A question of belief.

     A huge practical problem of political debate is that especially unpleasant facts used to illuminate a particular subject will often be rejected outright; those you are talking to will refuse to believe you. So it was when the conversation turned last week, in the course of one of my group conversation English lessons, to the topic of how Hamburg treats its asylum seekers. Our SPD government has just announced its reneging on a previous promise, and will continue to farm 180 of its asylum seekers out to the back of beyond in Mecklenburg, rather than house them within the bounds of its own state. (See article in die Taz from 30.1.2011.) (Go here for the free tool to translate German websites into English).

    And what then? There, out there in the sticks, the kids have no school - although Hamburg state law stipulates that all children of asylum seekers must attend school, in the same way as German kids. This was the point that some participants in my lessons simply would not believe. And after the disbelief, comes the defence: being in a refugee camp anywhere in the world is a horrible experience. Many older Germans who make this statement are talking from the heart: they may have experienced life in a refugee camp in Hamburg as a child, after coming as part of the movement of displaced persons after WW2. After that there were later refugee camps in Hamburg to house the influx of refugees - often fleeing with few possessions - from East Germany in the 1950s. Might personal experience of life as a refugee - however brief - increase ones sympathy for refugees in your state today? Why should it - distancing yourself from them by denying the details of their daily lives must be the most efficient way of dealing with the unpleasantness. Better to belief that a journalist in a renowned newspaper got a key fact of her article wrong, perhaps willfully.

     Which perhaps prooves that politics is not about facts, but rather about belief-systems which contradict each other so strongly, that in the clash of steel on steel it's near impossible to hear what the other side is shouting. You're back with James I of the UK, not wanting to hear the Catholic's say, but rather wanting to drive a Protestant wedge, in the form of Ulster & the Ulster Scots, between the Catholic south of Ireland & the Catholics in Scotland's western Isles. For James I, for those who choose to be interested in asylum-seekers and for those who cling hard to the rock of disinterest, the facts were & are a side-show: talking politics is a question of belief.

Your own work, that's the prize

Concerned that my last post may be misinterpreted as sour grapes about my city’s latest laurel-crowned translators, I write here to clarify; Ingo, Susanne & Ursel unquestionably “deserve” their prizes; who’d doubt their work was the best? My punch was not aimed at prize-winners but rather at prize-giving & prize givers.

You’ll be told that you need to reward excellence in society by granting honours, usually with a whack of cash attached. If you didn’t do this, it’s implied, excellence would remain plankton-like, swilling about the seas, it’d have no motivation to conjulate into a nice, compact two chapters &  proposal form. We’d have no excellence, no one who wanted to bring things on. We’d be back in the cave.

Is there any evidence to counter this claim? – It’s hardly possible to compare our societies with others, that give few or no prizes – because almost all societies do reward excellence.

The alternative is to hypothesise that prize-giving exists - not because literature or other arts or other areas of life wouldn’t produce wonders without it – but in order to reinforce the status of the prize-givers. As long as even a few people are still interested in what you’re doling out, your place in the pecking order is assured. When the last waverers waver away from you & ignore your prize – and ten applicants is getting close to a blanket ignorance - your podest is pulled away under your feet.

Which may lead prize-givers to take up their own, real work again, their “doing.” Perhaps it is only in our own work that there are prizes to win, which are worth winning. And worthy the winning.

A carve-up or a meritocracy? Hamburg's literary prizes.

Alongside six grants of six thousand Euro each for new German literature, a team at Hamburg's Kulturbehörde headed by Wolfgang Schömel grant three literary translation prizes of € 2500 each year. The literary translation prizes are exclusively for translations into German. I submitted an application including a sample translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1930s modernist masterpiece "A Scot's Quaire", a work largely unknown in the German speaking world. Have a dip here into the novel if you're not familiar with it.

