Tolstoi

La mort de Léon Tolstoï le 20 novembre 1910 dans une petite gare du sud de la Russie prit une dimension mythologique au moment même où elle se produisit. Pathé, le pionnier des actualités filmées, réalisa l’une de ses premières images animées autour de cet événement. Lénine avait déclaré deux ans auparavant que Tolstoï était «un miroir de la révolution». Les révolutionnaires communistes, comme le gouvernement russe, guettèrent l’effet qu’aurait la mort du grand anarchiste sur le peuple russe, qui sentit qu’il n’avait pas seulement perdu un grand artiste mais aussi la voix la plus éloquente qui ait jamais tonné en sa faveur contre de monstrueuses injustices.
À des questions aussi apparemment simples que la manière dont il nous faut vivre, il donnait des réponses qui ébranlaient l’âme même des tsars, des armées, de la police secrète et des inquisiteurs de l’Église. À la fin de sa vie, des millions de personnes du monde entier étaient suspendues à ses lèvres. Une semaine après sa mort, dans la cafétéria d’une gare moscovite, une femme fit une remarque désobligeante à son propos. Les ouvriers du café l’encerclèrent et le serveur refusa de lui donner son thé.

Si actuel

L’anniversaire de la mort d’un écrivain est généralement l’occasion de réévaluer et de relire son œuvre, mais il est rare d’y voir une incitation à se poser les questions les plus fouillées sur le monde tel qu’il est aujourd’hui et sur nous-mêmes. Et voilà que la mort de Tolstoï nous met au défi de nous poser les questions personnelles et politiques les plus profondes. Difficile de trouver un grand sujet de société auquel le monde actuel soit confronté qui n’ait pas été anticipé et discuté par Tolstoï d’une façon ou d’une autre, qu’il s’agisse de la crise environnementale, du débat religieux (créationnisme contre athéisme) ou du mouvement contre la guerre.
Qui fut donc cet homme qui en vint à représenter l’âme de son pays? Tolstoï naquit en 1828, dans une famille de diplomates et de courtisans parmi les plus éminents de Russie. Il s’engagea dans l’armée et participa à la guerre de Crimée. En 1862, il se maria, fonda une famille qui allait être conséquente (treize enfants), et initia un programme d’éducation des paysans en créant un vaste réseau d’écoles et en lançant de nouvelles méthodes agricoles. Après les voyages de sa jeunesse, il passa la plus grande partie de sa vie dans le domaine familial d’Iasnaïa Poliana, à environ 200 km au sud de Moscou.
Dans ses Récits de Sébastopol et dans les récits caucasiens intitulésLes Cosaques se révèle très tôt son génie pour les descriptions réalistes et détaillées non seulement de la vie militaire mais également de la nature. La volonté de découvrir la meilleure façon de vivre est au cœur de tous les écrits de Tolstoï. Elle s’insinue dans les songeries du prince André et de Pierre dans La Guerre et la Paix, ainsi que dans les questionnements intimes de Lévine dans Anna Karénine.
Après avoir écrit ce roman, Tolstoï subit une crise de la quarantaine et devint un fervent orthodoxe. Puis, changeant de nouveau d’avis, il décida que les enseignements de l’Église n’avaient pas de sens. L’important étant ce que Jésus lui-même avait enseigné. Et l’enseignement de Jésus, selon Tolstoï—qui réécrivit littéralement les évangiles—c’était le pacifisme, l’anarchie, pas de gouvernement, pas d’armée, pas d’aristocratie, pas de quête des richesses. Vint s’y ajouter un végétarisme de plus en plus obsessionnel.

