Litfest

At 91, JD Saliinger has died.

There are two facts that caught my imagination this morning as I listened to the radio.

1. His renown is based on one book (although his short stories sold well) – The Catcher in the Rye sold 65 million copies. I’d like to compile a list (with help, please!!) of other authors whose reputation was sealed on the back of one book. Apparently he continued to write while in retreat, so now there is speculation of other books …

2. Catcher in the Rye was originally written for adults, but became an adolescent classic. There are plenty of books that cross over the other way, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials triology, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, JK Rowling’s Harry P, Mal Peet’s Exposure, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, are the first that spring to mind, but what of books that travelled the other way? Another list?

Another in our infrequent series of conversations.

This time, with dynamic writer, Bernardine Evaristo, who has recently reissued her verse novel Lara with Bloodaxe.

Bernardine came to Lancaster to read the original Lara back in 1997. It was held in the beautiful old Folly photographic gallery in the back of The Storey building. Maybe twenty of us in the audience. I hadn’t read the book, but was interested in its theme of lineage. Bernardine’s reading was electric. I was totally hooked. The voices that filled the small room (all emanating from one body) were bustling and hustling in their veracity, spread across continents (Europe, Africa and America).

Bernardine has since been back to Lancaster twice (with more idiosyncratic voices in more experiments in verse/prose novels). Now, over ten years on, she has returned to Lara, and extended it; detailing the maternal line of Lara, her Irish and German roots.

I caught up with Bernardine a few weeks ago to ask her about the process of revisiting the book.

Sarah Hymas: After slowly moving away from writing verse through verse-novels and novels with verse to a straight prose novel I wondered how you found the return to verse with this new edition of Lara?

Benardine Evaristo: I wasn’t sure at first that I could get back into the spirit and craft of a verse novel having spent a few years writing prose fiction. But reading through the original text was a good way to get back into the flow of it. I did discover that my narrative voice is more cohesive and pronounced than it was in the original LARA. When I originally wrote LARA I was firmly rooted as a poet, now I see myself as a storyteller using whatever genre suits a particular book. It was also a bit of a challenge initially to not write sweeping great paragraphs instead of short, concise lines of poetry and to return to building up the story through small units.

SH: I imagine this return to writing poetry having an influence on how you tell your next story. How much does one idea develop as you’re finishing the previous one?

BE: It varies. I’m working on a new novel now which will be a prose novel, but I love the idea of making it a very poetic prose novel. I do love writing the verse novel form and I enjoyed returning to the snapshot sequences of LARA having written my first prose novel BLONDE ROOTS. I don’t usually know what I’m going to write next until I’ve finished a particular work and then, when the manuscript has been delivered, my head is clear to embark on the next project. Although, having said that, sometimes I do get a sense of the territory I’m going to explore next but I don’t think too deeply about it.

SH: What prompted you to include the Irish side of the family in this new edition of Lara?

BE: I was never that curious about the Irish side of my family initially, my mother’s relatives. I think that when I began writing LARA I was much more interested in discovering the unknown side of my family history, the Nigerian and Brazilian ancestry. An academic once approached me at a reading and asked me why I hadn’t written more about my Irish heritage, especially because of the colonial experience of Ireland and how that would draw comparisons with, for example, the Nigerian colonial experience. I was shocked to realise that I hadn’t really thought about it and decided then and there that should I ever re-issue LARA, I would add the Irish past. The German side of my family history, also on my mothers side, is also a new addition to the book. So whereas the novel initially spanned 150 years into my father’s history, it now spans 150 years into my mother’s history too.

SH: You switch narrators (including an omnisicient narrator) a lot. What is your starting point for finding the right voice for each character?

BE: It varies. Some of the characters are based on people I know well, like myself – so I just have to be true to my voice. Not as easy as it sounds, I think. Others are based on my parents and grandmother – all of whom I also knew/know well so I tried to hear their voices in my head – their vocabulary, intonation, the ways in which they expressed themselves verbally. It was a listening job – to my parents voices as they materialised inside my head, and to my grandmother’s voice as she was when she was alive. It also helped that I interviewed both parents at length on tape recorder, so I could play their voices back and listen to them with some degree of objectivity. My father’s English was quite broken and I was not aware of this until I heard him on tape. With the unknown characters – the family members I never knew – then I used photographs where possible to try and imagine character – once I got a sense of who they were I began to write and then magic takes over – they start to speak through me…..whooooo…..bit spooky, huh?

SH: And to end with, a short roll call of some of the people who influenced the writing of Lara:

Thank you, Bernardine, for your time and permssion to use the photos

I’ve just heard of Volta, a new translation magazine with wide reaching ambition: one poem, seventy five transations. Now that’s multilingual. Each translation is available as a downloadable pdf.

The English language version of the poem is the original, written by the compiler of translations, Richard Berengarten, and is a lyrical homage to the sun. A gift in this country, less so in others. I wonder how the poems reads in Yoruba compared to, say, in Faroese. Since language is a cultural signage there must be small yet significant differences in the weight of the words and their meaning. For this reason, alone (well, also because I don’t speak another language well enough) I’d love to have audio files accompanying this publication; to hear these transgressions set closely against each other.

The introduction says the publication throws up questions: Is translatability a universal feature of language itself? What does ‘originality’ actually mean? What difference is there between writing and translating a poem?

Great questions. Is there going to be a follow-on discussion for some answers?

