The economic consequences of the rise of English

Linguistic follies - Jul 19th 2007 - The Economist print edition -

 

 - IN RECENT years Brussels has been a fine place to observe the irresistible rise of English as Europe's lingua franca. For native speakers of English who are lazy about learning languages (yes, they exist), Brussels has become an embarrassingly easy place to work or visit. English is increasingly audible and visible in this scruffily charming Belgian city, and frankly rampant in the concrete-and-glass European quarter. Now, however, signs of a backlash are building. This is not based on sentiment, but on chewy points of economic efficiency and political fairness. And in a neat coincidence, Brussels is again a good place to watch the backlash develop.

Start in the European district, where to the sound of much grinding of French and German teeth, the expansion of the European Union has left English not just edging ahead of the two other working languages, but in a position of utter dominance. The union now boasts 27 members and 23 official languages, but the result has been the opposite of a new tower of Babel. Only grand meetings boast interpreters. At lower levels, it turns out, when you put officials from Berlin, Bratislava, Bucharest and Budapest in the same room, English is by far the easiest option

Is this good for Europe? It feels efficient, but being a native English-speaker also seems to many to confer an unfair advantage. It is far easier to argue a point in your mother tongue. It is also hard work for even the best non-native speakers to understand other non-native versions of English, whereas it is no great strain for the British or Irish to decipher the various accents.

François Grin, a Swiss economist, argues that Britain enjoys hidden transfers from its neighbours worth billions of euros a year, thanks to the English language. He offers several reasons, starting with spending in Britain on language teaching in schools, which is proportionately lower than in France or Switzerland, say. To add insult to injury, Britain profits from teaching English to foreigners. "Elevating one language to a position of dominance is tantamount to giving a huge handout to the country or countries that use it as a native language," he insists.

What about the Europe outside the bubble of EU politics? Surely the rise of English as a universal second language is good for business? Perhaps, but even here a backlash is starting, led by linguists with close ties to European institutions and governments. They argue that the rush to learn English can sometimes hurt business by making it harder to find any staff who are willing to master less glamorous European languages.

English is all very well for globe-spanning deals, suggests Hugo Baetens Beardsmore, a Belgian academic and adviser on language policy to the European Commission. But across much of the continent, firms do the bulk of their business with their neighbours. Dutch firms need delivery drivers who can speak German to customers, and vice versa. Belgium itself is a country divided between people who speak Dutch (Flemish) and French. A local plumber needs both to find the cheapest suppliers, or to land jobs in nearby France and the Netherlands.

"English, in effect, blocks the learning of other languages," claims Mr Baetens Beardsmore. Just as the global rise of English makes life easy for idle Britons or Americans, it breeds complacency among those with English as their second language. "People say, 'well, I speak English and I have no need to learn another language.'" He cites research by the European Commission suggesting that this risk can be avoided if school pupils are taught English as a third tongue after something else.

A huge government-financed survey of Brussels businesses reveals a dire shortage of candidates who can speak the right local languages (40% of firms have reported losing contracts because of a lack of languages). One result is a very odd labour market. By day, Brussels is more or less bilingual, hosting a third of a million Dutch- and French-speaking commuters from the prim suburbs, who fill the lion's share of well-paid graduate jobs. Once night falls, Dutch-speakers are in a small minority.

Not getting on their bikes

Moreover, among permanent Brussels residents, unemployment hovers around 20%. Just a short journey away, in Dutch-speaking suburbs such as Zaventem (home to the airport), unemployment is 4-5% and employers complain of worsening labour shortages. Even within Brussels, thousands of job vacancies go unfilled every month because nine in ten jobseekers cannot read and write in French and Dutch, prompting employers to bin their applications.

Olivier Willocx of the Brussels Chamber of Commerce and Industry argues that too many Brussels natives are "allergic to learning Dutch". The rise of Dutch is painful for some. French was once the language of the Belgian and Brussels elite, but the post-war period has seen Dutch-speaking Flanders (as the north of Belgium is known) boom. "Like it or not, the real economic power in Brussels is Flemish," contends Mr Willocx.

Hardline nationalist politicians in Flanders must take some blame because they have done a lot to make French-speakers feel unwelcome. The head of the Brussels employment service, Eddy Courthéoux, also questions the sheer number of job advertisements that demand both Dutch and French, saying that for some "it is just a way of avoiding hiring a foreigner": code for Moroccan, Turkish or African immigrants.

Perhaps Brussels should accept its fate as an international city, and switch to English, like some European Singapore (although with waffles, frites and dirty streets)? For all his problems finding jobs for monolingual locals, Mr Courthéoux looks appalled. "Living in a bilingual city is not a misfortune, it makes life rich and interesting," he argues. Some would call this pure sentiment, others might suggest that it reflects hard-nosed economics. But Brussels is actually a good place in which to hear the point and simply nod your head.

THE Amateur as critic

 

The Amateur as Critic

Terry Teachout From issue: November 2007

Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage. Not only have many newspapers done away with their book-review sections, but several major papers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, no longer employ full-time classical-music critics. Even those papers that continue to review fine-arts events are devoting less space to them, while the "think pieces" on cultural subjects that once graced the pages of big-city Sunday papers are becoming a thing of the past.

It is, I suspect, difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers. Yet a considerable number of the most significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century, including Virgil Thomson's The Musical Scene (1945), Edwin Denby's Looking at the Dance (1949), Kenneth Tynan's Curtains (1961), and Hilton Kramer's The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973) consisted in large part of newspaper reviews. To read such books today is to marvel at the fact that their erudite contents were once deemed suitable for publication in general-circulation dailies.

We are even farther removed from the discursive newspaper reviews published in England between the turn of the 20th century and the eve of World War II, at a time when newsprint was dirt-cheap and stylish arts criticism was considered an ornament to the publications in which it appeared. In those far-off days, it was taken for granted that the critics of major papers would write in detail and at length about the events they covered.¹ Theirs was a serious business, and even those reviewers who wore their learning lightly, like George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman, could be trusted to know what they were about. These men (for they were all men) believed in journalism as a calling, and were proud to be published in the daily press. "So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in journalism," Newman wrote, "that I am tempted to define 'journalism' as 'a term of contempt applied by writers who are not read to writers who are.'"

Why, then, are virtually all of these critics forgotten? Neville Cardus, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian from 1917 until shortly before his death in 1975, is now known solely as a writer of essays on the game of cricket. During his lifetime, though, he was also one of England's foremost classical-music critics, a stylist so widely admired that his Autobiography (1947) became a best-seller. He was knighted in 1967, the first music critic to be so honored. Yet only one of his books is now in print, and his vast body of writings on music is unknown save to specialists. How is it possible that so celebrated a critic should have slipped into near-total obscurity?

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In a better-regulated world, Cardus's Autobiography would be ranked alongside H.L. Mencken's Newspaper Days and A.J. Liebling's Between Meals as a minor classic of journalistic reminiscence, one in which the time-honored story of the poor boy made good is told with splendid wit and urbanity:

I have sold, as well as written for, newspapers. My parents conducted a home laundry; or, not to be tautological, they took in washing. I once delivered the washing to the home and house of the chairman of the Hallé Concerts Society,² delivered it in a perambulator at the tradesmen's entrance. Years afterward I dined with him one night; I was now music critic of the Manchester Guardian, and he wished to placate my pen on a point of musical policy.

This is, alas, not entirely reliable, for Cardus loved a good story too much to tell his own without adding embroidery. Yet the unadorned truth, as Christopher Brookes revealed in His Own Man, a 1985 biography of Cardus, would have been impressive enough in its own right. Though Cardus, who was born in Manchester in 1889, exaggerated his early poverty, he was in fact the illegitimate son of a part-time prostitute, and it appears to be no less true that he completed only four years of formal schooling. If his childhood was not quite Dickensian in its deprivations, it was still a working-class life of the sort well known to those familiar with the bleak annals of Victorian history.

