From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances.
The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.
Icelandic:
During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.
Ólafsdóttir’s most recent novel, Eden, won the 2022 Icelandic Booksellers Award for the year’s best Icelandic novel. It has yet to receive translations into languages other than Danish (by the aforementioned Skyum-Nielsen), but English readers can perhaps expect a future edition, since some of her previous novels have received great acclaim in their translations by Brian FitzGibbon. Discussions of her style at the festival hinged on Ólafsdóttir’s “tragicomic” equilibrium, a style apparently typical of her Icelandic context. Her novels, she claims, are “born out of [her] suffering soul as a writer,” and her antidote to this pessimism is a gentle, tender irony. To write in Icelandic, a language on the margins, about the beautiful devastations of human experience on an island marginal itself to Europe is to reclaim an authorial perspective of her culture, now under threat by the tides of mass tourism coagulating on Iceland’s volcanic slopes.
Eden evinces narrative loss in an Icelandic of climate change and linguistic disappearance, featuring a protagonist who is an expert in dying languages. Ólafsdóttir notes with eloquence, during the interview, the verbal flexibility of her native language: if English is the universal language of exchange, then Icelandic might be the world’s poetic language through the malleability of its vocabulary. In her works, this idea is powerfully rendered in a narrative expansion of the words “heimur” and “heimili,” two Icelandic terms of the same etymological root that mean “world” and “home,” respectively. For Ólafsdóttir, a novel is “always an extract,” a “concentration of ideas” expressed in a language whose function is to make a home of the world.
Italian and sign language (or, in this particular case, its lack thereof):
Claudia Durastanti begins her interview with Kathrine Tschemerinsky by noting that she has still not learned sign language, despite having two deaf parents; this opening reiterates her latest work, a long-form text called Strangers I Know, which is marketed as an autobiography by its Italian publishers while its English readership, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, know it as a novel. The interview then rapidly spirals into a nuanced attempt to assemble linguistic puzzle pieces into a synthesis of how we—as speakers, readers, writers, and translators—conceive of language.
Durastanti interrogates the possibilities of syntax, rhythm, and tone in sign language; how might she convey irony and metaphor to her mother, who refuses to use sign language with speaking people and relies on lip reading instead? What might be conveyed in sign language, and what might be lost in its translation from Durastanti’s spoken language? What kind of person does one grow into when certain facets or modes of language become non-existent in their personal linguistics? Durastanti examines language, therefore, as a “mutilation of possibilities”: language can open the wounds of loss and stitch them up again through the needle-and-thread of writing.
Acquiring the possibilities of language is a never-ending process, and so is its mutilation. Glancing off Roman Jakobson’s functions of language, Durastanti contrasts the practical meanings of speech, contained in the ineffability of their own sounds, against the possible opacities of writing, wherein she can experiment with the ability to “not be understandable.”
Learning to slot into standardized verbal expressions can save an immigrant’s life, as it did for Durastanti’s brother when her family relocated back to Italy from the USA. On the other hand, Durastanti’s own work as an English-Italian translator informs her on how blurred, smoky language can have its own purpose. As she says, translation is as much “made of beautiful accidents as deliberate work.” Durastanti’s Italian translation of Naoise Dolan’s The Happy Couple will be released in September, three months after the novel’s initial publication.
Japanese:
Haruki Murakami, the “headliner” of the festival, sits for an interview with the Danish journalist and filmmaker, Tore Leifer, and his Danish translator, Mette Holm. Both were involved in the film Dreaming Murakami (2017), written and directed by Nitesh Anjaan, which documented Holm’s process of translating the Japanese author. Despite this undeniable familiarity with the complexities and subtlties of Murakami’s work, the conversation occasionally stumbles over obstacles on its way to mutual understanding. Murakami’s preference to speak English rather than through an interpreter keeps the conversation from penetrating too deep, and also stops the interviewer from composing more delicate questions.
As he does in all his interviews, and despite all the attempts by his global audience attempts to probe at his work, Murakami appears reticent to reveal too much depth. However, he does explain that writing, for him, is a “way of thinking,” a “door to another world,” and above all, it constitutes pleasure. In his words, it takes “a certain arrogance” to write for over forty years, and to write is simply to lie through the prisms of other, fictional people.
