Every so often I remember that I run a publishing company as well as being a trans activist, a diversity trainer, an historian, and someone with a day job she needs to get done to pay the rent. Last night I sent I proof copy of this off to Juliet. Northern Storm, book 2 in the Aldabreshin Compass series, should be with you in a few days time.
Books
Looking for Lesbians
Yesterday’s Annual General Meeting of OutStories Bristol went very well. Thanks to the fabulous Bea Hitchman we had a good crowd of interested outsiders to make us quorate; and thanks to expert training from Kevin I was able to speed through the formal part of the proceedings very quickly. That left us plenty of time to listen to Bea.
The subject of Bea’s talk was the historical research that she did into lesbian life in fin de siècle Paris when writing her novel, Petite Mort. Researching LGBT lives is never easy, because so much is erased or hidden behind obfuscating language. In the case of lesbians there is also much pseudo-history written by men who are more interested in the titillating power of girl-on-girl sex than they are in the reality of lesbian life.
So sadly the idea that in order to signal oneself as a lesbian in Paris what one did was purchase a poodle, have it splendidly coiffured, and tie a bow around its neck, proved to be untrue. French lesbians did appear to have a fondness for dogs, but eccentrically decorative poodles were not de rigueur.
There were, however, lesbian bars, including La Souris (the Mouse) and Le Rat Mort (the Dead Rat), which bespeak a possible fondness for things small and furry. Toulouse-Lautrec was a regular visitor, as he was rather fond of painting pictures of lesbians.
Still with animals, I learned that Sarah Bernhardt, who was bisexual, had an exotic menagerie whom she took everywhere with her. This included a cheetah, and a boa constrictor which sadly died because she fed it too much champagne.
All in all it was a very entertaining talk, for which thanks again to Bea. If you have an event that needs an excellent speaker on lesbian issues, or indeed anything to do with historical fiction, do consider her.
After the talk, all of the lesbians hit the alcohol. They did not object to me joining them, which pleased me on a number of levels. One of those is that the Golden Guinea has an excellent selection of beer. I got to try Jurassic Dark, a dark wheat beer from the Dorset Brewing Company. Highly recommended.
Negotiating with the Dead
Today I’ll be in Bristol for the Annual General Meeting of OutStories Bristol, the LGBT History group of which I am co-chair. Our guest speaker for the event is Bea Hitchman, author of the fabulous Petite Mort. In the talk Bea will look at, “at the ethical detective work of researching a novel and what writers owe – or don’t owe – to communities of the dead.”
The novel is set in Paris.
This may turn out to be more complicated than we had expected.
It also reminds me that there is a reason why media news reports are called “stories”. Everything that you read and watch about Paris over the next week or so will be a story written by someone. Remember that.
Book Review – Carter & Lovecraft
I’m not managing to review all that many of the books I read these days, but I did want to do one for Carter & Lovecraft because I think my friend Jonathan has done something exceedingly fun with it.
I am eagerly awaiting the television series, though if the hero is not played by someone who at least looks like the All Blacks fly half I shall be very disappointed. I know who I want to play Emily too, but that would be a spoiler.
Anyway, the review is done, and you can read it here. Enjoy. And good luck with the sanity rolls.
Coming Soon – Afro SF Vol. 2
Ivor Hartmann has sent me a review copy of the new edition in his Afro SF anthology series. This one is a bit different, in that rather than a bunch of short stories it contains five novellas. All are, of course, by Africa writers. Here’s the line-up:
“The Last Pantheon” by Tade Thompson & Nick Wood. An epic superhero face-off thousands of years in the making.
“Hell Freezes Over” by Mame Bougouma Diene. Long after the last skyscraper has drowned who remains and how will they survive?
“The Flying Man of Stone” by Dilman Dila. When ancient technology seems like magic legends live again in the midst of war and sides will be chosen.
“VIII” by Andrew Dakalira. A space shuttle crash, the numeral eight, serial murders, what connects them all could end humanity.
“An Indigo Song for Paradise” by Efe Tokunbo Okogu. Change is coming to Paradise city and it won’t be pretty, but if this is paradise then heaven must be hell in need of a revolution.