That such a boy should have grown up to become a music critic for the Guardian is one of the more improbable occurrences in journalistic history—though it is still less probable that he should have started out as the Guardian's cricket correspondent, and continued to cover the game even after he took over the paper's classical-music beat. Indeed, it was as a writer on cricket that Cardus would always be most familiar to the public at large, eventually becoming so well known in that capacity that he was written up in Time in 1949. To the extent that he is remembered today, it is for such collections of his cricket dispatches as the posthumously published Cardus on Cricket (1977), the only one of his books to remain in print.

A self-taught writer who earned his youthful keep as a public-school cricket pro, Cardus talked his way onto the staff of the Guardian at a time when that paper prided itself not only on its reflexively liberal moralizing but on its extensive coverage of the arts. Within two years, he had become the Guardian's chief cricket writer, but music was his first love, and from 1927 on he doubled as its chief music critic, reviewing concerts as "N.C." in an elaborately Edwardian style identical to the one he employed as "Cricketer."³

_____________

In both roles, Cardus was primarily interested in colorful personalities. He wrote about such musicians as Sir Thomas Beecham, his favorite conductor, in much the same way that he wrote about great cricketers, sketching their characters with a fluent blend of impressionistic description and polished anecdotage that not infrequently sounded too neat to be quite true.

Here, for instance, is Cardus's version of a dinner with Beecham at the Salzburg Festival:

In a corner of the restaurant a little string orchestra was playing music—no tin-can stuff, but soft waltzes; and a number of elegant personages were dancing. "God!" ejaculated Beecham, "stop that noise!" He called for the maître d'hôtel. "How can I demonstrate to my learned friend here, the beauties of Schubert's music if that damned strumming goes on perpetually? Please have it silenced."

Perhaps it happened just like that, perhaps not, but as the Italians say, if it isn't true it ought to be. And when Cardus described a concert with the same impressionistic gusto, one felt inclined to say the same thing, for it was his great gift to convey the essence of a musician in phrases so vivid that the near-complete absence of technical specificity almost always goes unregretted (if not unnoticed). When he writes that Arturo Toscanini's conducting of Brahms sounds like "a sort of gigantic musical wheel revolving in a ruthless groove," or that Fritz Kreisler's violin playing "reminds me of a beautiful face that would be even more beautiful if it were lined or wrinkled," you take his point at once, and relate it effortlessly to your own memories of the performer in question.

No doubt, Cardus wrote that way not only because he could but because he had to. His musical training consisted of a year's worth of voice lessons, and the flipness with which he dismissed "score-reading critics" leads the attentive reader to suspect that his own abilities in that line were severely limited. But there were few limits to his responsiveness to the music and musicians he loved, and when he was on form, it was easy to go along with the admiring self-appraisal in his Autobiography

From the moment I gave up executive ability in music, I was free to cultivate the art of listening—which is an art sui generis. . . . For the critic of music should be the most enlightened and unprejudiced listener; it is his job, his full-time job, to hear and to receive music with a highly sensitized mind, governed by psychological and aesthetic insight. He is an artist with experiences in music his material.

_____________

Had Cardus taken the trouble to be born a quarter-century earlier, he would been the perfect music critic, Bernard Shaw's only peer, and it is possible that his work would be as well remembered today as are the concert reviews Shaw wrote in the 1890's.

But Cardus was a romantic pur sang who with few exceptions cared only for the music of the late-18th and 19th centuries.⁴ Unfortunately, his chief period of critical activity coincided with the emergence of the modern movement in music, about which he too often wrote with the complacent incomprehension of a philistine—an attitude that was widely shared in England between the wars. When Béla Bartók gave the English premiere of his Second Piano Concerto, Cardus wrote in the Guardian that "Bartók composes as though he owed the world of music a grudge. . . . The piano snaps away like a spiteful maiden aunt. It is tedious and crude." Even a work as accessible as George Gershwin's An American in Paris provoked him to suggest "a 150-percent tariff against this sort of American dry-goods."

Where Cardus shone, by contrast, was in his responsiveness to the long-unfashionable music of the late Romantics. He was one of the first English critics to recognize that Mahler was a major composer and to crusade for the acceptance of his work, just as he consistently held that Elgar deserved to be taken as seriously as Richard Strauss, and that his music was complex to a degree unappreciated by younger musicians who dismissed it as quaint:

For all his Continental accents and gestures, Elgar is English and Edwardian, unmistakably English of his period, but—and here is the subtle point—with a curious and contradictory side to him. At times he turns his vision inward to a fugitive realm of fancy, reflective, poetic, and sometimes of a sinister or inimical order or taint.

But that was as far as he was willing to go. Even a modern piece as approachable as William Walton's First Symphony seemed to him marred by its "insistent rhythm and harmonic emphasis, with an obvious disinclination to be easeful, quiet, and simple," while the best he could say about Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, perhaps the greatest opera of the post-World War II era, was that it had "moments of genius." For him, the rest of the 20th century was a closed book.

Because Cardus's tastes were so conservative, few took him seriously when he attacked the hermetic modernism of such avant-garde composers as Pierre Boulez in language that now seems prescient: "Listening to Pli Selon Pli, I could not relate the varied succession of aural phenomena to music as my musical intelligence and senses recognize music." By then a lifetime of reaction had exhausted his credibility, and little attention was paid to his later reviews for the Guardian, whose increasingly unsympathetic editors were disinclined to give him the space he had once taken for granted. "Last week," he lamented to a friend in 1969, "they cut my notice of the Hallé, in the Festival Hall, in half with no attempt to see what might be taken out here and there. No; the notice was chopped into two, like a butcher cutting a weekend joint."

_____________

Is there any chance that Cardus's criticism will enjoy a posthumous revival? The prospect seems remote. Journalistic tastes had changed long before his death, and postmodern readers have little use for the richly upholstered Vicwardian prose in which he specialized. Moreover, the amateur tradition in music criticism has been in headlong retreat ever since Virgil Thomson first showed the readers of the New York Herald Tribune that a trained musician could write about music every bit as stylishly as a professional journalist. As a result, today's classical-music critics are expected to have precisely the kind of technical training that Cardus's generation disdained.

Still, it is just possible that a well-edited collection of his concert reviews might succeed in bringing him to the attention of a new generation of readers unaccustomed to the kind of critic capable of remarking that "I hope I have never written of music except as one who is constantly bowing the head before the miracle of it."⁵ For all his good humor, Cardus took music as seriously as that sentence suggests, and believed passionately in its power and significance. Moreover, he also believed that the only way to write about it meaningfully was as a reflection of the working of man's soul:

I do not find music "abstract," a series of propositions; an elusive Thing in Itself. Music is for me all the composers who have created it; a symphony is as much a part of Beethoven as the voice and mind and heart and humors of my best living mortal friend. . . . When we listen to music, if we listen properly, we take part in a communion; we taste the body of genius, enter into the mind of the man.

Needless to say, such an essentially romantic view is no more in vogue today than the old-fashioned prose in which it is couched. Yet something vital disappears from criticism when its practitioners are unwilling to approach music in this way—the same something that is palpably present when Neville Cardus remarks, as he did in a 1935 review, that Sir Thomas Beecham "expels plainness. The merely respectable and competent perish in his presence." If this be romanticism, let us have much more of it.

About the Author

Terry Teachout, COMMENTARY's regular music critic and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

December 16, 2007

A Stranger in Camelot

By EDWARD HIRSCH

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

A New Verse Translation.