Une vie de prophète

La nouvelle biographie de Rosamund Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Lifem’a fait découvrir Tolstoï de façon plus vivante qu’aucune autre avant elle. Universitaire et traductrice, Bartlett est imprégnée de la langue et de l’histoire de la Russie. À chaque étape de la vie de Tolstoï, une présence gigantesque s’impose à nous: quand il planta une pommeraie dans sa propriété d’Iasnaïa Poliana, par exemple, ce fut la deuxième plus grande d’Europe. Né dans l’opulence, il en vint à mépriser sa fortune. Lorsqu’il entreprit de soulager les victimes de la famine, il devint une véritable association humanitaire à lui tout seul et galvanisa tout un pays pour sauver les affamés.
Pour le simple lecteur, il n’est pas aisé d’appréhender l’échelle et l’étendue des intérêts et des réalisations de Tolstoï. Avoir tout réuni en moins de 500 pages est une prouesse en soi. Pourtant, Bartlett ne semble jamais précipitée et se donne tout le temps de nous dépeindre les décors, pour faire monter les effluves de la terre et de l’herbe russes jusqu’à nos narines.
Dans ses pages, elle expose la différence entre la lointaine et raffinée Saint-Pétersbourg et Moscou, où Tolstoï acheta à contrecœur une maison de ville; tout comme elle transmet la soif de l’écrivain non seulement pour l’idylle pastorale d’Iasnaïa Poliana, mais aussi pour les étendues désertes de Samara, pour lesquelles il éprouva un attachement qui grandit sans cesse. Il s’y rendit au départ pour boire du koumis (lait de jument fermenté) pour sa santé, mais son caractère obsessionnel, qui s’intéressait à tout, ne tarda pas à le rendre amoureux du peuple qui y vivait, les Bachkirs, des musulmans turcophones. Il acheta près de 3.000 hectares de terre bachkire et obligea sa famille à passer bien plus de temps qu’elle ne l’aurait voulu dans des tentes, à boire du koumis dans des cuves de cuir tandis qu’accompagné de son percepteur de grec, il lisait Hérodote.
Il ne s’agit pas d’une hagiographie: Bartlett admet qu’il était un mari impossible et que son manque total d’humour le rendait pour le moins rébarbatif. Elle parvient à un parfait équilibre entre admiration pour l’art de Tolstoï et respect pour sa vie de prophète. La tradition veut qu’après Anna Karénine, le romancier perdit son dynamisme, fit une dépression nerveuse et se réinventa en prophète cinglé tonnant des appels de clairon moraux. L’écrivain Vladimir Tchertkov, grand prêtre du tolstoïsme à qui presque tous ses biographes font une fort mauvaise presse, l’encourageait à suivre ses marottes.
Mais Bartlett m’a fait réviser mon opinion sur Tchertkov–en plus d’introduire le délicieux ragot qu’il était presque certainement le demi-frère illégitime du tsar. C’était un fanatique, peut-être, mais il faisait aussi preuve d’un courage impressionnant. Un des excellents points de la biographie de Bartlett est qu’elle voit la nécessité de poursuivre l’histoire jusqu’à l’époque moderne. Elle suit la destinée des tolstoïens russes jusqu’à l’ère stalinienne.
Tchertkov, dont la foi dans l’anarchisme chrétien pacifiste qui fut une des marques du tolstoïsme ne vacilla jamais, poursuivit courageusement sa carrière de principal éditeur des œuvres complètes de Tolstoï, sollicitant vainement des fonds auprès de Staline pour finir la tâche, sans jamais compromettre ses convictions au milieu des horreurs qui ensanglantèrent cette époque. Quand cinq tolstoïens furent arrêtés en 1929 et condamnés aux travaux forcés, Tchertkov intercéda en leur faveur, tout comme il tenta héroïquement de maintenir la Société moscovite végétarienne Léon Tolstoï en vie, sans succès.
À la première lecture de La Guerre et la Paix, il apparaît clairement que Tolstoï écrit avec l’ampleur et l’envergure d’Homère. Nulle part ailleurs que dans L’Iliade ne trouvons-nous une si prodigieuse association de détachement artistique de la joie et de la souffrance d’une part, et, de l’autre, une telle sympathie et un engagement si passionné. Cette vérité paradoxale existe dans ces deux chefs d’œuvre européens, et le livre de Bartlett nous explique comment ces deux qualités divines, l’indifférence et l’empathie, étaient constamment présentes dans l’âme de Tolstoï.
Anthony Briggs, professeur de littérature russe, publia une excellente traduction anglaise de La Guerre et la Paix en 2005 pour les éditions Penguin. C’est une version vivante et très lisible, dans laquelle il a traduit les nombreux passages en français dans le même anglais familier qu’il utilise pour traduire le russe. Certains lecteurs n’ont pas aimé ce procédé, tout comme ils n’ont pas apprécié qu’il mette dans la bouche du général Koutouzov les véritables jurons que proférait ce vieux général (en réalité vraiment mal embouché) plutôt que des astérisques. Et Briggs a sans aucun doute perdu quelque chose en dissimulant aux lecteurs anglais découvrant l’œuvre pour la première fois le fait que l’aristocratie russe ne parlait pas russe.

J'ai changé d'avis

La très brève biographie de Tolstoï écrite par Briggs et publiée au début de l’année (chez Hesperus Press) adopte la vision qui, je pense, est devenue une orthodoxie, selon laquelle le Tolstoï tardif et prophétique était moins important que le romancier qui écrivit les premières œuvres. Briggs cite ce que j’ai moi-même écrit dans ma propre biographie du grand homme: que «plus nous possédons d’éléments sur Tolstoï, moins il a de sens». J’ai écrit ces mots il y a plus de vingt ans, et les années qui se sont écoulées depuis ont changé mon point de vue. Tolstoï a un sens très clair à mes yeux aujourd’hui. L’anniversaire de sa mort nous donne l’occasion de nous rendre compte qu’il n’y a pas deux Tolstoï, le romancier et l’anarchiste sectaire. Il n’y en a qu’un. La Guerre et la Paix n’est pas seulement une grande saga nationale et familiale, c’est un roman sur la régénération personnelle et nationale. Tolstoï fut l’un des grand révélateurs de vérité de l’histoire, le premier des grands dissidents et leur saint patron. Dans un monde dominé par des dirigeants véreux, des guerres injustes, la méchanceté et la corruption, et, surtout par les mensonges, Tolstoï devint ce que Dante appelait un «parti à lui tout seul» et se débattit contre tous les bords.
Certes, l’anarchisme chrétien de Tolstoï était inconsistant à de nombreux égards, mais quand on sait que les ennemis dans sa ligne de mire étaient l’épouvantablement égoïste famille royale et une église orthodoxe soutenant l’un des régimes politiques les plus iniques de l’histoire de l’Europe (et bénissant les armes sur le champ de bataille au nom du Christ), il est difficile de ne pas acclamer le vieux prophète barbu et de ne pas passer outre les méchancetés qu’il a pu infliger à sa femme.
Y a-t-il une vanité, presque une frivolité dans la position anarcho-pacifiste? Lorsqu’on sait les excès ultérieurs de Staline et d’Hitler, la mort de Tolstoï en 1910 peut apparaître comme le triste trépas d’un rêve utopiste. Mais l’histoire de l’Afrique du Sud—pour ne choisir qu’un seul exemple—démontre la vigueur et la force de l’idée tolstoïenne. C’est en Afrique du Sud que Gandhi s’enflamma pour les écrits de Tolstoï et qu’il commença à mettre en pratique la politique de résistance passive qui finirait par avoir raison de l’Empire britannique.
Les récents conflits en Irak ou en Afghanistan ne laissent pas penser que la guerre ait jamais pu être une solution aux problèmes humains. Le rejet de Tolstoï non seulement de la guerre et de la violence, mais du concept même de gouvernement, détient encore un grand potentiel pour changer notre monde. En tout cas, c’est ce que j’en suis venu à espérer.
En marchant sur ses pas, depuis cette gare provinciale isolée d’Astapovo jusqu’au domaine ancestral d’Iasnaïa Poliana, une fois de plus j’ai été stupéfait par le génie qui a produit les Récits de Sébastopol, Les Cosaques, La Guerre et la Paix, La mort d’Ivan Ilitch,Anna Karénine et Résurrection – pour ne nommer que quelques-uns de ses chefs-d’œuvre. Moi aussi, tout comme le peuple en 1910, je me suis senti submergé par la sensation que si seulement nous pouvions vivre comme il nous pressait de le faire dans ses derniers écrits prophétiques, nous trouverions la rationalité au milieu du chaos.
A.N. WilsonEcrivain et chroniqueur anglais

