Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 28

[p. 21]

Bart at fifty
Aidan Chambers

Dear Bart,

We first met when, as a university undergraduate, you came to stay for a couple of days in order to interview me for the thesis you were writing as part of your degree course. I remember thinking what an exceptional young man you were. Already a published writer, it was clear without you saying so that you were dedicated to your work with a quiet determination. You wanted to learn all you could about everything, especially about the art and practice of literary writing, yet at the same time it was quite clear to me that you had an intuitive grasp of the kind of author you knew in your secret self you already were. By the end of your visit I was sure that, barring the cruel accidents of biology and fate, you would create remarkable books.

And so it has proved. With your own bare hands you have composed stories which are precise in observation and moving in detail, of the lives of children and adolescents - stories that take their time in the telling and yet are elegantly pared down to the essentials of language and plot.

The Kirkus review of Hornet's Nest (Wespennest) comments on how the ‘vividly realised episodes focus the narrative lens in excruciating detail’, how you are a ‘master of atmosphere’ and have the ‘ability to crystallize’ emotional states. It seems to me this is true of all your fiction.

But that said, I can't escape the anguish of language. I can only read you in translation. I believe you and I agree that the heart of literature in whatever form - poetry, novels, plays, even diaries, letters, memoirs, whatever - is not so much what happens to whom and why and where and when it happens - the DNA of narrative - but the words in which the literature is written, and how the words, how the language, is composed. Because I cannot read Dutch or Flemish, when I read Brothers (Broere), for

[p. 22]

example, which happens to be my favourite of your books, I'm reading the English translation by Wanda Boeke. Am I reading you? Of course, I'm not. I'm reading you as interpreted by the translator.

This is not to say the translation is bad. Indeed, it reads well, and I sense (I can't actually know) that it does an excellent job of representing you, or rather the you that is the Flemish of Brothers. But at the same time I'm aware of a barrier between us. I keep feeling that if I could only brush the English aside, as if opening a curtain, you'd be there on the other side.

We can't do without translations. No one can read fluently every language, aware of all the references and nuances, not even of the small number of dominant languages. But we know that what is lost in translation is the author's ‘second self’, the essence of the person who inhabits the original.

This is all the more true of your fiction because it reminds me more of poetry than prose. Your stories are not plot driven, nor character driven, though both features are strong. Rather they are structured and composed as poetry is: by the choice and juxtaposing of words for their sound as well as the nuances of their meaning, the rhythm and the management of the lines and stanzas - in this case the arrangement of sentences and paragraphs. Poetry is a kind of music that makes intellectual sense. I'd argue that this is true of your fiction. I can see its presence even in the translations.

Some of our mutual Dutch and Flemish friends tell me that a major feature of your writing is its elegant lyrical beauty. When I read the English translations of your stories, I find elegance, but not what I think our friends mean by lyrical beauty. I guess the loss happens in translation. For the same reasons that everyone agrees it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to translate poetry.

But when we talk to each other, you speak English because I cannot speak your language. Or rather you speak your Bartian English. And then in your tone of voice and your choice of words and your phrasing I hear a trace of that lyrical beauty I believe our friends mean. And sense the poetry of your prose.

[p. 23]

What a disaster the Tower of Babel was! Why aren't we born able to speak all the languages invented by human beings so that we can be as rich in ourselves as all the cultures that languages encode?

Well, that's life, my mother would have said, you just have to get on with it and be grateful for small mercies. The mercy of translation is not a small one - it is immense. And the greatest mercy of all is the literature our best authors create, because it makes it possible for us to imagine being someone else, living in another mind and another body, and thinking other thoughts differently.

Congratulations on your fiftieth birthday, Bart, and on being one of those authors we cannot do without, who make living other lives possible and ourselves more aware of who and what we are.