I’m looking forward to it. The book goes on sale on December 1st.
Today on Ujima : Sanctum, TDOR, Tara and Tade
I was in charge of the Women’s Outlook show on Ujima again today. My first guest was Sara Zaltash who, like me, has performed at Sanctum. She’s one of those brave people who have been performing there in the middle of the night. And if you think that a trans woman reading science fiction stories is off the wall, just wait until you hear what Sara was doing.
Sara’s parents are Iranian, so along side discussion of her Sanctum performance we chatted about the issue of women’s rights in Iran. That was with reference to this article in yesterday’s Telegraph. I did rather like the idea that women in Iran are getting round laws about being their husbands’ property by refusing to get married. Of course personally I think the solution is to bring back Ishtar worship, but I can see that might be a bit unpopular in some quarters.
After Sara my next guest was Chris Hubley, a local artist who is staging an exhibition of work by trans artists as part of Trans Awareness Month (which November is). That includes a fundraiser party on the 13th at which I might be reading a bit of poetry. Chris and I talked a bit about the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) and how we both want trans people to be known for things other than being tragic. You can find out more about the events Chris is organizing here.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
Chris had to rush off to catch a bus to London, but before he went we had a brief chat about the Tara Hudson case. Chris explains why he doesn’t have a Gender Recognition Certificate. If the Ministry of Justice were being consistent they should hold that, were Chris to commit a crime, he should be sent to a women’s prison. My guess, though, is that it wouldn’t happen. The trouble with the MoJ Guidelines is that they are based on the assumption that the primary goal is to protect the other inmates from the trans person, not the other way around. Trans women, because they are still seen as men by the MoJ, are deemed a danger to other women prisoners. Trans men are also seen as men by the MoJ, and therefore also deemed to belong in men’s prisons.
That only took up 15 minutes as Chris had to go, so in the next slot I brought in Paulette and our new colleague, Zuzana, who were just back from a trip to Calais to deliver supplies to the refugee camp there. They will have a much fuller report on the trip in tomorrow’s Outlook show. It sounds like it will be well worth a listen.
In the final segment of the show I ran a pre-recorded interview with Tade Thompson about his new novel, Making Wolf. Tade and I talk a lot about the background to the novel, which is set in an imaginary country carved off from Nigeria after the civil war. There’s a lot of great material in there.
You can listen to the second half of the show here.
The playlist for the show was as follows:
- Thieves in the Temple – Prince
- So Blue – Mahsa Vahdat & Mighty Sam McClain
- Pressure Off – Duran Duran with Janelle Monáe & Nile Rodgers
- Love will save the day – Koko Jones
- Appletree – Erykah Badu
- Lovin’ You – Minnie Riperton (dedicated to Kevin)
- Killer on the Rampage – Eddy Grant
- Jezebel – Sade
I am particularly grateful to Sara for introducing me to Mahsa and Sam. I was also very pleased to be able to music by a trans woman of color during our discussion of TDOR.
I’m going to be on Paulette’s education show briefly tomorrow morning. She’s interviewing Roger Griffith and I about performing at Sanctum was how/whether our various educational backgrounds prepared us for being writers. That will be between 10:00 and 11:00.
Planetfall Drops
Talking of Planetfall, it is officially published today. I’m hoping that Forbidden Planet Bristol will have copies tomorrow as I’m in town to do the radio show. If you haven’t got the message about this book yet, why not listen to Emma Newman read the first couple of chapters at BristolCon Fringe.
Juliet Jacques in Bristol
Most of yesterday was spent either on social media or on the phone. It was a relief to have an excuse to get out of the house and go and listen to Juliet Jacques, who was in Bristol as part of the Festival of Ideas. Juliet has a new book out: Trans: A Memoir. Those of you who enjoyed her Transgender Journey columns in The Guardian will love this too. She’s a sharp, incisive and often very witty writer. And she hasn’t done the traditional trans autobiography thing by any means.
My thanks to Juliet for a great evening, and to Andrew and Zoe of the Festival of Ideas for putting on a very successful trans-themed event.