Traduit par Bérengère Viennot 
Cet article a été publié à l’origine dans le Financial Times.

Your Guide To The Modern Creative Artistic Types, by Matt Groening

To the Lighthouse, with Books

Lighthouses were often time located in remote areas and as such had no access to city services such as libraries, opera houses, entertainment, etc. that most people enjoyed who lived in a town or city. As light keeping was a lonely profession in most cases supplies were brought to them by lighthouse tender ships. One of the items the tender supplied was a library box on each visit as pictured to the left. Library boxes were filled with books and switched from station to station to supply different reading materials to the families.

In 1876 portable libraries were first introduced in the Light-House Establishment and furnished to all light vessels and inaccessible offshore light stations with a selection of reading materials. These libraries were contained in a portable wooden case, each with a printed listing of the contents posted inside the door. Proper arrangements were made for the exchange of these libraries at intervals, and for revision of the contents as books became obsolete in accordance with suggestions obtained from public library authorities.

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The Translator as Shadow Novelist, by Maureen Freely

Outside the Anglophone world, it is not unusual for novelists and poets to work at some point in their lives as translators. Though most will say that they did so mainly to subsidise their own writing, it is often clear, when you look at that writing, that it has been enriched by the imaginary conversations they've had with the poets and novelists whose words they have translated.

If there is such a thing as world literature, it is because today's most interesting writers are also well‑travelled readers and a lot of what they read is in translation. An up-and-coming Colombian novelist might be inspired not just by Borges, Conrad and Faulkner, but by contemporary novelists from Asia, Africa and Europe; his literary response to their work will go on to influence what his contemporaries on the other side of the world write next. These complex patterns of cross-fertilisation would end overnight if it were not for literary translators and the publishers who support them. So you'd think people would thank us, wouldn't you?

Well, sometimes they do, but in the next breath they'll tell you what a terrible career move you've made. To a degree, they're right, because the pay is pretty appalling. Although some translators get a sliver of the royalties, most work for a flat fee. We who translate from non-western languages will often discover, if a book becomes a world phenomenon, that most other translations will be from our translation and not the original. But by and large, we receive no extra fee and it is only when those working from our translations send us frantic emails that we discover how far our words have travelled.

World literature is the big new thing in literature departments, so you'd think our good name would be assured here at least. Sadly, universities and their regulators tend to be suspicious about translations, possibly because they don't know what yardstick to measure them by. For the last Research Assessment Exercise, I was asked to explain in precise terms how my translations had contributed to world knowledge. For the next one, I shall also have to demonstrate their economic impact.

You could say that all we're doing, really, is replicating someone else's thoughts. And aren't we soon to be replaced by machines? I don't think so. Here is the sublime first sentence of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City as rendered by Google Translate: "A place in the streets of Istanbul, similar to ours in a different house, with everything I like, twin, or even exactly the same, starting from childhood lived another Orhan a corner of my mind I believed for many years." And here is the first sentence of his seminal novel, The Black Book, replicating the Turkish word and suffix order as closely as possible: "Bed-of top-from tip-to as-far-as stretched-out blue checked quilt-of rugged terrain-its, shadowy valleys-its and blue soft hills-its-with covered sweet and warm darkness-in Rüya face-down stretched-out sleeping-was."

When I translate, I become something akin to a shadow novelist. When I am shadowing Pamuk, what I want to do most is capture the music of his language as I hear it. Accuracy is important, but a lot of what I need to be accurate about lies deep below the surface. After consultation with the author, the first sentence of The Black Book became: "Rüya was lying face down on the bed, lost to the sweet, warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt." The first sentence of Istanbulwas: "From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double." I can see, even as I type these sentences, how ephemeral they are. Other translators will find their own ways to capture what they see and hear in the text.

I was initially drawn to this art because, after many years of journalism, I longed for a quiet life. I imagined weeks and months of solitary reflection in my favourite chair. And of course there were periods like this. But if you are translating a controversial author, the world is never far away.