Dr. Schömel informed us per email that there were 194 applicants in total for these nine prices, including the three for translation. Of these only ten were translators. Not to have won a prize which - purely statistically speaking - you've got a one in three chance of winning is quite the opposite of inspiring.

Under "Förderpreis für Übersetzung" I understood something like supporting young talent, a prize to bring unknown translators on their way to their first proper contracts for literary translation. Not a bit of it.
Ingo Herzke, one of the winning translators, has done nearly all the German A. L. Kennedy & Allan Bennet's "The Uncommon Reader"; Susanne Höbel does, among other things, the German versions of the Graham Swift novels. Ursel Allenstein, the final winner, translates from Swedish and Danish and has a row of published translations to her credit.

So these prizes "award achievement" do they? Then you need to have a serious read of poet & satirical artist Tom Leonard's critique of prize-giving inside the literature industry which is spread, magnificently throughout his journals of the last two years.

On filthbook (like this!)

I returned from filthbook the other night with the predictable feelings – vacuously psyched-up, morosely enjoying the illusion of having done something, while knowing full well that a kitsch, peter-pan nowhere land had again managed to rob me of ninety minutes of my life, time which I shall never again recover. I came across my closest friend from my young adulthood –aged twenty-two, I’d broken off the friendship with him completely, an action that had meant a lot to me. There he was, taking a home-made quiche out of the oven, sending out his charming, playful, bashful smile in photos taken thirteen years later. Suppressing the separation-pain and necessity of the break – buzz, buzz, click, click – I click him the pre-formulated filth request – or, to use the official party language, I filth him –  which he filths back, accepted, without message, some days later. So now we’re friends in filth on filthbook & if we meet, by chance, on the street in Edinburgh – him say coming up from one of the Cowgate pubs and me going down that street by the back of the Tron, past where the City Cafe used to be – we’re less likely now to blank each other, though the objective shame flowing under the swapping of Broughton High School news would only be the greater, because of the official link between us in the book.

It makes me think of card-carrying party members in one-party states; of course most of them know and knew in private that being in the pary is the lowest of the sheepish low; but being in the party can get you jobs, get you deals you wouldn’t have got, kid you into a tolerable self-image. Is that a bad-taste comparison? -  however bad-taste filthbook may be, it doesn’t torture or kill you, like the apparatchiks did. I wonder. The middle-aged man sounding of in front of 104 filthy-friends about the coolest piece of 1990s techno he’s currently listening to – isn’t he desensitising a piece of his consciousness for ever, murdering it actually? And who are we, sitting with bags under our eyes, flicking through these posts – bystanders, curious for 0.25 seconds, the vicarious pleasure not worth the skin of scum settling thereby on the soul.

But must finish now. Writing this article, I’ve been neglecting my duties on The Book for far too long. 

Goethe's Eight Hour Avantgarde

We sat in the very back row of the Thalia through eight hours of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I & II. The play started at 5 pm and finished at 1.15 am. The night of 1^st October this year in Hamburg was warm – a pleasant 21 degrees when we came out for the first break at 7.45 pm, after the end of Faust Part I; it was a wise directorial decision to pull that through in a oner. The sold-out theatre combined with the warm weather outside made drowsy air-clouds float up to us at the back, sending us to sleep now and again during the action.

            And that action was fantastic; it didn’t matter at all that you woke realising you may have dosed off for half-an-hour, the dramatic body was so rich that you couldn’t be sorry about anything you might have missed. It was an irreverent take on Goethe’s work, with a bit scripted in at the start of Part II happy to proclaim that many of the rhymes in Faust are shite, words pulled haphazardly out of a rhyming dictionary.

            Yet if there are a few duff rhymes in among the endings of the 12,000 lines that make up Faust I & II, then it hardly matters. The series of strong images that comprise Faust’s life – from being involved in the making of paper money, to – very much in the spirit of the Frankenstein times – being involved in making an artificial human being, were convincingly portrayed. The eight and a half hours were a time out of time, a spiritual and intellectual holiday.