By Simon Armitage.

198 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

In 1967, Ted Hughes's third book, "Wodwo" — raw, spooky, elemental — sent me scurrying to find out the meaning of this strange Middle English word. The figure of "wodwo," which Hughes elsewhere characterized as a sort of "half-man, half-animal spirit of the forests," seemed to have loomed up out of the unconscious of English poetry. The book's epigraph came from a ferocious passage in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and soon I was parsing the somewhat resistant Middle English text and bounding through J. R. R. Tolkien's faithful translation. I was transfixed. I had stumbled upon the underground alliterative tradition of English poetry.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is one of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry. The poem was created in the latter part of the 14th century by an unknown author who probably hailed from the West Midlands of England. He knew the spoken dialect of the rugged country between north Staffordshire and south Lancashire.

The geography of the poem puts it a world away from cosmopolitan London. The sole surviving copy of the manuscript, now kept securely in the British Library, was recorded by a scribe and bound up with three other poems probably by the same creator ("Pearl," "Patience" and "Cleanness"). Thus the author is generally known as the Gawain or Pearl poet. He was a contemporary of Chaucer and a master of our mongrel English tongue.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It's easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it. You can tear through it in a night or two — I couldn't put down Simon Armitage's compulsively readable new verse translation — and linger over it for years.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is one of the founding narratives of English literature. The storyteller nods to the "Aeneid," thus invoking his epic lineage, and then settles down to tell his tale, which begins in the court of King Arthur, "most regal of rulers in the royal line." It is Christmastime at Camelot, and the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table are carrying on and carousing when suddenly an enormous stranger appears, a hulking interloper, "a most massive man, the mightiest of mortals." The astonishing stranger is green from head to foot, a kind of emanation from nature. Even his horse is "a steed of pure green stock."

The Green Knight, "otherworldly, yet flesh / and bone," presents a startling challenge: he will endure one blow without offering resistance, but whoever deals it must promise to receive a reciprocal blow in a year and a day. Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, rises to the challenge and beheads the stranger in one stunning strike. Then the Knight stands, picks up his head, and reminds Gawain to meet him at the appointed time. Thereafter Gawain, a bewildered southern innocent (he tells Arthur he is "weakest of your warriors and feeblest of wit"), honors his pledge to seek the Green Knight out and journeys into harsh northern terrain. A year of adventures ensues — an adulterous seduction, a series of graphically violent hunts, a meeting with the Green Knight in a green chapel — that constitutes the moral test and vision of the poem.

Alliteration, the audible repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or within words, is part of the sound stratum of poetry. Its heavy percussive use in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" brings the poem close to oral poetry. Listen to the letter "v" in this line about the Green Knight — "And alle his vesture verayly was clene verdure" — which Armitage gleefully translates as "In all vestments he revealed himself veritably verdant!" Or consider the letter "g" in this comparable line — "Thou wyl grant me godly the gomen that I ask / bi ryght" — which Armitage renders as "you'll gracefully grant me this game which I ask for / by right." The repetitive consonants tie the stressed syllables together (grant, godly, gomen) and urge the interaction of the words upon us.

Alliteration was the organizing device of Anglo-Saxon poetry, predating rhyme, but it was dying out by the 14th century until a group of poets established what has been called an "alliterative revival." "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" inevitably evokes its precursor, "Beowulf," which has been powerfully translated by Seamus Heaney, who provides the model for Armitage's enterprise. Alliteration didn't predominate in later metrical verse, but it is a rough current in Sir Thomas Wyatt, if you listen, and thereafter becomes a subterranean stream in English-language poetry. It comes bubbling to the surface in 19th-century English poets, like Swinburne and Hopkins, who use it with startling boldness, and 20th-century Welsh poets, like David Jones and Dylan Thomas.

Rhyme had come into poetry, via France, by the 14th century. The vogue for Petrarch would help make it one of the dominant features of later courtly verse. The Gawain poet also knew how to rhyme. There are 101 stanzas of uneven length in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and each one ends with five short, rhyming, tightly metrical lines known as the "bob and wheel." The first two-syllable line is the "bob," which is a bridge from the alliterated to the rhyming lines; the following four three-stress lines are the "wheel." This is how the translator renders it when Gawain turns up at an unknown court:

This knight,
whose country was unclear,
now seemed to them by sight
a prince without a peer
in fields where fierce men fight.

Armitage, an English poet from West Yorkshire, clearly feels a special kinship with the Gawain poet. He captures his dialect and his landscape and takes great pains to render the tale's alliterative texture and drive. Indeed, Armitage calls alliteration "the warp and weft of the poem." His vernacular translation isn't literal — sometimes he alliterates different letters, sometimes he foreshortens the number of alliterations in a line, sometimes he changes lines altogether and so forth — but his imitation is rich and various and recreates the gnarled verbal texture of the Middle English original, which is presented in a parallel text.

There have been dozens of translations of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" over the years. J. R. R. Tolkien's authoritative edition was a gift to readers, though his own translation now seems somewhat flowery. Marie Borroff did an alliterative version that holds up after 40 years. Ted Hughes translated some key sections, newly available in his "Selected Translations," which marvelously recreate the Gawain poet's alliterative long line. Five years ago, W. S. Merwin published a learned, lyrical translation. Now Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version. He reminds us that "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" still wields an uncanny power after 600 years. We're fortunate that "our coffers have been crammed / with stories such as these."

Edward Hirsch's new book of poems, "Special Orders," will be published NEXT SPRING.

An illustration from The Sphere magazine showing the Knights of the Round Table.

What are friends for ?

You choose your friends, not your family - and for many today, the former have become the most important people in their lives. But are you sure your friends really like you as much as you like them? And how do you know they will still be around in five years' time? In the first of a highly personal three-part investigation into modern relationships, Jenni Russell looks at friendship
Monday January 24, 2005
The Guardian

Earlier this year, I rang my friend Jo and found her in a state of stunned misery. The week before, her best and oldest friend had sent her an email to say that she thought the friendship was over, that she wouldn't be in touch for a while, and that she sent Jo all her best wishes.

Jo is a witty, sexy, single, childless woman in her 40s. She's a talented artist, but earns very little. Without a career, money, husband or family to bolster her confidence, a small group of friends have been a key part of her identity. Genevieve, an ambitious, glamorous woman whom she met at university, has been her constant confidante for almost a quarter of a century. But in the past three or four years, Genevieve has become increasingly unreliable: making dates she later cancels; slow to return calls or emails.

Last winter, Jo arranged for them to go to a film together, only for Genevieve to ring at 6pm to say she was awfully sorry, but she had to spend the evening with some dreary Burmese refugees, friends of her father's. Fortunately for Jo, 20 minutes later she was rung and asked to make up the numbers for a formal dinner party. When she walked into the room, she felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. Genevieve was sitting on the sofa, flirting with the men on either side of her. There were no refugees.

"The next day I sent her an email saying: 'Why did you lie to me? Why not just say: I want to go to a dinner party? I can take that. I can't take being lied to. This is a friendship. We're supposed to trust one another.' She emailed back immediately saying she didn't have to explain herself to me. And then a month later she said our friendship had run its course, and she wouldn't be seeing me any more. It's one of the worst things that's ever happened to me. And I haven't just lost her; I've lost all our history, all that shared experience. The truth is I think I wasn't an asset to her any more. But I can't understand why we can't talk about it. Why it's just over."