My first rude awakening came while I was translating the first chapters of Pamuk's 2002 novel, Snow. A Turkish newspaper got in touch; having heard what I was up to, it wanted to know what I thought of the headscarf issue, about which Snow has a great deal to say. My innocuous answer (that a woman should be able to choose what she wears on her head) was transformed into a provocative headline ("I curse the fathers!"), following which I was bombarded with emails from an extremist Islamist newspaper. I could not help but notice that their questions were almost identical to those asked by an Islamist extremist in the chapter I'd just translated. It ends with said extremist pumping a few bullets into his interlocutor's head.

Over the years that followed, and especially during 2005 and 2006, when Orhan Pamuk and many other writer friends of mine were subjected to hate campaigns for speaking openly about the Armenian genocide, later to be prosecuted for insulting Turkishness, there were times when I felt as if I had wandered into the book I was translating.

There were also the lesser fictions in which I featured as a süperajan (no translation needed). Many Turks who feel ambivalent about Pamuk like to attribute his international success and most especially his Nobel prize to his translators, who have, they claim, "improved his words for western consumption". The ultranationalists who drove the hate campaign went so far as to say he had sold his country to Europe for the sake of his career.

If I were just a translator, I might not have thought it necessary to write in Orhan's defence in the media here and elsewhere. I might not have become involved in the campaigns for free expression that went on to change my life and will doubtless carry on doing so. But this seems to be the rule for translators and not the exception.

Most of us do a great deal off the page. More often than not, we are the ones who bring new authors to the attention of publishers. Some run programmes that bring together young writers from countries that were once at war. Some run programmes in schools, working with children who speak a language other than English at home. Many are also novelists, poets, journalists and teachers. Some – most commonly those who translate out of minority languages – are agents.

I know all this because there aren't very many of us. We all work for the dozen or so publishers which remain committed to fiction in translation even as the walls of fortress English grow and grow. If the art of literary translation continues to thrive in this country, it will be thanks to them, and also to the British Centre for Literary Translation, which is training the new generation, and the Translators Association, which speaks up for us when we're exploited, and the Independent foreign fiction prize, whose organisers work hard to take our best efforts to a larger audience.

Why do any of us bother, when the odds are so against us? Because it's fun to discover new books and new writers. It's gratifying to see at least some of them do well. For me, it makes a welcome change from my old life, when I mainly looked after number one, wasting acres of times fretting about bylines and book sales and column inches. Somehow, this feels more romantic and far more worthwhile.

The Guardian

Writers, including Saramago's translator, choose their favourite translations

Tim Parks, novelist and translator

On a small, damp farm in northern Holland, after 30 years of tending cows and sheep against his will, Helmer Van Wonderen decides to take control of his life. Quietly melodramatic, intimate, tender and ruthless, Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin is one of the strangest and finest novels I have come across in many years.

Margaret Jull Costa, translator of Javier Marías and José Saramago

People tend to be rather snooty about Constance Garnett these days and yet when I was old enough to have tickets to the adult lending library, it was in her words that I read all the great Russians. I still remember reading with astonishment her translation of Dostoevsky'sThe Idiot.

Jo Nesbø, novelist

Hunger by Knut Hamsun. I read it when I was 17 and it suited my illusion of the romantic, suffering artist perfectly. The main character is wandering the streets of Oslo, madly in love, with no money, struggling to maintain some dignity. It's fascinating, heartbreaking and wildly funny. And it made me want to write.  

Rose Tremain, novelist

Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac. In his telling of this bitter domestic drama, Balzac curbed his natural exuberance of style and aimed at restraint. Because French demands more words to express things than English, the challenge for any translator is to restrain this restraint still further, so that the language remains purged of all excess. Marion Crawford's translation feels very adroit in this respect, her search for economy of means apparent from the first paragraph, where a phrase describing the solid houses of Saumur – "la vie et le mouvement y sont si tranquilles" - is elegantly rendered as "life makes so little stir in them".

Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese‑English Dictionary for Lovers, right

Some of the most poetic and imaginative sentences I've ever read are from Italo Calvino's novels, especially Invisible Cities, as well as Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. I think those works have reshaped and enriched our vision of history and reality.

Anthea Bell, translator of WG Sebald

The King James Bible, 400 years old, is a masterpiece of English literature – and a translation. I have been captivated since childhood by its dramatic narrative and resonant language. As a non-believer, I can't call it a spiritual companion, but it has been a favourite literary companion all my life.