What is perhaps less well-known to a Western audience is Murakami’s prolific translation work from the English to the Japanese—which includes the entirety of Raymond Chandler’s oeuvre—and behind this prodigious output is Murakami’s penchant for music, which is a love he can greatly indulge in while translating. In his process, translation almost becomes an excuse to listen to music, and musical technique interacts with Murakami’s translation style as much as it does his writing style: as he previously wrote in an essay for The New York Times, he translates to rhythm, harmony, melody, and improvisation. The first three factors are frequently evoked in analogies between writing and composing music, and the last factor, improvisation, may inform a reader’s understanding of Murakami’s creative process, which seems unstructured and free-flowing, but is underpinned by a compulsive formal framework. As suavely and unconcernedly as Murakami presents himself, his writing and translating pursuits certainly swing to a compelling internal rhythm of their own.
The tripartite practices of writing, translating, and listening to music reverberate upon each other in Murakami’s person. With the immense time that these three acts take up, they become vital forces not only for Murakami but for his readers—whether it is of his original writing or his Japanese translations. Time is valuable; the acts of reading, writing, listening, and translating are vital because they take time.
On a side note, Murakami notes in his matter-of-fact humor that Stockholm is a preferable city to Copenhagen for the purchasing of jazz vinyl records.
Danish:
The festival’s scheduling frequently slots international talks and Danish readings simultaneously, which has the effect of breaking the festivalgoers into two discrete groups and shrouding the festival’s multifarious linguistic facets. One event was not to be missed, however: the readings of a group of young Danish authors in the Louisiana Museum’s Lake Garden.
Helming the performance is one of Denmark’s most famous contemporary literary exports, Olga Ravn, whose novel, The Employees, in an English translation by Martin Aitken, was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. (Aitken’s translation of Josefine Klougart’s One of Us is Sleeping was featured in Asymptote’s Winter 2015 issue.) Ravn’s most recent work illustrates the ductility of her writing technique, which incorporates research, performance, and recording, and her performance at Louisiana draws on her recent research on seventeenth-century witch trials in Denmark. Also present is Jonas Eika; his novel, After the Sun, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, won the 2019 Nordic Council Literature Prize and was longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Both Ravn’s and Eika’s work reflect the experimentality of contemporary Danish literature, melding forgotten yet defiant historical perspectives with narrative explorations of structure and form. At Louisiana, Eika reads from his upcoming novel, which concerns an anarchistic group of women in Catholic Liège in the thirteenth century.
Sabitha Söderholm is a newcomer to the Danish literary scene who performs alongside Ravn and Eika in the evening’s line-up. Her literary début, Chellam, was published in 2022 to great acclaim and won her the 2023 Blixenprisen as the year’s emerging literary talent. In Chellam, Söderholm’s poetry speaks the language of nature and family discovery to express postcoloniality and the struggles of migration, reclaiming ties from the gulf of loss between Söderholm’s native India and Denmark. It has not yet been translated into other languages.
Kirsten Hammann was also included in the talented line-up; an excerpt of her novel, The Georg Complex, was published in a translation by Michael Favala Goldman in Asymptote’s summer 2023 issue.
The family lexicon:
Beyond the structurally defined semantics of conscious verbal languages, the language of family runs through Louisiana. The festival organizers brilliantly match Durastanti and Constance Debré, both contemporary writers of the female “I” in Romance languages, in a conversation moderated by Emma Holten. The former writes herself as a daughter and the latter as a mother, but they both draw on the mythologies of the family to distort and rewrite those roles—similar to that of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Durastanti says, during her interview with Tschemerinsky, that to be a daughter is also to mother one’s own mother: “a language is a mother, and a mother is a language.” This cyclical movement animates Durastanti and Debré’s discussion.
Debré’s autobiographical novels gained notoriety in her native France for the radicality with which they breach stereotypical roles. Love Me Tender was published in an English translation by Holly James in 2022, and a translation of Playboy is forthcoming in 2024. Both are autobiographical novels, and they mirror the genre-blurring of Durastanti’s works, cracking the iced surfaces of defined social identification. Ultimately, as Durastanti and Debré appear to concur, a social, human being is nothing more or less than a creature of desire. The childhood language of intimate, personal touch is the first vector of this desire, but this is a language that a human can continue to learn, again and again, well into adulthood and into their own practices of family, blood-related or not.
