PEN World Voices, Andrzej Stasiuk

A few years back, Craig Raine ran into Nicanor Parra and Tomas Tranströmer:

In 1988, I was in Bhopal as part of a poetry festival. There was a poster promising Ashbery, Ginsberg, and other big-hitters of world poetry. None of whom turned up – mostly for medical reasons. The mischievous 74-year-old Chilean poet Nicanor Parra asked me who I was there “instead of.” I didn’t understand the question.

Nicanor explained: “I am ‘ere instead of Neruda.” “But Neruda has been dead for 20 years,” I said. Nicanor smiled ruefully: “No difference. I am ‘ere instead of Neruda.”

At the same festival, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer explained to me the mechanism of international poetic celebrity: every country has several good poets at any given time, but only one is chosen for export. Arbitrarily, not necessarily the best. Foreigners can remember only one foreign name from each foreign country. In Czechoslovakia, it is easy to check out the principle: in prose, Kundera but not Skvorecky’; in poetry, Holub not Hanzlik.

On the literary festival circuit, PEN World Voices sits on top of the food chain. Wrapping up today in New York, PEN brings together writers, translators, and publishers for a week-long cross-cultural literary party – a bit more than “one foreign name from each foreign country.”  The list of attending Nobels, Pulitzers, and Bookers is formidable, as are the many poets: Homero Aridjis (Mexico – expect a review of his Solar Poems soon); Ariel Dorfman (Chile); Marlene van Nierkerk (South Africa); Cathy Park Hong (United States); valter hugo mae (Portugal); Ernest Farrés (Catalan) among many others.

Andrzej Stasiuk was in town this week before heading to New York for PEN World Voices (at the festival, he was speaking about Utopia and Dystopia with Jonathan Lethem and a handful of other writers).  He doesn’t speak English terribly well, maybe even at all – able enough to muster a “thank you” when I handed him a napkin at the food table – and although jetlagged, Stasiuk impressed me a great deal. Bill Johnston, his primary literary translator in the US, did most of the speaking while the two read excerpts from his career. Stasiuk and Johnston covered a fair amount, but I was particularly excited by what I heard from Dukla. The book is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press – for now, the work is only available in an excerpt published in Words Without Borders. Four of Stasiuk’s titles have been translated into English.  I’ve only read Fado, a book of travel essays through the Carpathians, but recommend it.

Johnston spoke of a translation workshop he taught in Poland.  He had picked a few examples from Polish literature as well as an unpublished piece he was working on. The crowd of students tried to guess who wrote each.  For the most part, they struggled at the guessing game until Johnston reached the unpublished story.  All of the students agreed – it had to be Andrzej Stasiuk. This speaks to his distinctive style, but it also had me wondering how many living authors an average group could recognize from an unpublished page or two. David Sedaris or Philip Roth have voices like that. Poets are a bit harder, I think – it would have to be a stylist like Seidel. Tranströmer’s “mechanism of international poetic celebrity” is an extension of that: Where a poet’s voice (or in some cases, the press agent’s voice) is so distinctive that it overpowers any discussion around a place or genre.