Friendship has been given a special status in our society. It is contrasted with all those relationships over which we have so little control; the families we can't change, the neighbours who irritate us, the colleagues we have to put up with. Friends are thought of as the joyous, freely chosen part of our lives, and it's assumed that those relationships are always pleasurable. If asked how you're spending the weekend and you say staying in or seeing your family or your colleagues, people may think you're a little sad. Say you're seeing friends and there's an assumption that you too are desirable, connected.

On one level, friendships are very simple. They are the bonds between people who enjoy one another's company. But probe deeper and it's evident that there is no consensus about what it means. Start talking to people about friendship and it becomes clear that while people value it and seek it, there is also much confusion, hesitancy and disappointment about friends in many people's lives. Friendship is one of those areas full of hidden assumptions and unspoken rules. We only discover that our friendship doesn't mean what we think it does when those assumptions clash.

There is no agreement about what friendship involves, or what to do if it goes sour. No one would dream of suggesting to a friend that they start seeing a friends' guidance counsellor to talk about the dynamics of their failing relationship. When things go wrong, we very rarely challenge our friends. That's because friendship is often a delicate affair and we don't want to tax it with too many demands. It's more common to absorb the hurt, and retreat. After all, there is no contract. The terms are unwritten, and nobody ever makes them explicit.

Ask people about friendship and what's startling is that they hold such a wide range of views, often accompanied by an absolute conviction that they are expressing an obvious truth. Some think it demands total loyalty; others that it carries no obligations at all. One man says long friendships have transformed his life, and been in some ways more important than his marriage; another thinks the great thing about friends is that you can always drop the old ones, because there are new ones around every corner. One woman says she would die for her friends; a younger woman says that all her friendships are ruthlessly practical, and designed to make her life easier in the here and now.

And what's intriguing about those attitudes is that they aren't obvious from the way people lead their lives. Everyone I talked to above has a large number of acquaintances and a social life. All but one assumes that most people think as they do.

Most of us feel a certain pride about our friends, pleased that they have chosen us, and that we have chosen them. We tend to believe that they reflect some important truths about who we are. Yet making friends isn't an exercise in free choice, any more than buying a house is. We buy houses according to what we can afford, what happens to be on the market when we're looking, and whether a capricious owner decides to accept our offer. Friendship is rather similar. We can only choose our friends from among the people we meet, in circumstances where making a friendly overture would be appropriate, and who show a reciprocal interest in knowing us.

Recent research concluded that at any time we have around 30 friends, six of whom we think of as close. Over a lifetime we will make almost 400 friends, but we will keep in touch with fewer than 10% of them. Almost 60% of us claim that our friendships are more important to us than career, money or family. Other studies show that men have, on average, one fewer close friends than women do, that middle-class men have more friends than working-class men, and that both men and women find their friendships with women more emotionally satisfying than those with men. Those findings are fascinating, but they mask huge variations. When I asked people how many close friends they had, the answers ranged from none to almost 100.

Joanna, a radio producer in her 30s, thinks anyone she likes, trusts and finds interesting, male or female, is a potential friend. She meets them frequently. Her oldest ones date from when she was six, and because she has never lost a friend, she says she has more than 80 of them.

Rosie, a writer, also makes new friends easily, but drops her old ones with equal ease. At the same time, she believes that one ought to be loyal to one's friends. She is perfectly consistent, because she believes that friendships are automatically dissolved as soon as one participant finds the other one boring. She is exasperated by some people's tendency to keep pursuing her when it's clear that the whole thing is over. On the other hand she's always thrilled by invitations from new people, because she never knows who she might meet.

It's very different for George, an old Etonian in his 50s, with a fat address book and enormous charm. As far as he is concerned, friendship is a club of seven men which was full by the time he was 23. They all share the same interests, they don't make emotional demands, and that's just the way he wants it. Tell George that other people think him a friend, and he'll think them fools.

George doesn't need new friends because he grew up in the same social, professional and geographical worlds that he now occupies as an adult, and his group offers as much security and intimacy as he requires. It's more complicated for the increasing numbers of us who are socially, professionally or geographically mobile. We all look for friends with whom we share some common ground, so that as our circumstances change, we're likely to meet new people we want to know. But it can be very difficult to tell, particularly if we live outside a small community, whether anyone is really interested in us or whether we matter to them at all.

Often, we don't know where we fit into friends' lives. We may like them enormously, but not know whether they'd like us to get any closer. Are we in the first dozen, or the remotest 90 in their circle? If they ask us to dinner once a year, is that an honour because they only entertain twice, or a sign of our unimportance, because they hold dinners every week?

This degree of uncertainty exists partly because many of us now lead lives in which we are the only connecting thread. It is perfectly possible for much of our lives to be opaque to anyone who knows us. They may only ever encounter one particular facet of our existence, because we can, if we choose, keep parents, past acquaintances, old partners, colleagues, friends, and neighbours in totally separate boxes. Many people value the anonymity and freedom that gives them. The flip side is that just as we are not known, so we cannot really know others.

In the absence of certainty, we live by assumptions, and we can be horribly surprised. Edward is an author who says he was unprepared for the explosion of interest in him when he wrote a successful book. For a couple of years he was a sought-after guest, moving in the company of people he had always wanted to meet. He thought he had joined a new circle, and it made him very happy. Then his book ceased to be the issue of the moment, and he was comprehensively dropped. Not only did the invitations cease; so did the Christmas cards. He was profoundly shocked. After all, his character and his intelligence hadn't changed. He had just ceased to be of interest.

Clare would have thought she was insulated from such shocks, because she has been part of a group of friends for more than 20 years, and their social lives have been intertwined. The group is made up of ambitious and competitive people, and her membership of it has been a source of greater pride and meaning to her than her career, even though the dynamics of it have always made her anxious: "You worry about who's becoming closer, and whether you're being left out. It's a constant source of tension. You hear that A and B have been asked to M's house in Cornwall and you feel sick - you wonder, well why didn't they ask me? And there's a continual struggle over who's the top dog - who's the most desirable person."

Last year, Clare fell out with the group's most successful couple. Gradually, to her anguish and incredulity, she realised that she and her family were being excluded from all the group's joint activities. Parties and dinners were happening without her being told. Then she discovered, from an unguarded remark, that the traditional annual holiday was going ahead without her. She climbed into bed and cried for three hours. What hurts most deeply is her realisation that, even within the group she had thought of as a refuge, status is ultimately all that counts. No one within it wants to alienate the pair who are, in practice, the leaders of the pack.

She says now that she realises that the bonds she thought the group had established were only superficial. They met only for enjoyment. They didn't look to one another for support. No one in the group ever made any demands on anyone else; no one made any sacrifices.

From the outside, Clare's blind faith in her friendships looks naive. If your friends are hugely competitive, and driven by the desire for power, wealth and proximity to it, then those values are likely to drive their private lives too.

But Clare is not alone. Many of us are childish in our expectations of friendship. Even though we may only present our most sparkling, desirable selves to our friends, and even though there may be nothing more to the relationship than five years of occasional lively evenings together, we still nurture the illusion that the friends who enjoy our wine or our wit are somehow very attached to the real us, the vulnerable or dull or anxious one they may never have seen. Which is why we are so astonished when friends melt away at a time of trouble.

Sasha is an academic in her 50s who had always assumed that her friends were utterly trustworthy, until she had a real crisis a few years go. "My husband was rushed to a hospital in another city for a transplant, and the hospital said to me; you're going to support your husband, but who's going to support you? Well, I used up my best friend because she just agreed instantly to look after my son, who was only 10, whenever I was away. And then I asked my other friends whether they'd be on standby to come with me. And they all said, 'Yes, but ...' Yes, I'll come, but only if it doesn't clash with Zoe's piano, or Max's football, or working late. In the end, not a single one ever came with me, and it was a real shock. I felt so lonely.

