Euro-Stodge or the Dawning of a Golden Age? How three European writers see the future of the continent.
This special edition of Czech Books comes from the Hotel Josef in one of the winding medieval streets of Prague's Old Town; this is where writers from different corners of the globe - from Saint Petersburg to Johannesburg - have gathered for the 14th Prague Writers' Festival. Prague is right in the heart of Europe: if you go some fifteen hundred kilometres to the north-west, you get to Britain, if you go the same distance in the opposite direction, you reach Greece. So with just days to go till the expansion of the European Union, I'm joined by writers from Greece, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom.
In most parts of Europe, when people hear "Europe" as a subject, it is something that isn't considered exciting or sexy. The European Union is something that hasn't really captured the souls of many Europeans. You're three European writers. How do you feel when you hear the word Europe?
Iva Pekarkova: "Very few huge empires ever captured the souls of any countries that belonged to them - or any groups of citizens - so I think that if we want to unite Europe, we have to get used to it, that it will not be very sexy or very exciting."
It's a regrettable necessity, you're almost saying.
IP: "I don't think so. To my mind what the European Community is trying to do is to keep the spirit of various countries right there, and not change it too much according to someone else's will. I think that's why the whole concoction of the spirit then becomes rather vague, and we are afraid to say anything - we are afraid to say God, Allah, Jehovah or whatever, because we may offend someone else who is also a member of the community and who doesn't like the way we think of God. Take places of worship: it's funny - I think it was in London - I saw this place of worship at the airport, the "airport chapel" it would have been called in the past. But in fact it was called a "place for meditation", and there was this funny stone in the middle of it and you were supposed to meditate about whatever you thought was proper for you. But the stone was boring and it was very visibly lacking any symbol of any religion which might offend someone else. So that's what happens."
Michael Hofmann: "So you think that's Europe - an airport installation. I think the one thing the EU has captured is the souls of businessmen, which is a contradiction in terms. I think it has changed, and probably regrettably, since the fifties, and it's probably gone too slowly. I have a sense that there was real magnanimity and imagination, especially to me in the Franco-German beginnings of it, because the two countries realized that unless they tied themselves to each other, they would go on fighting each other for ever. So people like Jean Monet and his German equivalents were doing something really heroic and really marvellous. And then I think money, business, bureaucracy, time and people's natural aversion and suspicion have taken over. Europe seems to be a matter of them and not us any more. I really regret that."
Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke: "As you said, I'm Greek, and there's a bit of schizophrenia here. The word schizophrenia is Greek of course, but the phenomenon is not only Greek. On the one hand, we were raised to the idea that we gave birth to the whole culture of Europe - the Ancient Greeks and Western Civilization - on the other hand, we felt we were at the end of the world and we had nothing to do with this thing called Europe. So when we joined it, there was a kind of childish pleasure in it, and I must say that I did partake, because I was raised in a polyglot and poly-ethnic world. My father was from Asia Minor, I studied abroad in Switzerland, and I must say, there was a satisfaction, and I think that in the heart of the Greeks there is a satisfaction."
Iva, do you feel as a Czech a sense of excitement that the country's just about to join the European club?
IP: "I must say, I used to be excited when I cast my vote in favour of it and everything, but now I am less and less excited because I think there will be some little inconveniences, for example, for me: when I go to Germany or England or wherever, I get some money - some cash - for reading or whatever. I never reported it to the tax bureau [all laugh], but now, with the European Community all together, who knows? Maybe they will start reporting it and I will get into trouble. So talking about money, this is one of the things where the European Community might hurt me..."
MH: "... a European tax office in Naples, or something like that. You can imagine a central fiscal unit somewhere. Watch this space!"
You're all talking about Europe in very pragmatic terms, but in terms of nation-building literature has played a huge role - for example in the Czech and the Greek nations. But people aren't writing for Europe, are they? Writers don't seem to be inspired by a common European identity.
KA: "The main subject for me, the main problem and the main target in my life is language. Unite Europe? - beautiful, fantastic, paradise - but does this mean eventually, I don't know in how many years (of course I won't be here), that there's going to be also one identity and one language? What will happen to our language? In my case, as a Greek, I have this fear. It's a language spoken by not even 15 million people - that's all - on this earth. It's going to be the first to disappear. For me language is not only a tool, it's not only an art, but it's also a way of inner life, because I think that inside we live in our language."
MH: "I feel English-language guilt. I'm not English - I'm German - but I fear the future will speak English, and probably only English, and I dread that, I must say."
