PEN WORLD VOICES: Peeling back the layers

The day is off to an auspicious start. I read in the NY Times that Gary Snyder has been awarded the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors “a living American whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.”

This morning the city is washed in light. It’s cool and windy, and I take a long walk around midtown.

* * *

At 1:00 I’m seated in the Martin Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Ave for Five Years of the PEN Translation Fund. It’s an intimate space. Around 75 people are here. I speak briefly with Martin Riker, editor of Dalkey Archive Press--one of our Reading The World publisher partners.

Translator Esther Allen gracefully introduces the four other panelists and eight recipients of PEN translation grants, and tells us about the genesis of this program. In 2003 someone showed up unannounced at the PEN office and offered to donate $734,000 to endow a translation grant award program—the only stipulation being that the donor remain anonymous. The money came from a small life insurance policy of a soldier who died overseas. The family invested the money and it grew over the years. Fifty translation projects have been funded so far by this program.

Essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger reminds the audience that publishers are nervous about translations. The PEN prize is significant because it gives the winners a credibility and visibility they otherwise wouldn’t have.

New Directions editor Barbara Epler informs us that only 3% of the books published in the United States every year are translations.

NYRB editor Edwin Frank reads a poem from a collection entitled The Battle For This Land Has Just Begun by O Dashbalbar, a Mongolian poet whose work he calls a strange combination of patriotism and Buddhism. “This is an example of the sort of work that never would come to the attention of American publishers without the PEN award.” The translator is Simon Wickham-Smith, and both Frank and Epler suggest reading his entry on Wikipedia. “He is very interesting,” Epler says.*

The PEN translation grant recipients—Karen Emmerich, Jason Grunebaum, Wen Huang, Sarah Khalili, Christopher Southward, Katherine Silver, Alyson Waters, and Idra Novey—give testimonials and read from their work.

* * *

This evening I attend Public Lives/Private Lives at the Town Hall on West 43rd St, half a block from Times Square. I’m right up front—A 101: first row, an aisle seat—which is a bit like being in the front row in a movie theater. Even if I slouch down, I’m staring straight up. The house is sold out, so I can’t move to another seat.

The program description promises that “some of the worlds most beloved and illustrious writers” will “peel back the layers of their literary selves.” Hmmm. Who wrote the ad copy for this? It sounds like some weird striptease. But that’s not what it turns out to be.

Salman Rushdie appears on stage and smiles as he tells everyone to “turn off your goddamn cell phones.”

Rushdie calls our attention to the empty chair on the stage, which represents imprisoned or silenced writers. “The silencing of one writer silences us all,” he says.

“The theme of this year’s festival is Public Lives/Private Lives. It didn’t used to be necessary to consider the public dimension. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was written during Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Her novels are exactly contemporary with the Napoleonic Wars, but they were never mentioned in her books. Politics and history happened so far away that it was possible to explain and explore her world without reference beyond the private.”

“The novel wants to be small, intimate and provincial. However, these days the subject cannot be just what Grace Paley called ‘the little disturbances of man.’”

Michael Ondaatje, who is the poet with the most beautiful voice since Dylan Thomas, reads The Great Tree, a poem from Handwriting, and a section from Divisadero his recent novel.

Evelyn Schlag, an Austrian poet, reads in German while the text is projected on the screen behind her in English. She is followed by Rian Malan, a white South African writer, who dedicates his reading to the people of Zimbabwe. Annie Proulx reads a story by Ian Higgins, an Irish writer published by Dalkey Archive Press. Peter Esterhazy reads a very amusing section from Celestial Harmonies in Hungarian.

Mexican Coral Brancho, author of Firefly Under the Tongue, speaks of “the fragility of that which we call private and the emptiness that the consensus regarding what’s public has created in the world that surrounds us.”

The Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua reads from A Woman in Jerusalem, which was written “in a very dark time” during the 2002-2003 Intifada. A 40 year old woman who works in a bakery is killed in a terrorist bombing. “Who was the woman, and why didn’t anyone know about her?” How do we give an anonymous, lonely death meaning? “Who cares about such things in times like this?”

Francine Prose reads from her forthcoming novel Golden Grove, the story of two daughters of an ex hippie New England couple who own a bookshop—the Golden Grove. “This is the beginning of our years of bad luck. One thing happened, then everything else.” Uh-oh.

Ian McEwan reads a very funny essay about traveling to the Arctic with a group of writers and artists to communicate their concerns about global warming to a wider public. He describes what it’s like to be on a ship stuck in the ice in temperatures of minus 30 degrees. The owner of a size 8 pair of boots mistakenly takes his boots. McEwan speaks of his sense of victimhood, and how close he comes to picking up a knife.

“It is not evil that undoes the world, but small errors. The social contract ruptures. After three days the boot room is a wasteland of broken dreams. All boot rooms need good rules. Leave nothing to good art. We barely know ourselves. Why else write fiction? Why else read it?”

On that note, the evening ends.

Salman Rushdie comes on stage to dismiss the congregation, saying, “I have nothing to tell you. I am here as a form of punctuation, an almost completely spherical being...”

After the reading the lobby is filled with people crowding around a long table to purchase titles by the authors who read tonight. McNally Robinson is selling the books, which is terrific.

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* Mr. Wickham-Smith is indeed interesting and busy. He is the general editor of the Kegan Paul Library of Mongolian Literature, and he is researching the astrology of the transgendered and intersex community. In addition, he is a musician in the experimental music underground in Great Britain. For some years he was a Buddhist monk.