Southern Fire in Store
My current project at Wizard’s Tower is issuing ebook editions of Juliet McKenna’s second series, The Aldabreshin Compass. The first of those books, Southern Fire, is now available in the major bookstores. You can find purchase links here.
The new covers that Ben Baldwin has done for the books are absolutely amazing. There are three more like the one above to come.
Dark Spires Review
Well how about that? A new review for the first book that Wizard’s Tower ever published. That’s Dark Spires, of course, an anthology of tales set in Wessex and edited by the late, great Colin Harvey. The review is at SF Crowsnest and is very pleasing. As the publisher it is of course my job to pull quotes out of a review that will show the book in the best light. Here’s the one I chose:
“… an interesting collection with a very professional level of writing throughout…â€
Oh yes, well done, Eamonn Murphy, you know how to make a publisher happy.
And if after reading that you fancy picking up the book at what Eamonn calls, “a bargain price” you can head on over to the Wizard’s Tower website for purchase links.
Bristol Lit Fest – Book Bazaar
On Saturday morning it was off to the Harbourside, where the Festival of Literature was putting on a day-long Book Bazaar. Many local small presses were taking part, including Tangent and Silverwood whose products I know well.
Our little corner of the event featured books by Wizard’s Tower, Kristell Ink and the North Bristol Writers group. The photo above (for which thanks to A A Abbott) shows me happily surrounded by lovely hardcover books. My thanks to Jo, Roz and Kevlin who have all taken a turn selling my books when I could not be there.
The event also included talks by authors and publishers. I particularly enjoyed Lucienne Boyce talking about how to research historical novels (complete with discussion of Samuel Pepys’ sanitary arrangements).
My final event in the Festival will be BristolCon Fringe tomorrow night, where the readers will be Joanne Hall and Jonathan L. Howard. It will be my first opportunity to hear some of Carter & Lovecraft, so I’m very much looking forward to it.
Women’s Outlook Does Literature
It was all books all the time on yesterday’s Women’s Outlook show.
First up I had a great interview with Nicola Griffith, mainly about her wonderful novel, Hild. Naturally that brought us on the the position of women in Anglo-Saxon society and the more general issue of how women’s roles in history are erased. We also touched on the work Nicola has been doing on women and literary awards, and on the forthcoming film of Kelley Eskridge’s novel, Solitaire.
The full interview with Nicola ran to about half an hour, so I had to cut quite a bit. I’ll put the whole thing on Salon Futura when I get the chance.
After that it was all Bristol Festival of Literature. I was joined in the studio by Amy Morse, Kevlin Henney and Pete Sutton. We talked through just about every event in the Festival. You can find more details about all of them here.
To listen to the first hour of the show click here, and for the second hour click here.
The playlist for the show was as follows:
- Barry White – Let the Music Play
- Percy Sledge – When a Man Loves a Woman
- Duran Duran – Pressure Off
- Sade – Nothing Can Come Between Us
- Prince – I Wanna Be Your Lover
- Cameo – Word Up
- Heatwave – Boogie Nights
- Parliament – Bop Gun
Yeah, I did play the new Duran Duran single. If you don’t know why, listen to the show. All is explained. (And it is a great song.)
Mr. B’s Book Club Does The Forever War
Well that was a long day. Radio in Bristol followed by Bath for the book club, with a bit of shopping in between. I’ll do the post for the radio tomorrow morning. In the meantime I’m doing a brief post about the book club.
The Forever War is an old book, written in the early 1970s. As with any early science fiction, it is liable to date. I was worried that the book club members might not like it much. I’m pleased to say that they liked it better than I expected, and I was quite surprised at what they didn’t like.
There were a few remarks about the characterization, but given that this is a 1970s science fiction novel, and Joe’s novel, I think it does pretty well in comparison to its contemporaries. Obviously it doesn’t stack up as well against modern novels.
What surprised me is that some of the club members found the book misogynist and homophobic, which I suspect will rather upset Joe. It does, of course, accurately reflect attitudes of 1970s America. It also includes an episode in which our hero, William Mandella, returns to Earth to find that society has evolved to become almost exclusively homosexual. That was revolutionary at the time.