The Guardian

William Blake, 28th November 1757

Todos ao Fórum Fantástico 2010

12 de Novembro, Sexta-Feira:
14:30 – Abertura.
15:00 – Painel “Clássicos da Ficção Científica Portuguesa”, com Luís Filipe Silva, António de Macedo, João Barreiros e João Seixas.
16:00 – Painel “Nova Fantasia Portuguesa para Novos Leitores”, com Fábio Ventura, Bruno Martins Soares e Bruno Matos.
17:00 – Painel “Arte Fantástica”, moderado por Ana Maria Baptista.
18:00 – Intervalo.
18:30 – Lançamento “A Simbólica do Espaço em O Senhor dos Anéis”, com a autora Maria do Rosário Monteiro.
19:00 – Painel “Fantasia Portuguesa no Feminino”, com Madalena Santos, Inês Botelho e Susana Almeida.
13 de Novembro, Sábado:
10:30 – A Mecânica da Escrita Fantástica (I) – “Worldbuilding”, por Ricardo Pinto.
11:15 – A Mecânica da Escrita Fantástica (II) – “Invented Technology and Atmosphere”, por Stephen Hunt.
12:00 – A Mecânica da Escrita Fantástica (III) – “Characters and Characterization”, por Peter V. Brett.
14:30 – “Fórum Fantástico: 5 anos, e agora?”, à conversa com Rogério Ribeiro e Safaa Dib.
15:00 – Painel “Lisboa Fantástica”, moderado por Rui Tavares, com João Barreiros, David Soares e Octávio dos Santos.
16:00 – Cinema Fantástico Português – Curtas.
17:00 – Intervalo.
17:30 – Lançamento “A Luz Miserável”, com o autor David Soares.
18:00 – À Conversa com Ricardo Pinto, por João Seixas.
18:30 – À Conversa com Stephen Hunt, por Luís Corte-Real.
19:00 – À Conversa com Peter V. Brett, por Pedro Reisinho.
19:30 – Sessão conjunta de autógrafos.
14 de Novembro, Domingo:
10:00 – Kafeeklatsch – Blogues Nacionais do Fantástico (em local a combinar).
11:30 – A Mecânica da Escrita Fantástica (IV) – “Quando a Realidade se mistura com o Fantástico”, por David Soares.
12:15 – A Mecânica da Escrita Fantástica (V) – “Noções de Guionismo Cinematográfico para Contistas e Romancistas”, por Luís Pereira (Monomito Argumentistas).
15:00 – Sugestões de Leitura, com Ana Cristina Alves e João Barreiros.
15:30 – Painel “Banda-Desenhada”, com Filipe Melo, Nuno Duarte, Osvaldo Medina, Rui Ramos, Fil, André Oliveira e Diogo Carvalho.
17:00 – Painel “Fantástico como forma literária”, moderado por João Morales, com Afonso Cruz e João Pedro Duarte.
18:00 – Intervalo.
18:30 – Cinema Fantástico Português – Curtas.
20:00 – Encerramento.
Durante o evento estará disponível uma Feira do Livro Fantástico, gerida pela livraria Dr. Kartoon.

The Many Faces of Gary Oldman, by Derek Eads

«I am an African. I am white»

Nadine Gordimer is 87 this year and as resistant to autobiography as ever. The Nobel prize winner, small, chic, straight-backed as a dancer, says "my private life is my private life" – a practical as well as a moral concern: what she calls the "jealous hoarding of private experience for transmutation into fiction".

 

It makes reading her non-fiction, collected earlier this year in a single volume and plain to the point of snappish, an exercise in sifting for lapses: the "bun-faced" nuns who taught her at school; her early "talent for showing off". The only thing that could deflect her from work, she once wrote, was "being in love", whereupon everything else flew out the window. She smiles indulgently. "Yes, I used to make bargains. I used to say I don't care if that book's published or not, it's the man that I want."

It is, for Gordimer, a year of collections; on the heels of the non-fiction, an equally large volume of collected stories, both covering a period from the early 1950s, when she started writing, to the present. It is a huge amount of work – "you're surprised that you've worked so hard" – and not even the main event. "That's nothing," she says, of the essays. "That was just on the side. Fiction is what really matters." Her writings about politics served a purpose, surely?

"They served a purpose only in that things happened – because you are not only a writer, you're a human being, with responsibilities. And so I would never write non-fiction if these things didn't occur. Even that very first essay in 1951, I wrote in the New Yorker because I badly needed the money."

Gordimer was in Britain from her home in South Africa this summer to deliver a lecture on the need for better library funding and the shortcomings of electronic books, which, in her arid style, she dispatches as pointlessly complicating technology. ("Kindle I assume has to be energised . . . the battery runs out. You can read a book anywhere, any time.") Her main preoccupation, however, is the state of her country, how far it has come and still has to go.

In that early New Yorker essay, Gordimer wrote of growing up in the "smug suet of white provincialism" in a small mining town outside Johannesburg. Her father, an immigrant from Latvia, was a watch mender; her mother was of English parentage – long after leaving east London, her maternal grandparents still subscribed to the News of the World by mailship. For liberal, white South Africans of her generation, there were, says Gordimer, two births; the literal one, and the moment of realisation that something in the culture around them was wrong. When she was very young she wanted to be either an actress or a dancer; she would mimic people ruthlessly and wonder, when they laughed, why it failed to occur to them that they would later, themselves, be targets. "Or perhaps it did, I do them an injustice and they didn't mind."

Writing as an aspiration came later. She traces it in part to an incident in the family home. Gordimer was 12 when their maid, Netty, who had been with them all her life, was subject to a random police search. "They pulled her mattress off, pulled all her clothes out, everything was in the yard, all her ordinary little possessions. It was a liquor raid – black South Africans could not buy liquor. My mother, father and I stood there and watched all this." The police found nothing and left. But it was her parents' failure to protest that shocked her.

"Now, I was old enough then to realise, from my reading, that you have to have a permit! But the police just came through the gate and did this. And neither my mother nor my father said to them, what are you doing here? One of the first stories that I wrote came out of that."

It was reading and writing that saved her, says Gordimer – "Kafka rather than Marx". She was given the best gift parents can give a young writer, she says: she was left alone. Writing from then on became "the scene of my greatest activity and my only discipline". Her favourite female character from fiction was Dorothea, "that priggish lioness from Middlemarch; her favourite motto from Camus: 'courage in one's life and talent in one's work.'" In 1963 she wrote, "the 'problems' of my country did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way life."

It put her at odds with her family, from whom she strained to get away as soon as she could, first to university in Johannesburg and then, in 1949, into an early marriage, with Gerald Gavron, a dentist. Looking back she sees things that, in her haste to leave, were lost. "Somehow the whole emphasis was on my mother. She was the dominant character. It's only now that I regret that I didn't ask my father about his background in Latvia – where he was born etc. He was from the usual very poor background and grew up under Tsarist tyrants when Jews couldn't go even to high school. But somehow, his past never became part of our conversation."

