Polish literature boost to LBF 2017

Poland, or "South-Central Ruritania" (after the Compton district of LA) as it is often considered, has chosen to align itself with the London Book Fair as "Market Focus" in 2017. The PR puff delivered to a world weary of Poland's somewhat "neo-Ruritian" stance on other social issues makes much of the area's "traditional" market structure, with 49% of all books sold in bookshops.

Also buried right at the bottom of the puff is news which might come as a shock to non-Ruritanian watchers, or "normal people" as they might think of themselves. Poland has "a translation tradition that dates back to the 16^th Century [and] five Polish Nobel Prizes for Literature awarded to Polish writers in the 20^th Century alone" makes Poland look like a proper literary and cultural entity.

The Ruritanian hopes newer and fresher writers get the exposure they deserve.

 

Move along, nothing of interest here - 2016 Man Booker International Prize

While The Ruritanian is very keen on the notion of a credible international prize for literary fiction in English translation, it notes that the 2016 Man Booker International Prize is not. The short list seems to be more interesting for what it lacks rather than for its contains.

Move along, everyone, there really is nothing of interest here.

Ruritania greets Reading Europe list with fabulous cartoon

The Reading Europe list has been picked up by quite a lot of media outlets across Europe. The Ruritanian notes the prize for best Brexit cartoon goes to Literární noviny...

The Magnificent Mandarin - Ruritania's engagement with China

Ruritania's engagement with "The Orient" stretches back to before the "Marauding Mongols" who may have become Magyars in Hungary as early as the eleventh century. The Slavs preceded them with their consonant clusters in earlier "migrations". Marco Polo's travels were transcribed with varying degrees of accuracy into the Ruritanian vernacular languages in the later middle ages and in the nineteenth century, the Oriental Institute was established in Prague.

Many of the region's twentieth century avant garde had more than a passing acquaintance with notions of the Orient. Egon Bondy studied Chinese philosophy from Tao to Mao and wrote extensively on the topic. However, it was his poem "Podivuhodný mandarin" which associated notion of the orient more closely with "underground" or avant garde thinking in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s and 1980s when The Plastic People of The Universe set the poem to music. "Podivuhodný mandarin" is usually translated as "Wonderous Madarin" in English, though the adjective "podivuhodný" can be rendered as "miraculous", "magnificent" or even "admirable".

Bondy's "Podivuhodný mandarin" bears a striking resemblance to the Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin [Marvellous Mandarin]" (1916) which, in turn, was turned into a "one act pantomime ballet" composed by Béla Bartók which premiered in November 1926 in Cologne, Germany. There, it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned on moral grounds.

Béla Bartók's new music fared much better at its launch in Prague however, but the mandarin character remains uncomfortable and his representation says more about those engaging with him than the mandarin himself.

Lengyel's mandarin is a wealthy and exotically-dressed user of prostitutes who ends up murdered by the gang of beggar-pimps. It is an uncomfortable representation describing exploitation in many voices. Bondy's poem is shorter and his mandarin more ambiguous; representing lust and greed, the poem describes the destruction of those seeking to profit from the mandarin. It ends with

...impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin.

Quotes from Bondy's poem and its precursor, Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin", were strangely absent from public forums on the western border of Ruritania two weeks ago when President Xi of China visited Prague.

Those more interested in the Ruritanian Gothic end of world culture than post-colonial criticism could do worse than engaging for a few minutes with those Plastic People from Bohemia and Moravia who turned Bondy's poem into a song in the early 1970s translated by a certain blogger into the English rhyming couplets show below:

Wondrous Mandarin                                                                        
 
Just spread your legs out, open wide                                                     
and swallow that wondrous mandarin inside

Dress yourself in vanity-guilt satin                                          
to feel close to the wondrous mandarin

With your head, dark eyes and blood pounding,                
craving the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Many times you’ll just want to give in                                    
because he wasn’t the wondrous mandarin
           
Then at forty, impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Ruritania comes to London on 12 May

Tomáš Zmeškal

Londoners are in for a real Ruritanian treat on 12 May when authors Tomáš Zmeškal and Hamid Ismailov are to be found in conversation with Ruritanian revisionist theorist, Misha Glenny.

Tomáš Zmeškal’s debut novel "Love Letter in Cuneiform" is a family saga - a story of marriage, love and destiny set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and 1990s. Josef meets his wife, Květa, before the WWII at a public lecture and she marries him instead of their mutual friend Hynek. But when her husband is arrested and unlawfully imprisoned, Květa gives herself to Hynek in return for help and advice. Exploring what is not spoken, what cannot be said and the repercussions of silence, Zmeškal's tale, told as a mosaic of events, exposes the larger, ongoing struggle of post communist Eastern Europe to come to terms with suffering when catharsis is denied. 

Hamid Ismailov’s latest book The Dead Lake, long-listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a haunting Russian tale about environmental legacy of the Cold War. It tells a story of a gifted violinist Yerzhan growing up on the Kazakh steppes, the Soviet test ground for atomic weapons. Yerzhan falls in love with the neighbour’s daughter and to impress her, he dives into a forbidden lake. Its radioactive water stops his growth and he becomes trapped in a boy’s body while the girl he loves grows into a beautiful woman. Drawing attention to atomic tests taking place between 1945 and 1989 in Kazakhstan, Ismailov creates a parable of modern arms race impacting on people’s lives and tradition.

Full details can be found here

Josef Jedlčka book launch at Waterstones Piccadilly 14 April

Subversion and Laugher: Growing up under Socialism in the 1970s and 1980s

 

Next week, the marvelous urban anthropologist Pavla Jonssonová will be joined by the author Jiří Pehe, academic Martin Machovec and poet Tomáš Míka to celebrate childhood and growing up in "socialist" Czechoslovakia in the1970s and 1980s.

Expect subversive insight and laughter!