So, the festival’s over. I don’t know whether to boo or cheer.

Cheer because we can now catch our collective breath, think over the past ten days of readings and marvel at what an amazing choir of voices were heard in Lancaster. I mean, I love Lancaster, some of my best friends are Lancaster, but it isn’t the largest city in the world – or even in England for that matter – or even in Lancashire – and the population can feel very familiar at times. Which might explain the great welcome our audiences give. And that’s saying something when, to my mind, literature audiences are the one of the most attentive of all audiences. Over the course of the ten days ideas, and the exchange of those ideas, spread around the Storey auditorium and bar. The percolation of stories and conversations passed between writer and reader.

For me it was the journeys we were invited upon that was the most exciting element of the festival (and not just because Lancaster is a small city). The events I went to took me to Amsterdam, Whitby, Bournemouth, Middlesborough, Fleetwood, Milan, a nameless Greek village, Belfast, Sarajevo and Luxor. And no passport, no five hour custom queues (or M6 queues), no carbon footprint. Literature, and readings particularly, offers a virtual road trip with an intelligent, illuminating companion you don’t have to talk too first thing in the morning.

Boo because it’s all over; it’s November (nearly); it’s very very quiet and I’m not going anywhere soon.

To interrupt our scheduled broadcast of festival highlights, we bring you a final (for now) review of the live literature project. From the artist’s own mouth. I introduce, Cath Nichols –

Sarah asked me to write the final blog for the exploring live literature project.

On day five we tried some improvisation. This was to address the problem we had identified with the way in which an audience for a literature event might be confused by a live art/ dance approach to the material. There was always some tension for Andy and Sarah, I think, about whether we were doing ‘live literature’ or something else. Was it becoming too much a theatre piece? Where were the boundaries? I was less concerned, as I tend to think definitions may be what the artist involved wants them to be. This strange business with the plastic and the sequins could be live literature because I was the writer and I thought it was (there’s arrogance for you!). But even I saw that our use of the recorded voice in a theatre space might lessen the audience’s response to the actual words. When a thing is heard as well as seen, people tend to prioritise the visual, as humans are very visual creatures. So, we needed to find ways to reassert the primacy of the words/ the text.

The improvised introduction, spoken directly to the audience, would stress the story and the texts involved. It also gave me permission to come in and out of the story at other times to address the audience. For example, the mermaid must ‘walk on knives and suffer such pain/ as she cannot imagine now, beneath the waves/ beneath the blue’, and we are reminded of this when she reaches the palace: after sweeping my plastic ‘skirt’ over a trail of sequins I say, ‘Each night she sees their sharp hard blades/ their glittering faces staring up beneath her skirts’; but now I come off poem and say to the audience, ‘Can you see them? The knives?’ Which not only involves the audience but also clarifies what the sequins have become. Previously the sequins (blue, and about the size of a two pence coin) were the mermaid’s attempts at speaking, like communion wafers, or foam, that sprayed from her mouth onto the floor …

Cath and Plastic

I was dubious about the introduction first: would it be needless repetition or a plot-spoiler? But in the end I found it useful. The introduction highlighted not only what the weird props were doing/ becoming (‘mermaids are different from us, they have a tail’ – wrap plastic round my legs in tail-like fashion) but allowing me to underline parts of the text I felt were important. For example, in the original story the mermaid is fifteen, which is a vulnerable yet headstrong age. The poem itself only mentions ‘she has the hope of adolescence’. I like the specificity of her age and could use it in the introduction. I also introduced her sisters, who try to save her life near the end of the story, and are represented by the plastic whirling in vertical circles like diving/ soaring tails. I ended by saying that in order to leave the sea the mermaid agrees to be without her voice and to be in constant pain, without her tail. We decided to rip the plastic sheeting to illustrate the severance of her tail. Both Andy and Sarah found this very graphic – and it made us aware that some of the other movements we had developed over the project did not perhaps have quite such a strong effect, though I maintain that the mermaid was a stoical person in the face of her pain and wouldn‘t show her suffering. But perhaps the pace of some of my movements needed changing?… After stepping forward from the ripped plastic, my final words of introduction were, ‘This is my story, The Price of legs’, which produces a nice double meaning: the mermaid’s story or the myth, and my take on it as a writer.

The questions Sarah and Andy have asked me during the process have been hard. In the face of , ‘what do you want the audience to get from this?’ I have to admit I am a bit clueless. I feel this way about the writing itself. ‘What do you want the reader to get from this?’ Umm… er…? All my energy for words has gone into the creative endeavour and I struggle to articulate what the text/ performance is for. Is it for anything, or is it just there? Eventually I did find some words, which apply to both performance and to the making of poetry. I want the audience (or readers) to experience something familiar become unfamiliar; and at the same time seem beautiful and strange. Then there is a return to the familiar, or to the real world, with a slightly changed perspective.

I can see this principle at work in my other writing, especially my previous sea epic Tales of Boy Nancy. It is part of a desire to have people want to return to a story, or a poem, and to read it/ see it/ hear it over again. It is satisfying to realise that this has been part of the structure of The Price of Legs from the beginning, because that is precisely what I have been doing with Hans Christian Anderson’s text: returning, taking issue, re-writing, challenging him; considering the story’s oral roots. With poetry this ‘return’ requirement is a necessary quality that I want to create: to keep leading you back into a text, so you want to spend time there, mulling it over.