The marriage lasted a few years, and she found herself in her mid-20s, divorced and bringing up a daughter alone. It didn't feel precarious at the time, she says, but "I can't believe it, looking back! That I had this small child, no car, no medical insurance. I had a little sum from my divorced husband's father, who was struggling too, so I could feed her. And it didn't worry me for a minute. All my friends were in the same boat." She laughs. "And somehow we all had rather a good time together."

While working on her first novel, The Lying Days, Gordimer had started to write short stories, and in 1951 had one accepted by the New Yorker. Slowly, she began to write longer and more complicated narratives, although "I never thought of it as getting better, of saying to myself, I am getting stronger. I just moved toward it as if I were feeling my way down a passageway. It came absolutely naturally to me, the same way that you don't feel that you are growing, as a child."

Of all the misconceptions about her work, the one that riles Gordimer the most is that, while writing under apartheid, she felt obliged to use her fiction for liberal agitprop. She gets very annoyed at public readings when unsuspecting audience members ask if she hesitated to give black characters in her novels anything but virtuous qualities – snaps at them as if correcting an obstinately clung to stupidity.

"Look," she says now, "the process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer."

But in a repressive regime, isn't there a greater pressure on the writer, a sense of the stakes being higher?

"No. Then I would write non-fiction. I would divide my work and what there is that is worthwhile at all, in my view, of life, is the fiction. When I am doing something with a purpose, with a direct public purpose, then it's in the non-fiction."

Her early novels were often described by critics as "sensitive", something that continues to annoy her. "Sensitive to what? Sensitive to people's feelings?" Gordimer smiles. "No; I was not sensitive to people's feelings."

Work, for Gordimer, almost always came first. She had another child with her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer and refugee from Nazi Germany who ran Sotheby's in South Africa and to whom she would be married for over 40 years. Gordimer identifies the best moment of her life not as being awarded the Nobel prize in 1990, but as being at a party when, looking across the room, a woman said to her, "who's that divine man?" and she was able to reply, "my husband". He died in 2001. I notice that in print she always refers to Cassirer rather formally, by both names. "Yes. Just to show, indeed, that neither of us was an appendage of the other."

His priorities were the same as hers. "I'm afraid the children went to boarding school. My husband would never say, why should they go? He always put my work first."

In the 1970s, Gordimer's work brought her increasingly into conflict with the South African government, which banned several of her novels, including Burger's Daughter, probably her best, and then nervously unbanned it after an international outcry. It is a novel which looks unsentimentally at those activist families to whom everything was sacrificed for the cause; "their love life, their children, their parents; everything had to come second. It's the biggest sacrifice that anybody could make; but it was made by many."

She says, "it is the ultimate in humanity. That's what fascinated me with writing Burger's Daughter. You are born to such a family of the faith and then you are brought up within that faith, just as you'd be brought up in any religion."

Gordimer is an atheist, although once wrote of considering herself to have a "religious temperament". She dismisses this now as a moment of weakness – "if I said it at all. I probably did say it. I cannot remember." The point is, "how can anyone believe in these comforting fairytales, that there's somebody up there, whether it's Muhammad or Jehovah? Beautiful fairytales. Or punishing fairytales. This is an unpopular view."

She believes in the progress of the country she lives in, which has not, she says, been given sufficient leeway, particularly by liberals abroad, who can be smug without their liberalism having ever really been tested. Indicating Britain, she once wrote that if you live "in a country where people of a colour different from your own are neither in the majority nor the ruling class, you may avoid altogether certain complications that might otherwise arise in the formation of your sense of human values."

She says, now, of South Africa: "We are still in the morning after. I cannot emphasis strongly enough, we have had 16 years [since democratic elections]. That's all. Sixteen years. It's not even a generation. And here you, in Britain and America, have had hundreds of years of working towards democracy, and it's still not perfect; you've still got poor people, you've still got xenophobia. But we're expected to have done it in 16 years." One of the most successful elements of the post-apartheid era, she says, is "the impetus that's been given to the really practical side of feminism. Black women were subordinate not only to the apartheid law, but to the traditional law that your father, your brothers, your uncles could order you about and tell you what to do. So they were doubly oppressed. Now younger black women are extremely active, to the surprise and amazement and dismay of men their own age. But they're really becoming very strong."

She was a fan of Thabo Mbeki, although, she says drily, "he had the misfortune to be an intellectual" and had "the enormous fault" of being in denial about the Aids crisis. When Gordimer met Robert Mugabe, not long after he came to power, she thought "he really seemed to be a good man. It's the old thing of absolute power corrupts. He seems to have gone a little mad. And I also blame the wives. Very often the wives of these people become the world's biggest shoppers; including his. His first wife was a good influence, but this one comes to one of the biggest hotels in Johannesburg, brings her entourage, she shops like mad. She's also been to Dubai to shop. While all these people are starving."

What does she think will happen when Mandela dies? "I can only compare it to the 27 years he was in prison; stone walls do not a prison make. Mandela was with us when he was in prison. And in a strange way, Mandela will be with us when he's dead and gone. I don't know how long that will last. But he will become more of an icon, just as Mahatma Gandhi did."