"I look upon friendships very differently now. I'm much more cynical. I don't think most people are really prepared to make an effort for anyone else. They're prepared to enjoy your company, and that's all. It was funny, but the people I almost admired in that situation were the ones who were just honest about the fact that they couldn't help. One couple wrote to me and said they were so sorry, but since they lived 50 miles away it was just too far, and they weren't going to be able to offer me any support. Well, I admired it until he got ill a couple of years later. And then she wrote me a really abusive letter, accusing me of not caring about them. I couldn't believe it."

Anna, a full-time mother of three, is equally disillusioned. She thought she had a rich network of friends until her youngest child was born disabled. She says now that she can't really call any of them friends, since they've all been so useless. "If you become a needy person, if you say, 'My child's never going to walk,' friends find it very difficult to give. I assumed that when something went wrong, people would offer practical support, ask you out, arrive with meals. But they're embarrassed. If they ring, it's just to make a practical arrangement, like, 'When is the eldest coming to tea?' They ask if you're fine, and that's where it stops."

She thinks that friendships may have been different in the past. "People are so busy they don't really have time for it now. It's my parents' friends, people in their 70s, who are friends of the old school. They visit, they ask questions, they bring things. I think now I only ever had loads of acquaintances. Possibly that's what everyone has now. If you can join in on a Friday down the pub - of course you're great mates."

It's noticeable that the people who are least disappointed with their friendships are either those who have never tested them, or those with the clearest understanding of what they are about. Sometimes that's because the friendships are rooted in the realities of their lives. Like Jill, a mother of three children and a part-time teacher. "My friends make my life possible," she says. "We care for one another's children, look after pets, do one another's shopping, counsel each other on our marriages. From all the mothers at the school gate, you pick the ones you really like, and then they become your support network. People are very practical about it. You'll hear them saying things like, 'I need to find a friend with a five-year-old son.' Or they'll say: 'I liked X very much, but I don't need another friend like that.' I know I can rely on my friends, because I do that every day."

Others who are contented are those who expect nothing more of friends than that they share pleasurable activities. Like Bill, who has friends he drinks with, workmates he gossips with, and men he plays football with, and wouldn't dream of demanding anything else. Or Jeanette, a care worker in her 20s, who wants only to have a good time with her mates when they go out. She'd never ask them to help her with her housebound mother.

What do these experiences, as disparate as they are connected, tell us about the notion that has gained currency in the past few years that friends are the new family? In one sense it's clearly true. Each generation is spending more and more time as independent adults before committing themselves to having dependents of their own. But we are so enamoured of the idea that we can be part of a freely chosen community that we haven't stopped to consider what it really involves. We celebrate the idea that people are no longer restricted to the bonds of kinship and obligation, and replace it with an idealised vision of people brought together by genuine affection and respect.

But just how realistic is that vision? What can we expect from our friends? Families exist because their members accept that a degree of selflessness is necessary to sustain them, and to ensure the survival of the next generation. There is no similar drive behind friendship .

Perhaps we need to think a little harder, and be rather more perceptive, about what sustains our relationships. We could start by being more honest with ourselves about what we like about our friends, what needs they fulfil, and what we would be prepared to do for them. We may feel truly generous to some of our friends, and resentful of others. Some we love, some flatter us, some we tolerate while they serve a purpose, and some we might despise. One woman, a charming, hospitable, gentle person, said to me: "It's very important to have some friends you dislike. It's so lovely afterwards, tearing them apart." Another man, generous in his behaviour, says nevertheless that he has few pleasures greater than watching the setbacks and disasters of his friends.

This would help us to be more realistic about which friends we might expect to see by our hospital beds, and which ones we think we would visit. It doesn't mean we can't value the ones who won't be there. Often we can be drawn to others for exactly the characteristics that would make them unlikely to be helpful in a crisis. One man says that he values his friends just because they are iconoclastic, reckless, exciting, arrogant and clever. And a woman who has endured two bereavements and a serious illness in the past few years says she is grateful that her friends remain distant from her grief: "When I'm with them, I always feel slightly as if I'm on stage - and I feel much better for it." We can recognise people's charm as entertainers and companions without expecting emotional support from them as well.

Does it matter that we can distinguish between deep friendships and transient or superficial ones? Talking to a wide range of people, it was clear that few of them are really happy with the friendships they have. Many of them feel privately wistful about the lack of depth, or in tensity, or number of their relationships. People with consuming jobs are sad that they haven't had the time to build stronger bonds, and wonder whether it's too late to develop them; mothers with time to spare want to find new friends but don't know how. Many people would like to have more friends, or deeper, warmer, more reliable relationships than the ones they have now, but don't know how to go about it.

This sense was particularly strong among the men I talked to. Men have been thought of as less in need of intimate friendship. Perhaps that's changing, and just as more men are becoming closely involved with their children, so there's a similar desire for the ease of close friendship. A man in his 60s, with a wife and children, told me that he is absolutely distraught because his one friend, a man he has known for 40 years, is seriously ill. "I cannot imagine my life without him," he said, "It's been the most important relationship of my life." Another man in his late 40s, whose children have almost left home, said that he feels now that the absence of close friendship is a huge gap in his life. Career and family have consumed his time for 20 years, and now he feels oddly lonely. A third man, a very successful manager, says he wishes he could establish male friendships, but he finds it hard to reveal anything important to other men. They block intimate conversation, rather then opening it up. A fourth man says simply that he wishes his friends would make more demands on him. He would like to be more involved in their lives.

There are powerful reasons why we should create these bonds, even if we only start when we are older. The phenomenon of later births means families take up a smaller percentage of our lives. We wait years to have children, and we could be 70 before we become grandparents for the first time. We have more time available, and fewer familial responsibilities, than the generations before us. We all want to feel needed and valued by others. It is possible for friends to fill that need, but only if we work at it.

It isn't easy, because friendship is a subtle dance, and no one wants to be explicitly pursued when it's unwelcome, or explicitly dropped when they are not wanted. Nor does it come with any guarantees. People are unpredictable. But we need to play the game of friendship. Evidence shows that people with close friends live longer and are happier than those without. And friendship defines what it means to be human. As the Greek philosopher Epicurus observed: "Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. Eating or drinking without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf."

A imagem do bem limitado e o mundo brasileiro
Roberto DaMatta

nov 2007

O antropólogo George Foster usou a idéia do bem limitado para compreender uma comunidade fundada em redes hierárquicas, onde qualquer movimento individualizador era visto como uma ameaça ao equilíbrio social e assim sujeito à inveja, ao mau olhado e à feitiçaria.

Nela, o mundo era lido pela experiência da escassez e da pobreza, de modo que se uma pessoa tinha sucesso ou se destacava por algum evento especial (paternidade, casamento, ganho numa loteria ou perda de um parente), ela era alvo de inveja. A inveja e o horror ao sucesso inibiam a individualização positiva, a mobilidade social e a competição.

A tese do bem limitado me fez ver que nas sociedades onde o individualismo existe, mas é tolhido e considerado como um sinônimo de egoísmo, o sistema tende a ser percebido como mais fechado e menor do que nos casos onde as hierarquias perpetradas por redes sociais imperativas são substituídas pelo individualismo e pela igualdade como uma ideologia dominante.

