Vera Burlak and Marija Martysevych: Belarus stars at Leipzig

Photo of Vera Burlak, courtesy of belaruslitteratur.blogspot.com

Are there many visitors to Germany's second largest book fair who really know what they're looking for? When I drove down last week with two colleagues from Hamburg for the day for my first ever Leipzig, the conversation in the car was full of what we know but also what we do not know about our own aspirations.

Willy Brandt: Does disappointment in social democracy ever really have a beginning?

For the millions in the English speaking world who feel chronically let down by social democracy — particularly post Blair and post the exposure of the Obama illusion — it may be a comfort to discover that many German social democrats became disappointed with social democracy much earlier. Willy Brandt, who, from 1969 to 1974 became the first social democratic Chancellor since the Weimar Republic, would have been 100 this year. The German papers have been full of eulogies for the man; so it was refreshing to find the poem I've translated below giving a different perspective on Brandt, first published in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, in December 1966. That was the month in which Brandt entered as a junior partner into a coalition government lead by Kurt Kiesinger, by this stage a CDU leader, but a man who'd previously had a moderately successful career inside the NSDAP, the Nazi party. 

Alongside Brandt's willingness to work with an ex-Nazi, there were two other main points of his coalition politics which Delius, the poet, and many others who had previously supported Brandt now found unacceptable. The first was the introduction of state of emergency legislation, referred to in the second stanza of the poem. The second was the cooperation over employment bans for political radicals, which, in practise, primarily meant Communists, or members of organisations dominated by Communists, including the Society for the Victims of the Nazi regime and for Anti-Fascists. Brandt's cooperation on this issue culminated in his Redundancy for Radicals legislation of 1972, which focused on public sector workers. 1100 people either lost their jobs or were refused jobs as a result of this act, with 2200 disciplinary procedures and 136 redundancies among teachers alone (for more details use your browser's translator software to read the Wikipedia 'Radikalenerlass' page on the subject.)

These were policies which Brandt was supporting back in 1966 already, when Delius wrote this poem. These were the policies which caused an irreparable break between many Germans, who had seen themselves as social democrats, and their former party, the SPD.

Abschied von Willy                                                             Farewell to Willy

Von Friedrich Christian Delius                                     By Friedrich Delius, trans. Henry Holland

Brandt: es ist aus. Wir machen nicht mehr mit.        Brandt: we are through. We're not playing any more. 

Viel Wut im Bauch. Die Besserwisser grinsen.            Ready to punch out. While the know it alls are grinning.

Der letzte Zipfel Hoffnung ging verschütt.                  The final coin of hope falls on the scrap heap.

Für uns ist längst krepiert, was Sieben Schwaben    What still seems good for Seven Swans like you

wie euch noch gut scheint, euch zu kopulieren.        is decrepit stuff for us, a corrupt corpus.

Den Spieß herum, es gilt zu formulieren:                    So put the foot on the other boot, shout it clear and raucous: 
Wer Notstand macht, der will den Notstand haben.   Who legislates an emergency state should know he's going to get that.                                                                                                       

Wer jetzt nicht zweifelt, zweifelt niemals mehr.        If you've no doubts now, you'll not be doubting never.

Was jetzt versaut ist, wird es lange bleiben.                      What's screwed up now, will stay that way for long.

Von Feigheit. Dummheit lässt sich nichts mehr schreiben,         On cowardice and stupidity I can not write forever

Kein Witz kommt auf. Verzweiflung nur und Spott, die treiben      With punch-lines lost; just despair, and scorn, endeavour

Uns zurück, wohin ich gar nicht will,                                           To push me back where I don't want to idle,

Verflixt noch mal, ich stecke im Idyll.                                           For chrissake, God, I'm stuck here in my idyll.

'Stuck here in my idyll': these words might also fit to Brits today who still see themselves as social democrats, but who wouldn't even consider touching the post Blair Labour Party with a barge pole. It may be a good position from which to launch satire. It's a poorer position from which to launch politics. 

Clemens Meyer at Harbour Front: Go hear this man, quickly!

 

(Clemens Meyer at the Leipzig Book Festival, 2010)

I had got it wrong, quite, quite wrong. I'd read Katy (Derbyshire) hyping, pushing, gushing about & explaining this man on her Love German Books, but I wasn't able to trust her backing Meyer. I thought self-interest was at play, that she's only praising this guy to the heavens cause she's already had her translation of one of Meyer's books published, & maybe more are in the pipeline. (Why, actually, are you guys hanging round reading this, when you could be reading literature? -  Katy's translation of 'All the Lights' by Clemens Meyer is purchasable here.) But thank God I did read Katy communicating Meyer, even if I mis-read her. That misreading was enough to make me get a ticket to hear and see Meyer reading on the old trans-atlantic ferry boat, The Cap San Diego, two nights ago as part of the Harbour Front Festival.

Authors shine while Harbour Front 'Festival' and Spiegel flop: German Book Prize reading with Mirko Bonné and Monika Zeiner

I want to admire Mirko Bonné for the way he does what he does. It's evident that he's not really enjoying the event, but he gets on with it professionally, dealing with Claudia Voigt (Der Spiegel) and her questions patiently, courteously even. Doing events like these are a necessary evil for Bonné if he wants to hold on to the working conditions that he's earned for himself, through which he can live as a full-time writer in the year 2013. Yet apart from giving a small number of writers an income out of which they can write, it's hard to see who the event last Saturday and other similar readings are meant to serve; and why we as an audience should contribute to serving these people.

Review: Donal McLaughlin's 'Naw much of a talker', a Scottish-Swiss novel.

NAW MUCH OF A TALKER

by Pedro Lenz, translated by Donal McLaughlin

Freight Books, 153 pp., £8.99, August 2013, 978 1 908754 22 6

As the title suggests, Donal McLaughlin's book is written in West-of-Scotland vernacular, a translation of Pedro Lenz's first Swiss-German novel, Der Goalie bin ig. Pedro Lenz himself, on his own website, describes the language he wrote the original novel in as Mundart, i.e. vernacular. In doing so he avoids using the word Dialekt to describe the language he writes in, just as McLaughlin has avoided the word 'dialect' to describe the language of the translation.

The question of whether we call McLaughlin's language dialect or vernacular will hopefully not interest most of his readers in the slightest; they might well just be hooked on and running through an understated, charming, stoical story. The question will continue to bother the minority of McLaughlin's readers who can speak -- and who occasionally write -- a language which one person will term dialect, another The Scots Language and a third 'demotic urban speech'. McLaughlin seems to have a savvy strategy, in the interviews he's given about the book: he's not limiting himself to a single, dominant concept when discussing the book's language. In one online interview however, he did distance himself from the word Scots, saying that he never learnt Scots at school, and implying that it's a concept that has little to do with him.