Brick Lane is a place where beigel shops are packed next to curry houses; on Sundays, market stalls sell the cuisine of every nation under the sun, and even those that aren’t, as the Swedish shop testifies. It felt like a suitable place to meet poet Nia Davies, who is the communications manager for Literature Across Frontiers (LAF), an organisation dedicated to making literature travel.
Europe-based organisation Literature Across Frontiers began a little over ten years ago and was initially focused on encouraging the flow of translation from the Eastern European states that had recently joined the EU, dubbed by Davies as “our so called new neighbours, even though they’d been there the whole time.”
Then it grew. Now LAF is confidently reaching out to Europe’s neighbours: North Africa, the Middle East, India and China. Along with research, their projects centre on getting literature translated from languages spoken by less than a million people and from languages that are currently poorly translated.
Davies spoke passionately about the necessity of translation for the writer: “If you’re working in Estonian or…Welsh even, you have to converse by a translator to reach a bigger audience or interact with the rest of the world.”
But just as important is the disorientating effect of reading translated literature: “If you reading something from Arabic or German…then you’re not going to place in the avant-garde versus mainstream, or give it an ism; you don’t place it – this has come from another world.”
It turns out that England suffers from a scarcity of translation. Davies tells me only “2.5 per cent of books published in the UK are translations…In France and Germany it would be more like 30 or 40 per cent.” In countries where a rarer language is used, most books published are translations, though a lot of those are apparently instruction manuals.
One of LAF’s recent projects gathered young writers from the Balkans, Turkey, Cyprus, the Black Sea countries and the UK, and put them all on trains through south east Europe down to Istanbul. The trains themselves were described as “grim”, and they translated each other’s work along the way, sometimes using bridge languages.
Cultural exchange was, as ever, the aim: “A lot of those writers take influences from all over the world…[But] they didn’t know so much about the literature of their nearest neighbours.”
In her own poetry Davies does not strive, consciously at least, to be across frontiers. “When I write, I’m not normally thinking about anything else than the poem.” But she finds herself influenced by the international poets she encounters at work, and also by Welsh – the language of her mother’s family – though she does not speak it herself. “There might be something in…the musicality of Welsh; in my poetry musicality is really inherent…the sound and the rhythms of the line…I don’t know if I could say it’s important, I just do it, it’s essential.”
It is from this musicality that Davies begins to write a poem. “[I] latch on to interesting sounds and phrases and overheard speech, images.” As for what the poem might be about, that only comes out in the editing process, which is not necessarily a good thing: “Sometimes I get disappointed if it’s all about something very clear and obvious; it loses its mysterious edge which is what drove it on in the first place.”
Meanwhile at LAF the immediate future looks exciting. A project called “Syria Speaks”, which will bring three eminent Syrian writers to the UK, is set to take place in late January.
It is not intended to make a political statement; “we’re interested in Arabic literature that goes beyond the headlines.” But Davies, looking a little weary, said of literary events, “you wonder if they’re going to tackle political issues, and in some ways you have to…[to] raise awareness as a human.”
Latching on to newsworthy political situations is not something LAF is entirely comfortable with: “you can’t discourage people from being interested in another culture, but it’s a bit of a shame that it’s only because of this violent deathly situation.”
For LAF the long term future does rely on politics – or at least on securing funding again from the EU. At the moment it seems likely, for which we should be thankful.