Mandella, of course, is discomforted by this, being straight himself. There’s a definite tendency, I think, for readers to assume that the lead character in a book told in first person is speaking for the author. That effect is magnified when the introduction tells you that the book is partly autobiographical.
However, talking it through we hit upon another possible explanation for the readers’ reactions. When we read a book by, say, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy, and find some of the social attitudes expressed by the characters reprehensible, we excuse that because the book was written in, and set in, the distant past. When we read a book set in the future, however, we expect that book to be at least as socially progressive as our own time. If it isn’t, we assume that the author must be some sort of throwback. It is hard to make the mental adjustment to understand that this is a book that is set in the far future, but written quite a long time in the past.
Having got through this issue, the club members then went on to enthuse about all of the neat ideas in the book. It is a great piece of science fiction, and a brilliant book about the Vietnam War. Joe can still be proud of it.
My interview with Joe from SofaCon 2, in which we spend quite a bit of time talking about The Forever War, is still available here.
Next month the book club is reading Anno Dracula.
Colin Harvey Hardcovers at Amazon
I’m pleased to see that the necessary electrons have found their way through to Amazon and the Colin Harvey hardcovers are now available to order. You can get them at the following links:
Of course I get next to nothing for selling a paper book through Amazon thanks to the massive discount that they demand. If you are in the UK and want a copy of either book, let me know. If you are in the Bay Area and want a copy of either book I may be able to get some shipped to Kevin.
Of Vicars and Witches
Today I took the car out for a run. I headed up to Fairford where Paul Cornell was doing a home town launch event for his Witches of Lychford novella. Fairford is a small country town on the edge of the Cotswolds, so I got to drive along a lot of those twisty country roads that are lined by the stone walls of country estates, and where the trees are carved into tunnels by the passage of double-decker buses. I wish Kevin had been with me, it was lovely.
I got to see the church where Paul’s wife, Caroline Symcox, is vicar. The signs you see on entering the town actually note that the church is world-famous, though whether that’s because of the vicar or for some other reason wasn’t made clear.
The event, which was in the town library, was well attended, apparently mostly by members of Caroline’s congregation. Aside from a friend of Caroline’s, I think I might have been the youngest person in the audience. They all listened patiently to Paul’s explanation of a story of witchcraft in a small, English country town, and they all bought the book so he must have explained it well.
There were lots of good questions, and I got to hear Paul effectively doing rehearsals for the comics panel I’ll be hosting on Friday. If we get more of that sort of thing it will be well worth attending.
Bath Does Diversity
Yes, yes, I know. Diversity in Bath generally means something like whether you would allow people to have Merlot with Sunday lunch rather than the more traditional Claret. However, yesterday the Bath Children’s Literature Festival ran a “Daily Telegraph Debate” on the subject of diversity in children’s books. “What could possibly go wrong?” I wondered. I was also pleasantly surprised.
Although the event was billed as a “debate” it turned out to be anything but, at least to begin with, because all of the members of the panel were convinced of the need for more diversity in books for children. We live in a very multi-cultural society, and it is just plain daft that the majority of books published for kids cater to middle class white children from wholly cisgender, hetero-normative backgrounds. The situation is even more stark in the USA. A recent Nielsen survey has revealed that only half of child readers under the age of nine are white.
The panel was made of of Lorna Bradbury (Daily Telegraph book reviews editor, Chair), Liz Kessler (author, also lesbian person), Shannon Cullen (Random Penguin, Kiwi) and Bali Rai (author, also non-white person). Basically Lorna asked the questions, Shannon tried hard to convince is that that the publishing industry was doing all it could, Liz was kind and conciliatory, and Bali did the Angry Brown Person thing. Bali was awesome.
There were some slight mis-steps, most notably when Bali appeared to give the impression that sexuality was a choice. When called on it he immediately realized his mistake and apologized for his poor use of words. Aside from that you might have come away with the impression that all was rosy and multi-cultural in KidLit land. Certainly the Bath Chronicle did.
