“Thriving on the Periphery” by Kapka Kassabova
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Within minutes of arriving in a packed Sofia University hall to receive the latest of his honorary doctorates, Orhan Pamuk addressed the elephant in the room: life on the periphery of Europe. He knows that, European Union or not, in a place like Sofia (which he generously likened to a small Istanbul), the sense of being a province has wounded the collective conscious forever. He struck a chord when he spoke of the shared Balkan experience of being on the periphery of things, of ‘our reality, our memories’ not having a clear place in a larger, more glorious European history. And yet, it is precisely through the obscurely local that a writer of vision and compassion can write himself and his country into world literature. His message was clear: write from the apparent smallness of your local world, write what you know. You don’t have to be living in Paris – as he dreamt of doing as an adolescent in ‘provincial’ Istanbul – to be writing interesting stories. It makes sense that Pamuk was in Sofia as guest of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. American author Elizabeth Kostova’s Bulgarian connection goes beyond the fact that her best-selling Dracula thriller The Historian is partly set in the bowels of a remote Bulgarian monastery. Kostova and the publishing director of Ciela Books in Sofia set up the foundation four years ago with the general idea of linking writers across borders and languages, and more specifically linking Bulgarian writers with the Anglophone book world in which less than 5% of published books are in translation. So the chances of a writer from a tiny language to be translated into English are equally tiny. EKF’s work (www.ekf.bg) aims to redress precisely such injustices of geography, and since 2008, each summer the EKF has held fiction seminars for a hand-picked group of new writers in both English and Bulgarian. The seminars open for submissions at the start of each year. The tutors are Elizabeth Kostova herself and a prominent local author; the setting is Sozopol, an ancient Greek city on the Black Sea coast; and the party lasts four days. Every day, lunch is served on a cliff top in the cobbled old town; one side of the menu has stuffed peppers and moussaka, while the other has the afternoon’s discussion topic for fellows and guest writers and publishers. This year, the topic was translation, which John Freeman, the international editor of Granta magazine, described as a bridge to ‘what we know exists but cannot see’ until we are ‘piggybacked’ by the translator. As one of the world’s oldest literary magazines, Granta is a champion of new voices, including those in translation. Two issues ago, Freeman commissioned a special edition featuring the best of young Spanish language novelists, which involved a torturous process of selection that heavily depended on the quality of the translations. ‘Translation has a high failure rate’, Freeman said, while the President of the European Association of Publishers Fergal Tobin went further: ‘Translation is an impossible job. Translators are the unsung heroes of literature, because they render a whole world.’ Manol Peikov from publishing house Janet 45 put it starkly too: ‘A translator is a co-author. If their work is good, the book may be a success. If the translation flops, the book flops too. Translators are the most intelligent people in a society, and also the most undervalued.’ Rana Dasgupta, author of the novel Solo (which is set in Bulgaria and published there by Janet 45), pointed out that ‘novelists reject translation psychically. They are programmed to reject translations because they are other versions of their text.’ Therefore, authors ought to surrender control over their translated work to the publisher and stay out of it. Ilija Troyanow, the German author of explorer Richard Burton’s fictionalised life The Collector of Worlds, found this impossible with his Chinese translator, who explained that in Chinese, there is no ambivalence in word meanings, so for each ambivalent German word in his novel she gave him a multi-choice list for him to tick. No wonder some novelists reject translation psychically! But others – the ones writing in tiny languages – depend on it. This is why EKF runs a two-way Bulgarian-English translation competition each year. The latest winners were Thrown Into Nature by Milen Rouskov and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.