Looking back on my first year as an author/translator in Britain

 I still haven't posted anything here this year, it's April already and possibly a bit late to look back on 2022, the first whole year I've spent as an author/translator in Britain. But I feel like doing it now, and with the time that has passed some things may appear clearer, not only to myself, but also to anyone who is reading this blog.

I came to London in the midst of the pandemic and with two small books for translation in my suitcase, the poetry collection Λοιπόν; (So?) by Yiannis Ritsos, 1978, and the essay collection Oeffentlichkeit als Partner (The public as partner) by Max Frisch, 1967. I've translated the first one into English (and German). I'm still looking for a publisher. Prototype have recently published another Ritsos collection, this may be a sign that the time is ripe for some kind of a Ritsos revival. He is a poet who was most popular at the high time of the (now traditional) New Left. Since then his work has been sparsely published in Europe. But his poems aren't dependent on any kind of era, they are contemporary. I hope the translation will soon be published. I may publish it privately first.

I've written an essay titled "German song": Gottfried Benn's poetic plurilingualism, diving once again into the lyrical work of one of my favourite authors from Deutschland, subject of my doctoral thesis, one I frequently return to. The essay was supposed to be published in a renowned academic journal, but some problems occured in the course of the review process. It's a text that marks my farewell to any kind of principal monolingual and monocultural approach in writing and creating, a tendency that I necessarily had to follow due to the way things turned out for me over the last 15 years or so, but that was also inscribed at least as a possibility in my upbringing as a bilingual person.

Since I was in Britain, I felt the need to learn more about the contemporary literary scene here. I've read a few good books. Due to the lack of space and time, I'll name just one in this post, Jessica Gaitan Johannesson's novel How we are translated (Scribe, 2021). It's a book that strengthened the tendency I spoke of above right at the time of its concrete unfolding. A book that inspired me to think about the ways foreign language text can consequently be incorporated in a fictional narrative, something I have never done in my own writing so far, but that henceforth will be part of my toolbag.

I haven't read only books originally written in English, I've also read a bunch of books in English translation. As for contemporary literature, be it originally in English, German, Greek or whatever language, I have once again come across the usual overrating, the usual babble of advertising new products. You just have to find your way through all these soap bubbles of institutionalised celebration and  shallow excitement. That's how it's always been. To me it was noteworthy that quite a few of the better books I came across were by Japanese authors. Maybe it has something to do with what German intellectuals in former times referred positively to as einfalt, I mean a kind of stripped-down approach of rich simplicity that is foreign to a lot of Western authors. This is just a hypothesis, I don't know much about Japanese culture and history.

I attended an Arvon course about translation, I visited last year's London Book Fair (see post below), but the best experience in terms of participation and contribution was the conference at  Uni Warwick in Coventry I took part in, Anonymity, Un-originality, collectivity: Contested modes of authorship. My paper was about Martin Heidegger, maybe my favourite philosopher, and how the ontological desubjectification in his aesthetics can be combined with Michel Foucault's sociohistorical polemic regarding the "author function". That was in May, we were slowly staggering back to normal again (as far as one can speak of normalcy in these times), but it wasn't until summer, maybe even autumn, that I had the feeling that things got better for me personally.

In spite of still living in an in-between state, in spite of all the difficulties that come with my move to the UK, in spite of all the unfinished business mainly from my Greek years, in spite of still being without my library and bereaved of all the necessary support that an author like me needs to work properly, I still managed to be productive, as far as it was possible. I'm working on my new trilogy of German novels, I'm writing essays, I'm translating. I think it was about three years ago, still in Athens, that I finally realised that it just became impossible to continue to see myself as a part of the official German literary scene. The circumstances I live in make it impossible. I'm outside that circle, I just don't have the means to function as a part of that system. My first literary language is German, but I had to become familiar with the idea to write prose and poetry only out of an inner necessity, ausdruckszwang, as Gottfried Benn called it, not as part of an established collective that feeds on its reciprocal processes of intrinsic motivation and competition. My wider approach, as a writer, as a scholar, as a translator, multilingual, is an answer to this situation. I recently finished the translation I did with my mother (my frequent co-translator) of Alfred Andersch's Sansibar oder der letzte Grund  (1957) into Greek. It is an effort quite symbolic for the current circumstances of my productivity. 

With thoughts like that in mind I study the programme of this year's London Book Fair. I see that the debate that the excellent Violent Phenomena anthology started lingers on. But I also see the persistence of hegemonial reductionism and primitive commercialism in the programme. It is surely advisable to represent different facets of the book market at such an event, but I doubt that there is something substantial to learn from panel discussions titled "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" or "Money, Money, Money" (sic). The persistence of the respective ideologies hints at bigger problems, problems that transcend the sphere of literary production and marketing. During my over fifteen years as a writer and translator I have come across attitudes that are not just simply unacceptable, but also exterior to the whole complex of literary production and reception. They are toxic extensions of anti-social policies and manipulative processes of oppression. Events like fairs, annual gatherings and presentations offer the possibility to support different directions or at least to favour tendencies that benefit the integrity and the communal spirit inside a sphere that still cannot be absorbed by the oppressive mechanisms of late capitalism.

But maybe i just don't know enough about the cultural scene in general, I'm new in this country, I'm just trying to understand things on the basis of my experiences and my beliefs. I might not visit this particular event, but I'm looking forward to lots of other coming events and opportunities to participate in cultural production. I hope 2023 will provide as many opportunities of this kind as 2022 did, and I hope to find the time to share more of that on this blog than last year.