It wasn’t until we got to audience questions that we actually got some debate, and mostly that centered around what doing diversity actually means. If you have read my essay on writing trans characters over at Strange Horizons you’ll be aware that there can be a great deal of difference between writing a trans character and writing a trans character that trans people are actually likely to identify with. That sort of problem doesn’t just happen with trans folk. It can happen with just about any “minority” group if the books being written are all written by, and intended to appeal to, middle class white folks.
Where I got involved was when the panel started talking about “universal stories”, because so often that is a code term for “stories that white people can relate to”. Of course things like falling in love, having parents die, and so on can happen to anyone, but the way we tell those stories can be very different. Someone mentioned that if you have a story about aliens visiting Earth, why couldn’t they drop in on a Somali family rather than a white one? Well, there’s Lagoon, a book that I dearly love. It is a book about an alien invasion that happens, not in New York or London, but in Lagos. Nnedi has made no compromises in writing it. It is a book full of Nigerian people and full of issues of interest to Nigerian people. I’m delighted, and somewhat surprised, that it got published in the UK and USA. It is not what most people would think of when they talk about “universal stories”.
Bali made a very similar point when he noted that he’d been taken to task by white editors over the language his characters use. He knows far better than they do how kids of South Asian ancestry living in Leicester actually speak.
Of course it isn’t easy making diversity happen. We are very lucky to have people like Shannon championing the diversity cause within publishers, but she can’t just publish what she wants. She has to work withing the constraints of the industry. Go back and listen to Kristine Kathryn Rusch in the Coode Street podcast I linked to yesterday for an industry insider’s view of how changes in the structure of the book industry have resulted in an obsessive focus on best-sellers.
As a publisher myself, and as someone with a lot of friends in the business, I know a bit about how things work. When you ask publishers why they don’t publish more of a particular type of book they’ll probably note that they don’t get enough submissions of that type from agents, and that they have trouble placing such books with the major bookstore chains. Let’s look at both of those issues.
Yes, publishers could go out and look for the books they want, but they use agents for a reason: it saves them lots of time and effort. Agents, of course, may have fixed and erroneous ideas of what publishers actually want. And they may not have the right clients. Bali made the point that most of the non-white writers he knows are self-publishing rather than going through the traditional publishing route because they assume that the overwhelmingly white publishing industry won’t be interested in their books. Shannon was impressively voluble on the subject of helping writers who are not from white, middle class backgrounds to navigate the gatekeeping process so that people like her get to see the sort of books they want to publish.
At the other end of the process, failing to impress the buyer from Waterstones or Barnes & Noble can be the kiss of death for a book. That’s less of a problem if you are Random Penguin and can offer to throw a fortune at marketing a book, but a real issue for smaller publishers. The bookstores, on the other hand, will say it isn’t their fault. They know what sells and what doesn’t, and they have to make a living just like anyone else. If the only people coming into their shops are middle class white people, they will only stock books aimed at middle class white people.
Now of course the reason other people don’t go into bookstores might just be that the shops only stock books aimed at middle class white folks. However, some of those middle class white people claim to be pro-diversity. Here’s Lavie Tidhar:
There is a HUGE gap in genre between people talking about the need for diversity to people buying The Apex Book of World SF 4–
— Lavie Tidhar (@lavietidhar) September 16, 2015
He has a point. It is all very well campaigning for more diverse books on Twitter, but you have to buy them too. Six weeks ago I re-issued Colin Harvey’s novel, Damage Time. The lead characters are a Muslim man and an intersex woman. Colin could have done things a bit better, but how many books do you know of with intersex characters who are key to the plot and have agency. I wrote a blog post about why I was republishing the book. Want to guess how many people bought the book on the strength of that?
Zero.
Coming Soon from Wizard’s Tower
The Colin Harvey hardcovers will be on sale at BristolCon, and through other venues soon thereafter. My next project is the Aldabreshin Compass series from Juliet E. McKenna. We’ll be publishing all four books, one per month, from October onwards. All of them have fabulous new covers by Ben Baldwin, such as the one for the first volume, Southern Fire, pictured above.