A noção de um beneficio limitado, de uma sociedade onde muitos são chamados e poucos escolhidos, fotografa um sistema onde destacar-se é um ato de desabusado egoísmo, pois nestes sistemas a 'cidadania' seria dada naquele conhecido adágio brasileiro que consagra o 'cada qual no seu lugar' que realmente sinaliza o perigo de ultrapassá-lo. Colocar o chapéu onde se pode apanhar é o outro lado da inveja de quem sai de uma pauta aristocrática aberta às novidades de fora e ranzinza com as razões locais. Quando se usa o 'está se achando' como um sinal negativo de uma apresentação na qual a auto-importância é destacada, revela-se como os controles para permanecer no seu lugar são levados a sério mesmo neste Brasil de Bovespa bombando e governado por um Lula cada vez mais neoliberal e disposto a canibalizar a tal 'herança maldita'; de resto, um trabalho político magistral simplesmente abandonado pelos tucanos.

A vantagem dos sistemas onde todos se ligam com todos é que a lealdade e a proteção anestesiam as enormes desigualdades sociais. Neles, todos se sentem mesmo culpados, e poucos têm orgulho coletivo, pois o mais bem-sucedido, rico, honesto ou bonito, sempre tem como contrapeso o mais pobre, o mais canalha e o mais fracassado. Daí a leitura perpetuamente negativa de si mesmo. Aqui, o famoso narcisismo às avessas de Nelson Rodrigues não é uma figura de linguagem, mas um fato da vida.

Em tais grupos, não há espaços individualizados ou abertos. Não existe fronteira. Tudo tem dono, patrão e lugar. O pessimismo é dominante porque os relacionamentos são marcadas por vergonha, pena pelas lealdades decorrentes da troca de obséquios que cada vez mais prendem uma pessoa a outra. Os desgarrados são lidos como inovadores, gênios ou miseráveis.

Como o maior pecado é ter opinião e ser autônomo, há uma enorme dificuldade de separar pessoas de regras, cargos ou preconceitos morais. Se as pessoas são donas de pessoas, elas são ainda mais donas de cargos e normas que deveriam valer para todos.

Daí a criminalização do sucesso. E a vigência da crença segundo a qual o êxito de um profissional, em qualquer área, é um sinal de que o bem-sucedido acaba recebendo muito mais do que merece, de modo que essa 'mais-valia' simbólica, teria que ser de punida, pois seria a parte - como expressou Marx com nitidez - que ele estaria roubando de alguma pessoa do sistema. Nestas sociedades, é complicado convencer um artista que o sucesso do colega significa uma abertura do sistema para a obra de todos os artistas, pois ele sempre vê o êxito do outro como uma agressão ou como um sinal de que jamais terá vez neste mundo. O sucesso universal que todos um dia vão obter, ainda que seja por 15 minutos, só poderia ser a idéia de um Andy Warhol. Um artista, é claro; mas antes de tudo, um americano crente de que basta esperar na fila que, um dia, você vai ter tudo o que sonhou.

O crime do êxito está ligado a esse desamarrar do sistema. Mas, pior que isso, é descobrir que ele sorri para as pessoas erradas, para quem não faz parte da 'turma' correta. O 'estar por dentro ou por fora' fala desse pertencer generalizado, ainda que humilde, a alguma rede de relações. Quem assume uma individualidade contundente, corre o risco de ficar por fora. Foi o caso de Lima Barreto e, quem sabe, de Pedro II.

Entende-se agora a enorme simpatia por qualquer tipo de coletivismo, desde que o bem a ser dividido não seja o nosso, mas o 'bem comum' que não pertence a ninguém num sistema constituído de pessoas concretas, jamais de cidadãos universais. Outro dado marcante é a existência de revolucionários oficiais, do mesmo modo que pululam canalhas institucionais. Os transformadores acusam o sistema sem piedade, mas com malícia; já os canalhas são os que jamais obedecem às leis, mostrando que, quando se 'chega lá', o céu, e não a cadeia, é o limite.

REAL GABINETE PORTUGUES DE LEITURA

Livro de arte conta a história do Real Gabinete Português de Leitura

Leticia Helena

A homenagem não poderia ser mais adequada: o Real Gabinete Português de Leitura — uma jóia em estilo neo-manuelino, encravada no Centro do Rio, que abriga 350 mil obras raras — virou... livro de arte. Com textos das professoras Beatriz Berrini e Regina Anacleto e fotos de Valentino Fialdini e do próprio Real Gabinete, o livro, da Dezembro Editorial, faz um passeio pela arquitetura, pela história e pelo acervo da instituição, fundada em 1837, possivelmente no rastro das boutiques à lire que se espalhavam em Paris após a Revolução Francesa.

— Há uma teoria que indica que o gabinete do Rio, bem como os de Salvador e Recife, copiavam a idéia francesa de emprestar livros mediante o pagamento de uma pequena quantia. Mas, o fato é que, desde o começo, os diretores do Real Gabinete tiveram a preocupação de adquirir obras e coleções raras — diz o presidente da instituição, Antonio Gomes da Costa.

E bota raridade nisso. O Real Gabinete tem uma edição original de "Os Lusíadas", de Luís de Camões, de 1572, que pertenceu à Companhia de Jesus. Pelas prateleiras, é possível ainda encontrar manuscritos de Camilo Castelo Branco e Machado de Assis, entre outras raridades.

Para contar essas histórias, a editora conseguiu o patrocínio da Portugal Telecom e contratou duas feras no assunto: Beatriz Berrini, da Universidade Católica de São Paulo, especialista em Eça de Queirós, que fez um texto descritivo do Real Gabinete; e Regina Anacleto, da Universidade de Coimbra, considerada a maior autoridade mundial no período neo-manuelino, que escreveu sobre a arquitetura e a construção do imóvel.

— O livro é uma viagem por um Rio que poucos cariocas conhecem — diz o publisher da Dezembro Editorial, Alberto Veloso.

Foto da capa de 'Os Lusíadas' é um dos destaques

Para fazer essa viagem por um Rio quase desconhecido, o livro, em suas 104 páginas, oferece imagens deslumbrantes do Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, que hoje funciona, muito apropriadamente, na Rua Luís de Camões: são móveis, luminárias, corredores, prateleiras, bustos, quadros, moedas, objetos e livros, muitos livros. A capa da tal edição rara de "Os Lusíadas", por exemplo, é um dos destaques. Sem falar nas fotografias da fachada e dos detalhes arquitetônicos do interior do prédio, exemplar típico de um estilo consagrado no Mosteiro dos Jerônimos, em Portugal.

— O livro foi feito, originalmente, como um brinde de fim de ano da Portugal Telecom. Mas a repercussão foi tão grande que resolvemos fazer uma edição especial para vender em livrarias — conta Alberto Veloso. — Mandamos um exemplar para o "Le Monde", que vai fazer uma reportagem sobre o Real Gabinete — acrescenta ele, numa referência ao jornal francês.

Primeira sede foi na Rua Primeiro de Março

Prova do prestígio de um dos prédios mais bonitos do Rio. O Real Gabinete foi criado com o intuito de "promover a instrução e melhorar o nível de conhecimento" dos portugueses que chegavam ao Brasil em meados do século XIX. Inicialmente, funcionou num imóvel da Rua Direita, hoje Primeiro de Março. Depois, peregrinou por outros endereços até que, em 1880, por ocasião da comemoração do terceiro centenário da morte de Camões, foi iniciada a construção da atual sede.

Dom Pedro II lançou a pedra fundamental da construção e sua filha, a princesa Isabel, sete anos depois, inaugurou o prédio, projetado pelo arquiteto português Rafael da Silva e Castro. O gabinete de leitura, porém, só acrescentou o título de real em 1906, graças ao rei português D. Carlos, em 1906.

— No Brasil, a arquitetura neo-manuelina representou uma ligação quase umbilical com a mãe-pátria distante. O Real Gabinete é um exemplar perfeito do estilo — diz a professora Regina Anacleto, uma das autoras do livro.

