One of the advantages of living in Oxford is that there are plenty of "book" events, though I usually miss them as I'm away. Sloph spotted a talk by Ismail Kadare at the Maison Francaise and so we turned up one evening to a packed hall and had to stand at the back.
The talk was introduced in English by Noel Malcolm (of Short Histories fame) and everything was translated back and forth by David Bellos, his current translator. I was pleased to see my French held up under the strain of bad acoustics and Kadare's answer was often funnier in French than the translation. Actually this is normal. The raconteur has complete control of when he delivers the punchline, gauging the amount of suspense, but the translator has already had the reaction from half the audience and the moment has gone.
The audience was more interested in his early life under communism. I, on the other hand, have only read the later works (Three Elegies for Kosovo, Broken April) and am now working backwards, from The Successor. The review of Broken April by Violainvilnius gave a completely different impression of Broken April than I received. I thought it was a flirtation with feminism, since it was the only book I have read so far by Kadare where a woman had a character. She described it as barbaric, mainly about the besa (honour) code of revenge killings. But more of that later, when I have reread it to see if I have become very desensitized to violence in Albania. Nobody mentioned this book at his talk.
Noel Malcolm kicked off the questions, asking Kadare if he had much influenced by his Ottoman heritage and Ottoman literature. "What, those dry old books in a script that none of us could read?" came the answer. One of Kemal Ataturk's reforms was to change from the Turkic script to the Roman alphabet so no one could read old books. A very cunning way of cutting off the past, which no communist has ever managed to do! It was clear that in the 30s and 40s when Kadare was growing up Albania was building on its western orientation.
In the 50s, he went to study in Moscow at a writer's school. He described it as a very good school for writers who were trained in propaganda and socialist realism. It was a good school for him as well. Whatever they stressed as important, he neglected and vice versa. So when they told him to write about the achievements of the workers and the shining future of communism, he wrote about rain and the countryside and "la boue". Of course he was criticized for his books being too much realism and not enough achievement, but he survived that.
Here is another pitfall of translation. Kadare writes in French mostly now. Although it is clear what he means when you translate "boue" as mud, it seems there is also a phrase in French "nostalgie de la boue", which I found when googling to check the translation. Here is an example:
"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. I have been submerged in such ideas since I was born and am just getting my head out of the waters. My parents romanticized Hungarian folk culture — my father photographed and published peasant architecture, my mother wore folk dresses, my uncle and father promoted native handicrafts in the weaving workshops they organized in the 1930's. I went much further in romanticizing the seemingly most unromantic Aztecs, leaping across an ocean, a continent and five centuries in revalidation.
His first book (of poetry not prose) was published in Moscow. By then he had acquired a reputation as a decadent writer (meaning one with western leanings). He said that this made him very exotic in his girlfriend's eyes, as she had never met anyone decadent. One suspects this allowed to him to get away with rather a lot. His publisher urged him not to publish, since as well as his first book, it might have been his last. However, he was determined and they compromised by the publisher writing an introduction describing him as a decadent writer. Since this was during the Khrushchev spring, they got away with it, and the "damaging" introduction actually improved his sales.
He also talked about censorship in Albania during Enver Hoxha. I think most people are surprised to find there was any cultural life at all during the period, so primitive was the society painted. However, according to Kadare, Hoxha had been educated in France, and considered himself a little bit intelligentsia. So it was impossible to have censorship. Books were published and then condemned afterwards, but not before. Of course, one can suspect that there was a considerable amount of self-censorship based on the results of the post-publication criticism of other books.
After that there were some very silly questions about his life as a foreigner in France (how did it feel?), that really made me ashamed of how parochial the British were. Kadare dismissed them as irrelevant.
The time allocated was far too short for me, and it was clear that Kadare was an amusing and ironic speaker about his experiences. I definitely shall read more of his books.