By the way, as the Aldabreshin Archipelago is located towards the equatorial regions of Juliet’s world, most of the characters in these books are black.
Today on Ujima – BristolCon, Stephanie, Art & Refugees
Today’s Women’s Outlook show had a lot of science fiction content. For the first half hour I was joined by Joanne Hall, the Chair of BristolCon. We discussed the various things that people will be able to see and do at the convention, and then we went on discuss Jo’s new book, Spark & Carousel, which is launching at the convention. We may have noted that Jim Burns like a beer or two.
One of the many fine authors who will be attending this year’s BristolCon is Stephanie Saulter. Last week I did a phone interview with her about her latest novel, Regeneration, which I broadcast today. The whole thing is about half an hour long, so I had to cut it down quite a bit for the show because of ads, music and news. I will post the extended version on Salon Futura in due course.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
The second half began with the studio full of artists. They were all people involved with the Art on the Hill art trail, which is one of many such trails in Bristol. Nicolette de Sausmarez provided all of the admin details, Jane Lee & Sue Jones talked about their art, and Alan Gibson represented Nota Bene, a local a cappella group.
Finally we got serious and discussed the refugee crisis. Paulette, who is back from Jamaica at last, announced a new initiative from Ujima to help people in Calais. I talked to Dr. Naomi Millner from Bristol University who wrote this fine article about what we can do to provide practical help.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The playlist for today’s show was as follows:
- Earth, Wind & Fire – Fantasy
- Janelle Monáe – Tightrope
- Pointer Sisters – We are family
- Bob Marley – Could you be loved?
- Prince – Art Official Cage
- Nota Bene – Let’s do it
- Jamiroquai – Emergency on Planet Earth
- Jama – No Borders
And finally, here is a news report about Ujima’s recent win at the National Diversity Awards.
Colin Harvey Hardcovers
I have the proof copies of the new Wizard’s Tower hardcover editions of Winter Song and Damage Time now. They look OK so I’m confident they will be available for sale at BristolCon. The UK cover price is £20 per book, but for the convention I’ll be selling them at £15 each and £25 for the pair.
Naturally I don’t want to be stuck with huge quantities of stock, so I won’t be ordering many more books than I think I can sell. That means I need a good estimate of how many copies people want. So, to avoid disappointment, if you want copies, and can collect them at BristolCon, please email me and let me know. I’ll make sure I have enough copies to satisfy everyone I know wants them.
For those of you not able to get to BristolCon, copies will be available through our friends at Tangent Books in due course. Kevin and I are looking at how we make copies available in the USA without you having to pay postage from the UK. And of course the books will be available from the piranhas.
Translation Conference, Day 1
Way back in February I attended a workshop on translated fiction in Bath. I mentioned at the time that there would be a follow-up conference in Bristol in September. That date has now arrived, so I was up early and off to the big city.
I did actually miss the first set of papers. It has been a very long week on the day job already, and there was no way I was getting up at the crack of dawn, but I made it there for morning coffee.
That was important because the first paper of the second session was by Paulina Drewniak from the University of WrocÅ‚aw. Her paper was all about Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series, which is one of the few cases of a major international hit from translated genre fiction. It turns out that Paulina is a fan, and had been at the Eurocon in Dublin last year (where Sapkowski was one of the Guests of Honor). I apologized for voting for Barcelona. We agreed we’d be going anyway, and I’m trying to get her to come to Helsinki. We should bug her for a paper, Merja. Anyone who ends her academic talk with a picture of a Lego Witcher figure is OK by me.
Actually I want to know more about the figure of the Witcher in Slavic folklore. Apparently Sapkowski drew on pre-Christian traditions for his stories, as well as including a wealth of Polish in-jokes, most of which were omitted in the English translations.
Next up was Olivia Hellewell from Nottingham University who is working on Slovenian literature. I had a great deal of sympathy with the writer she interviewed who said that he now sends translations of his work to US and UK publishers under his own name, because if he says they are translations they go straight in the bin.