March 06, 2005 O Globo

Lost: translation

Richard Lea goes in search of the literary world disappearing from the map because of English publishers' resistance to books from other countries

Friday November 16, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The English-speaking world won't listen ... translators at the UN. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP

A glamorous award ceremony at London's South Bank Centre. A scintillating array of international talent. An intellectual superstar as keynote speaker and prizes worth £16,000. You can almost see the flashbulbs popping and the reporters' microphones crowding in - but you'll be hard pressed to find any mention of last week's translation prizes on the front pages.

For the last seven years, the Society of Authors has been bundling all of their translation awards into one annual splurge in an attempt to raise their profile.

"These prizes celebrate the best of the work of literary translators, and at the same time generate further interest in translated books and literary translation," explains the society's awards secretary, Paula Johnson. But it's an uphill struggle. "If you look at review pages, you don't see translated fiction taking up an enormous amount of space."

It's not just a question of column inches. In any library or bookshop, the vast majority of books on the shelves are by authors writing in English. In stark contrast to publishing throughout the rest of the globe, translated fiction accounts for only a tiny fraction of the books published in the English-speaking world. In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it's 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent. One measure of the lack of interest in translated literature from both government and the industry is that Britain is the only country in Europe that doesn't produce any statistics on translation.

It's a state of affairs described by translators as "shocking", "pathetic", "scandalous". And according to Esther Allen, the executive director of Columbia University's Centre for Literary Translation, the crisis may be even deeper in fiction. "The number of novels being published in translation is ridiculously small - in the hundreds each year," she says. "If you sort out the authors who are already globally validated - Nobel winners and so on - and the retranslations of the classics, then it's absurd."

Translators also suffer from a lack of status, a situation reflected in the fact that only two of the Society of Authors' seven winners work as translators full time. Translation is considered by many universities to be insufficiently significant or original to add lustre to an academic CV, while publishers routinely sweep evidence of translation off the covers of books. "It's weird," says Allen. "There's no stigma attached to being an actor rather than a playwright, or a pianist rather than a composer, but there's this horrible stigma attached to being a translator." Translations are often seen as second best because they are interpretations of an author's work, but as Allen says, "It's like saying 'I'm not going to see Hamlet because Shakespeare's not playing it'."

"As you can imagine," says one of last week's winners, Sarah Adams, "literary translation isn't a great way of making a living." Even though most translations are of authors with a high profile in their own cultures, according to Adams, many publishers are unwilling to support translated fiction. "Most publishers get a grant to do the translation, print a run of 5,000 copies and then wash their hands of it." Publishers seem to think that translated books are difficult to sell, she continues. "By and large, if you can make people think it's homegrown - great."

It's a point that Bloomsbury's Bill Swainson, an enthusiast for literature in translation who published WG Sebald at Harvill and now publishes the Spanish winner of the 2004 Independent foreign fiction prize, Javier Cercas, accepts to some extent. However, he claims that the difficulties of commissioning foreign literature are often overplayed.

"Every publisher who's publishing a wide range of literature from around the world has their own ways of dealing with it," he says. He relies on a wide network of "like-minded" publishers in Europe and America, readers who are sometimes also translators, scouts and journalists to find the books worth looking at. When acquiring a book, he typically prepares a synopsis, extracts of the original, translated extracts and something about the author and the book's reception in the original language - a package which compares favourably with the information provided by literary agents for many authors writing in English. He's "sceptical" of figures suggesting that only around two per cent of books in the UK are translations. "I think the way to look at it is: 'Are the good books coming out in the rest of the world finding their way into English, and in good translations?'," he suggests. "And I think the answer is, 'Yes, a great many are'."

Allen is less optimistic. "I don't think anyone doubts in the slightest that there are very good books being very well translated into English," she responds, "and I totally admire the editors who are bringing them out. But it's hard to deny that there are extreme barriers to publication of translations."

She herself spent three years in the early 1990s seeking a publisher for her own translation of Rosario Castellanos's The Book of Lamentations (Oficio de Tiniebras) about an indigenous revolution in Chiapas. First published in 1962 and never out of print since, this Mexican classic was championed by Carlos Fuentes and cited as extremely important in the New York Times Book Review. "None of that mattered," she continues. "No US publisher wanted to have anything to do with it. I subsequently discovered that people had been trying for 20 years to get it published in English. I finally found a publisher in 1992, after Subcomandante Marcos obligingly led a revolution in Chiapas - making the book 'relevant'. If he hadn't, I doubt it would ever have come out in English - it's now a Penguin Modern Classic."

According to Allen, there's even a danger that the dominance of English-language publishing is putting other languages and literary cultures at risk. Ninety-six per cent of the world's languages are spoken by just four per cent of the world's population, she says. "Eco-linguists like David Crystal have started talking about a world in which there's essentially one language," she says, "which seems absurd, but when you look at the statistics on minority languages the situation is grim."

The combination of financial and linguistic muscle that English wields puts writers in other languages under enormous pressure. Creative writing schools in the UK and America are now seeing writers already published in their own languages enrolling for writing courses in English, a solution to the problems of getting translated which leaves the language they leave behind in deeper trouble.

Allen cites the example of Vassilis Alexakis, the winner of this year's Académie Française grand prix du roman, who writes in French rather than his native Greek. While the question of which language to write in is an intensely personal decision made under enormous pressure, she finds it "completely amazing" that a writer "with that kind of linguistic heritage should choose to write in French [partly] because otherwise no one would know of his work".

It seems undeniable that publishers have, at best, an ambivalent attitude to works in translation. Indeed, according to Christopher MacLehose, publisher at Harvill Press for 21 years, mainstream publishers have a ready excuse for ignoring literature from around the world.

"The idiotic notion is that there's enough being written in English," he says, "so you don't have to bother." English is so generally spoken that it's possible to read very widely and not notice that you're only reading books written in one language. Another excuse is that author and translator must both be paid, which is, according to the director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, Amanda Hopkinson, the prime reason for publishers' "resistance" despite "opportunities for funding within the UK and the EU which they're not taking advantage of".

But for Peter Ayrton, the founder of Serpent's Tail, the larger houses have it backwards: a foreign author can be a strength. "There's a general perception in the trade that these books can be difficult to sell," he says, "and as long as that persists it's a self-fulfilling prophecy." The popularity of international travel demonstrates an appetite for something a little different, he suggests, so translation is not "something you hide. If you're publishing a book from Istanbul or Barcelona you want to make it clear that's what it is. There'd be no point in packaging it as if it's from Middlesbrough." He feels that the situation has reached some kind of turning point. "It's getting easier to the extent that it can't get any more difficult," he says.

There are "encouraging signs" agrees Allen. "It's been in crisis for so long, and now people have begun to do something about it." She points to a National Endowment for the Arts survey in 1999 as the turning point in the US, a low point which sparked new presses, new departments of translation and PEN's World Voices, an international literary festival based in New York she helped to found in 2005. "This notion of an indifference to translation has been completely belied by our festival," she says, "which attracted huge audiences and was hugely successful."

In the UK, Hopkinson also detects "positive signs", identifying a "groundswell of opinion from the grass roots ... which we should be taking notice of".

For Hopkinson, translation is a crucial tool for promoting mutual understanding. "We shouldn't be discussing other cultures through English culture," she says, "we should be discovering their own cultures, what they have to say for themselves."

Swainson, on the other hand, has "never really thought of [publishing literature in translation] as a duty." After all, writers such as Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak were the ones who first sparked his love of literature. "There's such wonderful writing out there that it's not a hardship posting. It's a pleasure and a privilege."