IP: "Actually people did tell me that, but usually they were extremely old and kind of crazy, so I don't really take it so personally. But I know that the very famous Czech writer Milan Kundera, who I think opened the door to so many other Czech writers to the English and world readers' community, he once said: 'I don't feel like a Czech person, I feel like a European.' And that was it. The nation hated him for it - I don't know how long - 20 years or something. It's still there, it still goes with him, wherever he goes. I may have said someplace that I feel European rather than Czech but, you know, I haven't really been attacked for not cultivating the Czech language well enough. But basically, what I was trying to say was that (since you're talking about language) I think that if the door opens to various countries, where you can freely travel and live, it might actually improve the quality of translations of so many books, because, whenever you open a book in Czech which is a translation from the English, every single time you find some major mistake, caused either by not good enough knowledge of the language or not being exposed to the culture. So you misunderstand it. I think that if you live in the place, at least for a couple of years, and then start translating, this really helps, and I think that if this happens within the European Community - and hopefully in the world community - then things will be much, much nicer."
Michael Hofmann, when I told you before we started talking that Iva writes in both Czech and English, you appeared slightly shocked. Can you tell me why?
You're saying that you think languages will gradually disappear and that English will take over?
MH: "I can see that happening, and I think one should dig ones heals in and try to prevent that happening and try to keep different languages going. By all means, please keep translation going, but I'm pessimistic on the chances of other languages than English surviving."
IP: "I don't know. Of course I do want every language on the planet to survive, but on the other hand it would be lovely if everybody in the world spoke English or even a language which I don't speak and I would learn it then - if everybody spoke one language, and wherever you go you can communicate with the people using this language. It's so inconvenient. Each time you want to live in a different country you have to attempt to learn the language again and it's really time-consuming and difficult for many people."
KA: "Yes, that's a very good idea, but in parallel with their own. It means for bilingualism to be almost as natural as eating and drinking. That yes, because we must not forget one thing. Language is not just the words: 'I want to eat;' it's the whole spirit behind it. For example, I was surprised when I was in France last week in a festival. I was watching TV - you learn a lot from TV - and they have adopted in French, without realizing, this kind of attitude of the English, which is, for example, the playing with words. It's not natural - neither in Greek nor in French - to play with words. They pun, pun, pun all the time for publicity reasons. All publicity is punning. In principle I have nothing against it; that it would be so nice to communicate in one language, not to feel lonely, not to feel cast out, but on the other hand, what's the price for that?"
I'd like to ask Michael Hofmann: you grew up bilingual, with German parents, but growing up in Britain. Do you think that bilingual upbringing enriched your use of language or impoverished it?
MH: "I suppose that instinctively or greedily I would think "enriched", and I do remember thinking that you can't really write poems with one language. But there's also a very real way in which it's impoverished, because I think I don't have a (and therefore perhaps don't believe in the idea of a) deep language. German to me is a deeper language than English, because it's a little bit older and there's more childhood in German - it seems to me anyway - from Grimm and songs. Not just my childhood, but universal childhood - there's more of that in German. I don't have that, and I have a shallowly rooted language and I have a big preference for the part of English which is dying out, which is the Latin part of English, which is the bit that everyone confounds. It's the learnt language in the tradition of Conrad or Nabokov or Brodsky."
Iva, do you think that you write differently in English or in Czech, or better in one of the languages, or say different things with different nuances in the two different languages?
IP: "I have a feeling that Michael - not accused me - but said that I was under pressure to write in English, and actually it wasn't so. Maybe I was under pressure, but not from publishers or whatever, but from the country itself, because when I was trying to write this novel it was about a young Czech woman who comes to New York and goes through all strata of society, while learning some kind of half-black, half-white English, so the language is a huge part of the book, and it's almost untranslatable into Czech, because we don't have categories like black Czech or whatever. Very often when people translate black English into Czech, they speak Slovak! [All laugh] So most black people in American novels in Czech translation speak Slovak, which I think is kind-of funny. But I think it actually did improve my Czech, because I learned some of the grammatical categories or some kind of way of conveying them into Czech. I was praised by two critics for inventing a new Czech language, which was based on the English books. So I think the fact that I can write in English did improve my Czech a little bit, or at least enriched it."
To conclude, the European Union is shortly to have 25 members and at least as many languages: is this European integration going to enrich European literature from the 25 countries for the future?
KA: "Of course. Numerically of course it will, but the difficulty is how are we going to keep track of all these different literatures? And again, the question of language is put on the table of discussion. Will all these literatures be written in 30 languages or will they end up being written in one language? That's another question. So the future is promising, but also leaves a lot of questions at this point unanswerable to my mind."
IP: "As I already said, I believe that the European Community will enrich the literature of every single state probably in many aspects, and one of them, I believe, is the quality of translation."
MH: "I'm very happy that it's expanding eastwards, but I think historically that the British see only the west of Europe, and there's so much to the south and east. I hope people keep their separateness of culture and that separateness of language survives and that it's expressed in translation, not homogeneity."
Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke from Athens, Iva Pekarkova from here in Prague and Michael Hofmann from the United Kingdom, thank you very much for joining me.
