Rebecca was Angharad’s great aunt. The book
is the family history, through Rebecca’s eyes.
However, and
this is a point Jon Gower made: Angharad as ‘historical compiler’ or ‘historical
embellisher’ acts like a seamstress, stitching these disparate pieces of story
together. A motif attached to title character, too.
The book is frequently
described as being about a family where there are three blind brothers. What
Price does best at, though, is to align the sympathies and pride of the
readership with the narrator, the aforementioned Rebecca Jones, and to gain an
interest into her world, and life.
That this
understated character can have so buy reader buy-in, that so many readers will
and have reacted as I did, with utter sadness, then it goes to prove that
Angharad Price is not a storyteller, or a story thief, but a writer, using the
foundations of reality and family to tell her
story, her truth, of the life of Rebecca Jones. It’s Rebecca’s ‘autobiography’
– and therefore Angharad’s work.
Whether there
is a veil in the way or not, it’s irrelevant. This book (Angharad said it isn’t
a novel!) with its combination of deliberately simplistic and quotidian prose, elegant,
almost spiritual passages about the river, and the poetry of englyn and hymns
and longer poems, works so well. It takes in the whole of the Twentieth
Century, and the history of farming in Wales, and makes it personal and compact
rather than the expansive outside world. It takes Rebecca Jones, and makes her
sing and love.
Angharad
clearly adores her book. It took her the best part of 10 years to allow a translation
into English:
‘I wanted to
let it breathe in Welsh’
I think it
was a very sensible decision. Having won at the Eisteddfod, the book was
immediately published. In Welsh it quickly became canon, and the lack of a
translation maintained that specialness. As an established welsh book,
appreciated in English, as a work in translation, as a glimpse into a truly
different culture and language.
There is a
sense of inevitability when she talks about the success of the book. When translated, a
parallel English / Cymraeg edition was published, and barely noticed. Lateran
English-only edition it was published by a London-based press, and all of a
sudden it is reviewed in national broadsheets and declared a masterpiece. Which
it is.
oOo
II:
Displacement and Childhood
The second
panel at Fiction Fiesta saw the Argentinian short story-writer and journalist Inés Garland and Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon read from their work, and
discuss it, with prompts from the chair - Fiesta patrón Richard Gwyn.
Garland,
though prolific in her homeland, has just had her first story translated and
published in English, by Senor Gwyn inthe 100th issue of New Welsh
Review.
Halfon is also widely published in Spanish, but his first book to be
translated into English so far is last years The Polish Boxer.
Halfon’s
novel-ish-short story collection is the best thing I’ve read in the last six
months, hands down. It is also the only thing I’ve read three times in the last
six months. I did get to tell him this, thankfully. He didn’t run away
screaming or call the police.
The panel
talked about identity and versions, alternate selves: Halfon’s narrator in The Polish Boxer is a character called
Eduardo Halfon, but is not the same person.
‘He smokes a
lot. I smoke a little’
Garland too
writes of a reality / fiction amalgam – her story 'A Perfect Queen' takes in an incident
of her childhood, but she remembers it, deliberately unreliably, mixing fact
with what it needs to work as a story.
Both
writers, although from very different parts of the Americas, talked of the idea
that in ‘Latin American’ writing, there is no dividing line of fact and
fiction, only stories. Halfon makes the point that he wants the reader to feel
like they are reading real events.
This is the
writing of ‘a truth’, rather than ‘the truth’.
A question
from the floor asks how South American Literature or Latin American Literature
can be such a collective genre, almost, whilst European literature does not have
the same catch-all generalisation / genrefication. Garland and Halfon admit
their own difficulty in even obtaining each other’s work – that Guatemalan
fiction is not available in Argentina, and vice versa. Spain is the melting pot
where this work all meets, to be dispatched and consumed.
It is all too easy to
compare everything with Márquez, with Borges, or Bolaño , and ignore that there can be other voices, lacking in
magical realism or whatever else is ‘expected’ of a South American author
What neither
mention, which is apparent to me, is that it is easier to pigeon-hole all Spanish
language writing from South America as ‘South American Literature’. European
fiction cannot really exist, in that we have too many different languages, the
romance and Germanic and Slavic (...etc) roots of which all provide different
textures and rhythms.
Whereas
(lusophonic Brazil aside) Central and South America, ‘Latin’ America, are united
by this linguistic consensus, by a collective consciousness of words. European
fiction is too diverse and dispersed to ever have the same impact as English,
North American or Latin American literature, purely because it lacks that
unifying communal vocabulary.
One thing
that united the panel, language and literary capability aside, is there sense
of wanderlust, of displacement even. Perhaps this sense of travel and ennui at sitting still is the key to
writing. Gwyn spent a long period vagabonding about Europe. Garland started as
an au pair in London before heading
for the continent, while Halfon moved from Guatemala to the USA and back to
Guatemala. He is half-Jewish, and married to a Spaniard. He used a unique
Spanish word, one that can almost be translated as an extreme form of
displacement and unbelonging.
I think he
should move to Cardiff. We could be friends. I don’t tell him that. He might take out a restraining order.
oOo
III. Potter
versus Gower
Readings
from poet Clare Potter and writer Jon Gower were the first serving of afternoon
entertainment. Clare went first. As Jon
said straight after.
‘Remind me
never to try and follow Clare Potter’
She
performed her poetry with such singsong gusto and humour and love for the
subjects. Potter sings and almost raps, fusing Blackwood valley-girl with a New
Orleans jazz twang that just captivates. I saw her do a similar set of poems in
October, one of her first performances after taking some time off. Some six
months later and she really is back. I'm a prose writer, but Potter really could make me turn...
Jon, freshly
nominated for the Welsh Book of the Year award for his Wales at Water’s Edge read some of his work, and it was clear quite
why he has been so highly regarded.
oOo
IV. Pick a
Number
Tiffany Atkinson,
albeit sore-of-throat, read some tricky poems. Tricksy as they made you laugh
and then regret laughing and want to cry. Her traffic jam poem (the name of
which escapes me) being the prime example of this phenomena. I've got to stop enjoying poems. I'll start writing them again if we're not careful.
Charles Boyle,
a man of many nom-de-plumes, read
from his ‘Jack Robinson’s collection of micro-vignettes from London ,W12.,
Days and Nights in W12. Boyle read a
selected few, before engaging in a bout of ‘call out the page number’ which led
to unexpected storied being read.
oOo
V. Turks, a
Scot, and a Welsh ex-vagabond.
Richard Gwyn
and W.N. Herbert closed the day with tales of Turkey, and their recent
translation project there, and read out some of the work they’d completed.
Herbert read a piece he’d translated in Chinese, while Gwyn read some new
poetry, prose poems being he’d not written for a while. Herbert finished, at
6pm prompt, with poems of dogs and other such amusement. We even got a poetic
duet between Herbert and Potter.
oOo
Postscript.
Wine on the
lawn, with up’n’coming superstar Joao Morais, and two of my fellow MA
classmates. A train home accompanied by one of my tutors, and lots of ideas and
inspirations. And confidence, and affirmations, about where my writing is
going. I am also very annoyed to have to miss the Sunday session. Here’s to
next year, anyway.