Like Swainson, MacLehose is keen to stress the quality of translated fiction, suggesting that you could do worse than only read literature in translation. "It has all been through not just one filter," he explains, "through not just the Spanish or Italian editor, but also one in the UK, and then the best editor of all: the translator. Think how good the books must be." He is shocked when asked to justify the importance of translation to our literary culture, lamenting the fact that "we live in a world where you can in all seriousness ask that question."

"What is important," he continues, "is that some of the greatest minds, the wittiest of minds don't happen to be born in Manchester or Hampstead. We're living in a world, not in a village for God's sake!" He believes that the time is ripe for the pendulum is "to swing the other way". Hopkinson, who has devoted 30 years of her professional life to promoting literature in translation, is a little less sanguine. "We live in hope," she says.

Fifty Writing Tools: Quick List

 

FRIDAY, JUNE 30, 2006

Fifty Writing Tools: Quick List

Use this quick list of Writing Tools as a handy reference. Copy it and keep it in your wallet or journal, or near your desk or keyboard. Share it and add to it.

I. Nuts and Bolts

1. Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.
Make meaning early, then let weaker elements branch to the right.

2. Order words for emphasis.
Place strong words at the beginning and at the end.

3. Activate your verbs.
Strong verbs create action, save words, and reveal the players.

4. Be passive-aggressive.
Use passive verbs to showcase the "victim" of action.

5. Watch those adverbs.
Use them to change the meaning of the verb.

6. Take it easy on the -ings.
Prefer the simple present or past.

7. Fear not the long sentence.
Take the reader on a journey of language and meaning.

8. Establish a pattern, then give it a twist.
Build parallel constructions, but cut across the grain.

9. Let punctuation control pace and space.
Learn the rules, but realize you have more options than you think.

10. Cut big, then small.
Prune the big limbs, then shake out the dead leaves.

II. Special Effects

11. Prefer the simple over the technical.
Use shorter words, sentences and paragraphs at points of complexity.

12. Give key words their space.
Do not repeat a distinctive word unless you intend a specific effect.

13. Play with words, even in serious stories.
Choose words the average writer avoids but the average reader understands.

14. Get the name of the dog.
Dig for the concrete and specific, details that appeal to the senses.

15. Pay attention to names.
Interesting names attract the writer – and the reader.

16. Seek original images.
Reject clichés and first-level creativity.

17. Riff on the creative language of others.
Make word lists, free-associate, be surprised by language.

18. Set the pace with sentence length.
Vary sentences to influence the reader's speed.

19. Vary the lengths of paragraphs.
Go short or long -- or make a "turn"-- to match your intent.

20. Choose the number of elements with a purpose in mind.
One, two, three, or four: Each sends a secret message to the reader.

21. Know when to back off and when to show off.
When the topic is most serious, understate; when least serious, exaggerate.

22. Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction.
Learn when to show, when to tell, and when to do both.

23. Tune your voice.
Read drafts aloud.

III. Blueprints

24. Work from a plan.
Index the big parts of your work.

25. Learn the difference between reports and stories.
Use one to render information, the other to render experience.

26. Use dialogue as a form of action.
Dialogue advances narrative; quotes delay it.

27. Reveal traits of character.
Show character-istics through scenes, details, and dialogue.

28. Put odd and interesting things next to each other.
Help the reader learn from contrast.

29. Foreshadow dramatic events or powerful conclusions.
Plant important clues early.

30. To generate suspense, use internal cliffhangers.
To propel readers, make them wait.

31. Build your work around a key question.
Good stories need an engine, a question the action answers for the reader.

32. Place gold coins along the path.
Reward the reader with high points, especially in the middle.

33. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Purposeful repetition links the parts.

34. Write from different cinematic angles.
Turn your notebook into a "camera."

35. Report and write for scenes.
Then align them in a meaningful sequence.

36. Mix narrative modes.
Combine story forms using the "broken line."

37. In short pieces of writing, don't waste a syllable.
Shape shorter works with wit and polish.

38. Prefer archetypes to stereotypes.
Use subtle symbols, not crashing cymbals.

39. Write toward an ending.
Help readers close the circle of meaning.

IV. Useful Habits

40. Draft a mission statement for your work.
To sharpen your learning, write about your writing.

41. Turn procrastination into rehearsal.
Plan and write it first in your head.

42. Do your homework well in advance.
Prepare for the expected -- and unexpected.

43. Read for both form and content.
Examine the machinery beneath the text.

44. Save string.
For big projects, save scraps others would toss.

45. Break long projects into parts.
Then assemble the pieces into something whole.

46. Take interest in all crafts that support your work.
To do your best, help others do their best.

47. Recruit your own support group.
Create a corps of helpers for feedback.

48. Limit self-criticism in early drafts.
Turn it loose during revision.

49. Learn from your critics.
Tolerate even unreasonable criticism.

50. Own the tools of your craft.
Build a writing workbench to store your tools.

To purchase a copy of "Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer,"

FONTE WWW.poynter.org

 

From The Times

April 2, 2008

Arts funding row over sex orientation demands

Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

Theatreland will have to give up its bedroom secrets in the quest for funding, under new Arts Council requirements. Organisations applying for grants are being asked to state how many board members are bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, lesbian or whose inclinations are "not known".

Audrey Roy, the director of grants, said that the council needed to understand who its audience was and to whom its funding was going. "We see diversity as broader than race, ethnicity, faith and disability," she said. Question 22 of the Grants for the Arts forms, relating to sexual orientation, was not compulsory, she added, although the form states that it must be answered.

The question caused anger and bemusement among leading figures of the arts world yesterday. The Oscar-nominated actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is openly gay, said: "It sounds extraordinary. It shouldn't be on a form. It's quite inappropriate."

Vanessa Redgrave, the actress and human rights campaigner, said: "Everyone should put down 'trisexual', whoever you are. Britain has become the world's leading population of trisexuals."

Michael Frayn, the author of the farce Noises Off, suggested boxes to "specify how many members are longsighted or shortsighted, how many wear black socks or brown socks".

Christopher Hampton, whose adaptation of God of Carnage is showing in the West End, said: "It's bureaucracy and political correctness gone mad."

The application form notes that the question is for government purposes only and will not enter into the grant decision, but that claim was contradicted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Its spokesman said: "We appreciate that, as a responsible public body they need to monitor their overall grant-making programmes. But it is absolutely not the case that sexual orientation monitoring is a government requirement."

Condemnation of the question spanned the arts. Julian Spalding, the former director of galleries and museums in Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow, said: "I can't see what relevance it's got. It's a horrible invasion into one's personal and private life." He added: "What they like to do in bed is not the Arts Council's business."

Maggi Hambling, the painter who describes herself as "queer", said: "It's insidious, insulting and quite outrageous for the Arts Council to consider anyone's sexual orientation of any kind to be their business. It appears to be somewhat Hitlerian in its suggestion that grants will be given if, among the applicants, there is a nice smattering of dykes and queers."

Nicolas Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in London, said: "This is ridiculous. It has no relevance. The Arts Council is prone to huge overregulation, as seems to be the case with the whole of society. But the Arts Council has caught it very badly. They should advance the arts instead of ticking every box they invent."

Referring to the recent protest over the council's decision to cut the grants to prominent companies, Simon Callow, the gay actor, said: "The Arts Council comedy continues. What is difficult is to divine to what conceivable use they could put this information. I love the presence of a category for the Not Known — a despicable heresy, surely, in 2008?"

Almost a year ago James Purnell, then the Culture Secretary, vowed to relieve arts organisations of the burden of meeting "crude targets" as a condition of funding. Yet the Arts Council's application form also asks about ethnic backgrounds.

The council said that the answers were confidential and exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. It said that it does not issue guidelines on how to persuade board members to reveal details of their sex lives.