Finally in that session we had Richard Mansell of the University of Exeter on Catalan fiction. I love the Catalans. They are so proud and defiant. They refuse to be described as having “minority” language, but rather insist that it is a “minoritized” language. Nor is Catalan a stateless language. It is the official language of Andorra. While most Spaniards will have a copy of Don Quixote on their bookshelves to show that they are cultured, Catalans have it bookmarked at the page where Cervantes describes a Catalan novel as the best book ever written. I could go on. I am so looking forward to Barcelona.
There is a fairly well known Catalan novel that is a bit experimental and science-fictional. Richard didn’t think much of it as a book, but he noted that the central character spends the first few chapters talking about how he was once a member of the IRA. That section has been omitted from the English translation for fear it would offend delicate English ears.
I had managed to miss booking lunch, but I got really lucky and found a really good Indian restaurant across the road. This one. The little mint leaf in white chocolate that they gave me at the end was to die for.
The graveyard session was allocated to the poets, perhaps in the hope that they could entertain us and keep us awake. It is not an area I have much interest in (save for Roz Kaveney’s translations of Catullus), but I was astonished to hear that there are 119 books of Macedonian poetry translated into English. Apparently it is because they have a big international poetry festival in Macedonia and stuff gets translated for that. I was also delighted to discover that there are books of Cornish poetry in English translations. People write poetry in Cornish these days. I remember visiting the house in Mousehole where the last living Cornish speaker died. It is wonderful that the language has been resurrected.
The final poetry paper was about Cavafy, which was kind of appropriate because the conference was being held in the former home of another great gay poet. John Addington Symmonds is one of the superstars of Bristol’s LGBT history. He was also a translator. Up until he took a look at them, no one in the UK knew that Michelangelo’s poems were homoerotic. The original translator had gender-swapped some of the characters so that sensitive English readers need not be offended.
The final session opened up with Åžule Demirkol Ertürk from Istanbul talking about two different translations of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (which is not SF, the title is a reference to clocks). The first translation was done by a small press specializing in Turkish literature. However, after Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize publishers looked for other Turkish writers to exploit, and a new translation of Tanpinar’s book was commissioned, with the involvement of Pamuk’s translator, Maureen Freely (though apparently most of the work was done by her student, Alexander Dawe).
Åžule’s paper was fascinating in the way that it contrasted the different approaches, and wildly different commercial success, of the multinational and small press publishers. It wasn’t just the marketing muscle. Penguin also made a specfic effort to package Turkish culture in a way that would appeal to Western readers likely to be suspicious of the country.
Interestingly exactly the opposite is happening with Jules Verne. When he was first published in the 19th Century the big publishers of the time rushed to get him to the English-speaking market. They too were insistent on packaging him for their audience, including removing all of the anti-British and pro-Socialist rhetoric. Nowadays there is a movement to re-translate Verne and let the English speaking world read the books as they were originally written. This is all being done by small and academic presses such as the fabulous folks at Wesleyan.
The next paper was about Swedish women writers, which would have been great except that it focused on the 19th century and was half about poetry. If you are interested, there is a blog maintained by the researchers.
Finally we had a couple of Serbian academics telling the story of one particular translation. It didn’t help that the original was badly in need of an edit, but their tale of English translators and editors desperately trying to dumb down the book for the English audience was hilarious. Too many characters with funny names? Seriously? Have these people never read epic fantasy? Probably not. I wish I could have given those people a Zoran Živković book. If they had to put a dream sequence in a different font to help the reader understand what was going on they wouldn’t stand a chance with Zoran.
Anyway, it was a fun day. It also shone a light on a few cracks in the world. There was a very clear divide in the audience between those people who thought that translations were a good thing to do regardless, and those who felt that unless the project resulted in a major best seller like Steig Larsson it was all a sad waste of time. It was also clear that while international literature and poetry festivals were seen as a valuable way to promote the product, international science fiction conventions were mostly seen as an embarrassment to be avoided.
Anyway, my thanks to Rajendra Chitnis and his team for an entertaining day. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, if not exactly to getting into Bristol for a 9:00am start.