This week, our editors-at-large report from prize ceremonies and literary festivals, exploring the entanglement of the literary establishment with the cultural industry and uncovering innovative artists fostering transnational collaboration. Read on to find out more!
Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy
Since 1947, on the first Thursday of July, the mannerist nymphaeum of Rome’s Villa Giulia has hosted the award ceremony of Italy’s most closely followed literary prize, the Strega Prize (Premio Strega). Its beginnings date back to 1944—just before the capital’s liberation from Nazi occupation—when a group of intellectuals, writers, journalists, and artists, self-named “Amici della domenica” (Sunday friends) and led by Maria Bellonci, began holding a series of informal meetings that, in the aftermath of WWII, gradually evolved into the literary prize we know today, bringing major works of fiction to national attention.
Last week, Andrea Bajani’s autobiographical novel L’Anniversario (The Anniversary, forthcoming with Penguin Press) was announced as this year’s winner. It tells the story of a family whose emotional life is underpinned by the delicate interplay of violence and subjugation—a story whose end, however, is marked by the writer-narrator’s drastic decision to “abandon” his parents for good. Deprived of psychological and emotional depth, the mother—who willingly gives up on life—functions as the novel’s narrative pivot; for Bajani, her entrenched passivity becomes the vantage point from which to observe the father, a “normal” man—that is, a controlling, aggressive, short-tempered provider—in whom the claim to authority, the shame of failure, and the need to be loved converge in a lifelike if partial portrait.
Bajani’s language is clean, precise, composed; inclined to circumlocution and upheld by an affable disposition, its coldness—along with the frequent use of ellipses—echoes the hollowness of a home where silence reigned, a “perfectly functional, closed” family system, akin to a “carceral” facility. While Bajani’s intent is to reject a 20th-century patriarchal legacy (first by breaking the yoke of secrecy, then by severing ties with his parents), the trajectory of his distancing remains nebulous—suggesting an unwillingness, or an inability, to envision an alternative.
According to Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Strega Prize had already begun feeding into the local “cultural industry” by 1968, when he denounced its entanglement with consumerist logic. More recently, author and professor Gianluigi Simonetti—who praised L’Anniversario—has outlined how the Prize, once intended to support literary talent, now operates as a tool for industry integration: in this light, a novel that is formally restrained and non-confrontational is less an act of refusal than a form of “noble entertainment” that leaves the most difficult work to the reader’s imagination.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania and Egypt
Zidul de Hartie is a Romanian arts collective, “poetry band,” and writing-residency organization started by poet-artist Florin Dan Prodan in 2007. Although based in Suceava, North-East Romania, it started by offering residencies and retreats in a once-popular hot-springs and spa resort in the central part of the country, Borsec, up in the Transylvanian Carpathians. The meantime ghost town and, as Prodan once described it, half-deserted rundown Disneyland, provided the perfect surreal scenery for the collective’s postcommunist writing retreats which echoed the very name of the organizer (Paper Wall, at times translated as Paper Citadel, with simultaneously self-assertive and ironical connotations: Paper Fortifications).
Borsec was the location of choice for the Paper-fortified retreats for 12 years, and then Prodan took things to the next level by turning the project into an itinerant “nomadic” initiative, with writing-and-arts residencies offered on the Bulgarian Black Sea-side and then to Central Asia where yurt writing retreats were organized on the shores of Yssil-Kul lake, up in the Tian Shan mountains.
Part of this series, a one-of-a-kind Romanian-transnational week-long festival took place in late May in Cairo, where Zidul de Hartie and Florin Dan Prodan teamed with local Egyptian and international partners. Interwoven Voices was in fact several things in one, a poetry and arts residency, a writing retreat, a cross-artform festival, and an interdisciplinary colloquium.
The opening-night bill featured an impressive host of poets, visual artists, and musicians from around the world, including, besides Prodan himself, poet-translator, performer, and critic, Rhys Trimble (North Wales), internationally awarded Chinese poet Yang Lian, Italian sound-and-visual artist and sound engineer Niet FN (Kaczynski editions), German visual artist Laila Seidel, German author, artist, and lecturer Angelika Sinn, Romanian artist and novelist Paul Mihalache, Lebanese poet and academic Charbel Dagher, Egyptian novelist and publisher Safaa Al Naggar and Egyptian poets and artists Mohsen El Belasy and Ghadah Kamal.
It is worth noting in the context, that Prodan himself, in his own poetics and artistic practice, is the embodiment of similar fusions of transnational interests and cosmopolitan sophistication, on the one hand, and focused connectedness to local histories, languages, and topographies, on the other as the events he organizes. I became familiar with his work a decade ago and—while sampling it for a special feature in Plume—was excited to discover his genuine relevance to a wider nomadic or “nomadosophical” poetic trend in Romanian-transnational poetics—as charted for instance by Asymptote contributor Martin Woodside.
Prodan and Zidul de Hartie are up to more and ever more exciting projects and exploits though. He recently pushed out a call for applications for a Himalayan Basecamp poetry residency (scheduled for October this year) which will be hosted by Anapurna BaseCamp Guesthouse with a tie-in with the On the Road Again festival to take place at the legendary hippies colony at Phewa Lake, in Pokhara, Nepal.
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