She still writes in the morning for four hours, at a desk adorned with a postcard of Proust as a boy, a carving from the Central African Republic and a picture of the late anti-apartheid campaigner, Trevor Huddleston – "a lovely old photograph of him around a brazier in Sophiatown". On the subject of her own aging, says Gordimer, "well, first of all you think it's never going to happen. And I happen to have been married to someone who was 16 years older than I was, so the process of aging – my sorrow in that is attached to him. And my own? You are born, you grow, and then there's a stage in your life when you begin to die."

It is, typically, a bracing statement, not without feeling. The fiction might be what matters, says Gordimer, but it is the deeds of her life by which she wants to be judged. "That through the way you lived your life as a human being, rather than what you did as a writer, you could earn your way to being an African. I am an African. I am white. I in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right. Nothing else."

The Guardian

A decorrer: Mensageiros das Estrelas

Os meus momentos preferidos (para assistir) a azul

Colóquio Mensageiros das Estrelas / Messengers from the Stars Conference

Ficção Científica e Fantasia / On Science Fiction and Fantasy

2-5 Novembro 2010 / 2^nd-5^th November 2010

CEAUL/FLUL 

 
2 de Novembro / November 2^nd
13.30 – 14.00 – Abertura / Opening Session Prof. António Feijó; Prof. Isabel Fernandes; Prof. Francisco Contente Domingues; Prof. Isabel Barbudo; Prof. Angélica Varandas e Prof. Adelaide Serras – Sala / Room 2.13


14.00 – 15.00 – Plenária / Plenary Session: Henrique Leitão (FCUL/CIHC) “Galileu, o Mensageiro das Estrelas”. Moderador / Chair: Isabel Fernandes – Sala / Room 2.13


15.00 – 15.30 – “O uso da realidade: perspectivas sobre a ciência na ficção” – Luís Filipe Silva. Moderador / Chair: Isabel Barbudo – Sala / Room 2.13


15.30 – 16.30 – Painel 1 / Panel Session 1: “Fantasia e BD/Fantasy and Graphic Novels” – Moderador / Chair: Angélica Varandas – Sala / Room 2.13  
1. Luís Silveiro (FLUL): “Cultural References in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta”.
2. Ana Rita Martins (FLUL): “Enter Sand(Wo)Man: Re-thinking the Female Power in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Series”.
3. António Jorge Gonçalves (FCSH): “Imagens de um Mundo Flutuante”.


16.30 – 16.45 – Coffee Break


16.45 – 17.15 – “À conversa com David Soares” – Moderador / Chair: João Barrelas – Sala / Room 2.13 
17.15 – 18.15 – Visita à Exposição “Caminho das Estrelas: Exposição sobre Ficção Científica e Fantasia” apresentada por Pedro Estácio (Director da Biblioteca da FLUL) / Visit to the Exhibition “Stars Track: An Exhibition on Science Fiction and Fantasy” hosted by Pedro Estácio (Library Director at FLUL). 
   
3 de Novembro / November 3^rd  
10.00 – 11.15 – Painel 2 / Panel Session 2: “Ficção Científica e Cinema / Science Fiction and Cinema” – Moderador / Chair: Teresa Malafaia – Sala / Room 2.13 
1. Luísa Azuaga (FLUL/CEAUL): “Beowulf: Monstros, Medo e Fantasia”.
2. Ricardo Barata (FLUL): “Os Estranhos Somos Nós: Revisitando Solaris nos Filmes de Andrei Tarkovsky e Steven Soderbergh”.
3. Angélica Varandas (FLUL/CEAUL): “We are not who we are: Alien and Science Fiction”.


11.15 – 11.30 – Coffee Break


11.30 – 12.30 – Mesa-Redonda / Round Table: “Vinte Coisas que Aprendemos da Literatura Fantástica”. David Soares, Inês Botelho, Octávio dos Santos, António de Macedo. Moderador / Chair: Margarida Vale de Gato – Sala / Room 2.13


12.30 – 13.00 – “Ficção Científica e Fantasia: Uma experiência Académica”. Salomé Machado (FLUL/CEAUL). Moderador / Chair: Ana Rita Martins – Sala / Room 2.13


13.00 – 14.30 – Almoço / Lunch


14.30 – 16.00 – Painel 3 / Panel Session 3: “Ficção Científica e Narrativa/Science Fiction and Narrative” – Moderador / Chair: Carlos Gouveia – Room / Sala 2.13
1. Adelaide Serras (FLUL/CEAUL): “A Voyage to Naples and Journey up Mount Vesuvius: A Descent to Paradise”.
2. Maria João Terenas (FLUL): “Science Fiction/Detective Fiction – Differences and Common Features between the Two”.
3. Nuno Marques (FLUL): “William Burroughs e a Ficção Científica”.
4. João Seixas (Escritor): “Verdade e Imaginação na Ficção Científica”.


16.00 – 16.30 – Sessão de cinema com comentário/ Commented film session: “I’ll See you in my Dreams”. Filipe Melo(Realizador/Escritor). Moderador / Chair: José Duarte – Sala / Room 5.2


16.30 – 16.45 – Coffee Break


16.45 – 18.00 – Painel 4 / Panel Session 4: “Fantasia e Movimento / Fantasy and Movement” – Moderador / Chair: Teresa Cid - Sala / Room 5.2 

1. Elsa Childs (UL): “Tim Burton no País das Maravilhas”.

2. Iolanda Ramos (FCSH/CETAPS): “Mulheres Perfeitas de Stepford – De Fantasia Masculina a Utopia Feminista”.
3. Mário Avelar (Univ. Aberta): “Watchmen, Dialogues with (Moving) Images”.
 