“There is no such thing as a childhood,” writes Debré, referring to the Enlightenment idealization of childhood innocence and the traumatic “un-aesthetics” of a perfect nostalgia. She decompartmentalizes and unmythologizes the idea of a child, just as Durastanti interrogates the myths of her childhood, wracked by violence and love, in Strangers I Know. Their autobiographical narratives inject an unpliable, formal spine to literary expressions of loss in atomized families.
During the aforementioned interview with Leifer, much is made of Murakami’s essay, “Abandoning a Cat,” first published in The New Yorker. The essay reckons with Murakami’s father’s upbringing as a member of “the unfortunate generation.” “War,” says Murakami, “takes three generations” for its repercussions to cease reverberating; he was unable to write about his parents’ lives while they were still alive, because writing about them is above all to write about their experiences of World War II. In his case, writing the family lexicon becomes an act of kindness, a shouldering of ordinary burdens. Ravn’s The Employees echoes this theme: some of the novel’s characters leave their families and lives behind to assume weightier responsibilities in the technological matrices of Ravn’s twenty-second-century world. In this way, Murakami and Ravn’s embedded, collective nostalgias counter Durastanti and Debré’s more agonizing explorations of the “I” within the family alphabet.
And other languages:
While it is impossible to attend each talk involving a writer in translation, Eva Menasse’s conversation with Joyce Carol Oates, hosted by Martin Krasnik, resounds with the weight of collective language. An English-language translation of Menasse’s novel Darkenbloom is underway, circling the dark silence of remembering—or fudging—German war atrocities during World War II in an Austro-Hungarian border village. Notably, Krasnik, a Danish political journalist, is perhaps not the best choice of interviewer for two extremely prolific and thoughtful critics of society; he seems intent on garnering their opinions, rather than listening for the subtlety of their observations and their reflections on writing.
Menasse attributes the increasing divisions of society to a binarification of language, a growing collective fluency in the tongue of the computer. Overcommunication destroys communication, and the road to easy technological solutions also leads to the false idea of human communication having been successfully simplified. The dialogue with Oates, says Menasse, takes place in the “analog”, but the disappearance of analog communication increasingly bleeds into the syntax of real social languages and our ability to sustain meaningful exchanges.
The most outstanding international English-language writers in attendance at the festival are Wole Soyinka and Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose takes on English-language writing necessarily thrum with the postcolonial tensions of writing in an imperially imposed language. Their themes of exile anchor a narrative of loss—whether of language, intellect, or attachment to space. Gurnah defines politics, at their noblest, as the ability to speak about injustice—a quality which, for both Nobel Prize winners, is one of the most fundamental aspects of writing.
The Menasse-Oates dialogue, as well as the Soyinka-Gurnah conversation, both raise questions about the linguistic and cultural diversity of this year’s Louisiana invitees. In both exchanges, the words “Holocaust” and “postcolonialism” recur as in a succession of mirrors. Now in the second year of the Russo-Ukrainian war, which is notably a war so attached to cultural and historical representations of identity, it remains a surprise that the name “Ukraine” is enunciated only once in four days.
Does a literary festival of this caliber carry a responsibility to amplify the most marginalized and threatened voices of contemporary writing? And even for those who disagree, shouldn’t a global literary festival represent at least more than one non-European language?
Though such questions become increasingly prominent in a world of growing interchange, one should keep in mind that the trends of Danish readership and the availability of Danish translations of global literature primarily determine the selection of participants at the Louisiana Literature Festival, which ultimately remains Danish-facing. This had led to a festival that is both colorful and rich in language, and abundant in thematic explorations of literature’s linguistic dances—but with a distinct loss hovering in the festival’s narrative. Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.
Michelle Chan Schmidt is an assistant editor of fiction for Asymptote. She studies English literature and history at Trinity College Dublin, where she also edits for various student publications. She is fascinated by representations of Hong Kong history in Hongkongese literature and culture.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: