Chekhov’s Mistess

NYC Event: Pen World Voices, Festival of International Literature

I originally posted this back in March, but thought I would re-run it as a reminder. While the paid events are sold out, there are many free events open.

Pen America, the writer’s association, is hosting a series of talks on international literature. The events will take place between April 16 to the 23rd and they all look fascinating.

Here are a few of the events to give you a flavor of the festival:

Reading: Banned Voices

Margaret Atwood, Antoine Audouard, Anouar Benmalek, Rick Moody, and other Festival authors read from writers who were not able to attend the festival.

Conversation: Chico Buarque and Paul Auster

Don Quixote at 400: A Tribute

Africa and the World: The Writer’s Role

Elizabeth Alexander, Breyten Breytenbach, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Achmat Dangor, Nuruddin Farah, Zakes Mda, Pedro Rosa Mendes, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Uwe Timm

Late Night, Love and Hate: Writing in/from Hostile Surroundings, hosted by Words Without Borders

Kader Abdolah, Hanan al-Shaykh, Anouar Benmalek, Orly Castel-Bloom, Khaled Mattawa, and Pedro Rosa Mendes; introduced by E. L. Doctorow

Conversation: Nancy Huston and Siri Hustvet

The Post-National Writer

Lilian Faschinger, Francisco Goldman, Jose Manuel Prieto, Yuri Rytcheu, Salman Rushdie, Yoko Tawada, Eliot Weinberger, Adam Zagajewski

Literary writers work as individuals, expressing an individual and entirely unique perspective; much great literature is about the clash between the individual and the collective. Nevertheless, we seem perpetually unable to keep from reading writers as representatives of their nations. The writers assembled for this panel each test the limits of nationalist definitions of literature in his or her own way, and they will discuss the issues of identity and nationalism they confront in their work and their lives.

UniVerse: World Literary Voices

Fadhil al-Azzawi, Bei Dao, Martín Espada, John Godfrey, Joan Margarit Consarnau, Dunya Mikhail, Elena Poniatowska, Elif Shafak, Oksana Zabuzhko

Czeslaw Milosz and the Conscience of Literature

Bei Dao, Durs Grünbein, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, Eva Hoffman, Ryszard Kapuscini, Azar Nafisi, Leon Wieseltier, Adam Zagajewski

At the end of a week much engaged with the subject of the writer’s struggle to assert humane values in a “Ruined World,” the first PEN World Voices appropriately concludes with a tribute to the great Polish Nobel laureate who died last August at the age of 93. Friends, former colleagues, and fellow artists come together to celebrate a poet who spoke out many times against authoritarianism, yet was diffident in his claims for the authority of letters: “I know what was left for smaller men like me:/ A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud./ A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.” (From “A Confession,” translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass from The Collected Poems 1931–1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.)

… and more.

In fact, if you can’t make it to New York City, there are a couple of “virtual events” in conjunction with Words Without Borders.

The following is from Pen America’s website:

Welcome to the debut of PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature, a confluence of remarkable writers from more than 45 countries who will come together for seven days of discussions, tributes, readings, and conversations that will expand the literary horizons of American audiences.

As Arthur Miller said at a PEN gathering of world authors almost 40 years ago, “None of us comes here as the representative of a country.” PEN World Voices hopes to open a global conversation in which the shared human concerns that are central to literature take precedence over issues of ideology or nationality.

PEN World Voices grows out of more than 80 years of work by PEN American Center to promote international cultural exchange and literary translation. PEN members have long been dismayed by the striking dearth of translated writing in this country. Translations account for less than three percent of all literary books published annually in the United States. It is difficult not to connect this phenomenon, in which we stand apart from almost every other country, with increasing American cultural and political isolation. A recent anonymous gift has enabled PEN to create a program of grants to promising translation projects and to focus greater efforts on raising American awareness of the extraordinary breadth of literary talent available to us from beyond our national and linguistic borders. PEN World Voices represents a major phase in this campaign.

This year’s festival will be the first in what is planned as a series of annual events that will take on new dimensions as each year’s new group of writers is assembled. No single festival can be entirely representative of the vast spectrum of world literature, but we do hope, from year to year, to be as fully inclusive as all the arbitrary external factors that affect an event of this magnitude will allow us to be.

Also from the site:

Dear Friend,

On behalf of the 2,900 writers, editors, and translators who are PEN American Center, I take great pleasure in welcoming you to the inaugural PEN World Voices Festival. Over the week of April 16 to 22, you will have a unique opportunity to cross literary borders into territory generally unvisited by American readers. This exclusion arises not from conflicts between nations or the censorship that in other contexts PEN seeks to redress, but from the combination of historical circumstances and market forces that keeps most of the world’s literatures from being published in English.

We believe this situation impoverishes our own literature, and we are also convinced that its consequences extend far beyond the literary sphere. The United States needs, as never before, to hear voices from beyond its own borders. Writers are the indispensable intermediaries in this international dialogue, as well as the custodians of the unique artistic patrimony represented by every language. We cannot expect this conversation to be conducted entirely and always in English.

This book includes descriptions of the Festival’s numerous programs throughout the City—from large scale to intimate, from The New York Public Library, Town Hall, museums, and universities to downtown clubs and bars—every one of which will give you an exhilarating view of the world’s literary riches. It also includes short biographies of our extraordinary guest writers from abroad and an impressive array of American and U.S.-resident authors who are joining them in these programs. You’ll also find information about the remarkably generous and energetic coalition of corporations, cultural agencies and consulates, foundations, and individuals who have joined together to help launch what we hope will be an annual event.

Our Festival Co-Directors invoke a supreme literary talent and PEN leader sadly gone on the eve of this gathering: Arthur Miller. Another great writer whose presence will be sorely missed not long ago called translation “the circulatory system of the world’s literatures.” Susan Sontag saw that the genius of any one language could thrive only in a continuous interchange with the great works of other tongues and times. She, too, would surely have joined us in this celebration of the diversity of world literature and relished the chance, as she did on so many occasions, to meet both unknown and famous talents from every part of the globe. As a celebrant of the manic cultural energy that is New York, she also would have appreciated the appropriateness of our assembling in a city whose residents represent 180 of the world’s 192 nationalities and speak more than 200 of its languages.

To these two great tutelary spirits of PEN, we dedicate this first World Voices Festival.

Sincerely,

Salman Rushdie

President, PEN American Center

comments

Where can I get an online list of the fiction writers featured at the festival?

    – Niela Miller (05/24  at  05:16 PM)

Page 1 of 1 pages of comments

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 15, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Reading Railroad: Events

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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