4 de Novembro / November 4^th
9.30 – 11.15 – Painel 5 / Panel Session 5: “O Outro na Ficção Científica / The Other in Science Fiction”. Moderador / Chair: John Elliott – Sala / Room 2.13.  
1. Maria do Rosário Monteiro (FCSH): “Mundos Possíveis / Mundos Fantásticos”.

2. Mário Jorge Torres (FLUL/CEC): “Próspero no Espaço: The Tempest e The Forbidden Planet”.

3. Luísa Falcão (FLUL/CEAUL): “Searching for Otherness”.
4. Ana Mafalda Sernadas: “The Messenger Ray Bradbury”.


11.15 – 11.30 – Coffee Break


11.30 – 12.30 – Mesa-Redonda / Round Table: “O debate da imagem do fantástico e ficção científica na literatura e cinema”. Pedro Marques, Nuno Artur Silva, Filipe Melo, António Jorge Gonçalves. Moderador / Chair: Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa – Sala / Room 2.13.


12.30 – 13.00 – “Ficção Científica e Ovnilogia: Pontos de Contacto?”. Nuno Montez da Silveira (Sociedade Portuguesa de Ovnilogia). Moderador / Chair: Marijke Boucherie – Sala / Room 2.13.


13.00 – 14.30 – Almoço / Lunch
 
14.30 – 15.45 – Painel 6 / Panel Session 6 – “Ficção e Arte / Fiction and Art”. Moderador / Chair: Lili Cavalheiro – Sala / Room 2.13.
1. Cátia Marques (FLUL): “Let There be Steam! Um Retrato do SteamPunk na Actualidade”.
2. João Abraços (FLUL): “Noções de Espaço em 2001: Odisseia no Espaço”.
3. José Duarte (FLUL/CEAUL): “Marcianos no Ar: de New Jersey a Cascais”.


15.45 – 16.45 – Mesa-Redonda / Round Table: “A Ficção Científica está a morrer?”. Luís Filipe Silva, João Seixas, João Barreiros, Telmo Marçal e Nuno Neves. Moderador / Chair: Luís Filipe Silva – Sala / Room 2.13


16.45 – 17.15 – Coffee Break com visita à feira do livro (FLUL). Coffee Break with a visit to the book fair (FLUL).


17.15 – 18.45 – Plenária / Plenary Session: Maite Carranza e lançamento de O Deserto de Gelo, segundo livro da trilogia A Guerra das Bruxas, apresentado por Salomé Machado, Angélica Varandas e Responsável da Editorial Presença. – Sala / Room 2.13
 

5 de Novembro / November 5^th  
10.00 – 11.00 – Plenária/ Plenary Session: Farah Mendlesohn. “Genre as a State of Mind”. Moderador / Chair: Luísa Azuaga e Safaa Dib – Sala / Room 2.13


11.00 – 11.15 – Coffee Break


11.15 – 13.00 – Painel 7 / Panel Session 7: “Fantasia e Narrativa / Fantasy and Narrative”. Moderador / Chair: Ana Daniela Coelho – Sala / Room 2.13.  
1. António de Macedo (Escritor/Cineasta): “O Imaginário Fantástico Português – Tradição e Transição”.
2. Iolanda Zôrro (FLUL/CEAUL): “Representações do Mal em Never Ending Story de Michael Ende e em Harry Potter de J.K. Rowling”.
3. Marijke Boucherie (FLUL/CEAUL): “Trippsy Pillivinx, Blue Elephants and Other ‘Airy Nothings’”
4. Luísa Feneja (ISLA): “Ray Bradbury’s Short Stories: Fantasy as Criticism”.


13.00 – 14.30 – Almoço / Lunch

14.30 – 15.30 – Plenária / Plenary Session: Geoff Ryman, apresentado por Pedro Reisinho. “Science Fiction and Identity”. Moderador / Chair: Luis Filipe Silva. – Sala / Room 2.13

15.30 – 16.45 – Painel 8 / Panel Session 8: “Utopia e Distopia: Futuros (Im)Possíveis? / Utopia and Dystopia: (Im)Possible Futures?”. Moderador / Chair: Adelaide Serras – Sala / Rom 2.13. 
1. Paulo Furtado (ISLA): “Paradigms of Change and the Apocalyptic Vision of Philip K. Dick”.
2. Teresa Botelho (FCSH/CEAUL): “American Dystopias and Universal Utopias? Imagining Futures in the Fiction of Octavia Butler”.
3. Gerd Hammer (FLUL/CEC): “Cory Doctorow: From Science Fiction to Social Romanticism”.


16.45 – 17.00 – Coffee Break

17.00 – 18.00 – Mesa-Redonda / Round Table: “Debate entre Editores – A Edição Portuguesa de Literatura Fantástica”. Pedro Reisinho, Luís Corte Real, Joana Neves e Responsável da Editorial Presença. Moderador / Chair: Safaa Dib – Sala / Room 2.13.

18.00 – 18.30 – Concerto de Madalena Palmeirim (piano), Ana Luísa Valdeira da Silva (violino) e Clara Gomes (violino) no bar da Biblioteca da FLUL /Concert given by Madalena Palmeirim (piano), Ana Luísa Valdeira da Silva (violin) and Clara Gomes (violin) at FLUL’s Library Coffee Lounge.


18:30 – Encerramento com porto de honra / Port Wine Toast.
 

Existem outras actividades que se encontram no nosso site, como, por exemplo, workshops e um ciclo de cinema na FNAC na semana anterior ao colóquio.
Para consultar essas actividades vá à página EVENTOS ESPECIAIS.