Chairs Speech 2005
Address given by John Carey, Chair of the Judges, at the presentation of the first Man Booker International Prize to Ismail Kadaré, Edinburgh, 27 June 2005
For the last few months the judges of the first Man Booker International Prize have felt like three of Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians inadvertently transported to the land of Brobdingnag. Worse, we've felt like presumptuous Lilliputians, because the task allocated to us has been to size up the giants and arrange them in order of merit. The rules of the International Man Booker are, for the judges, alarmingly open. They state simply that the prize is for achievement in fiction, and that all living writers worldwide are eligible, provided their works are in available in English. They also state - this is the nice part - that the judges must meet in various cities around the world. At our first meeting in October 2004, in Rome, we drew up a list of 120 writers from 36 different countries who seemed to us to meet the prize's conditions. The rules required us to reduce that number to a shortlist of approximately 15. In the event, when we met in Washington in February, as guests of Georgetown University and of Alvaro Ribeiro, an old friend of the Man Booker Prize, we settled for a shortlist of 18, simply because we couldn't bear to eliminate any more of our favourite writers.
All such lists, we're well aware, are subjective and provisional. Nevertheless our shortlist cost us a very great deal of soul-searching, as well as many, many hours of reading and re-reading, and we felt a sense of achievement when - after a whole day of occasionally stormy discussion - we finally agreed on the 18 writers we would include. We were heartened by the enthusiastic response it got in newspaper and media coverage across the world.
Whatever misgivings we may have about our own judgments, we are in no doubt about the importance of this new prize. For us, its prime aim is to build bridges between different cultures, and we believe it has never been more urgently needful to do that than now. What literature proves is the inter-connectedness of cultures. The practice of fiction - telling each other stories - seems to be a biological human need, like food or air. Story-telling is universal. It is one of the marks of our common humanity. That's why a novel from Albania, say, can illuminate reality for someone from Kansas or Katmandu, strange as that might otherwise seem.
But not only do readers need stories, stories need readers. The function of literary prizes, as we see it, is to alert readers to writers they haven't met with before. We didn't set ourselves any quotas, geographical or otherwise, when we drew up our shortlist. But we were pleased when it turned out that more than half of the 18 authors wrote in languages other than English, and that several of them were scarcely known in Britain.
This brings me to the subject of translators. We should like, as judges, to pay tribute to translators, without whose labours the International Prize could not have happened. Translators, it seems to us, bring nations and races together far more effectively than statesmen or politicians, who often do the opposite. Translators are heroes, working against impossible odds. For in truth there is no such thing as an accurate translation - no such thing as a linguistic equivalent in one language for a word in another. Languages are closed systems, separate planets with their own atmospheres of thought and feeling. Even loan words from another language become something different when they are transplanted into their new climate. Brain scientists now tell us that the language we use modifies our neural pathways, so that an English speaker's brain organisation, for example, is different from that of someone who speaks, say, Italian or Japanese. So translators are trying to join up differently organised brains. Of course, translators must strive to hide these problems. They are benign deceivers. They must make us feel that what we are reading is not a translation at all, but the author's work. The judges are delighted that the rules of the Man Booker International Prize have now been modified to include a special award for the winning author's translator.
It is a sign of the disrespect in which translators have customarily been held, and a sign too of the parochialism of the British literary scene, that foreign literature in translation is so neglected. As Alberto Manguel pointed out in an article in the Spectator, if you speak Spanish or French or Italian or German, or any of a dozen other languages, and walk into your local bookstore, you will find translations of a fair sampling of most of the important books written around the world. You will find what is being imagined in China, what stories are being told in Korea, how the novel is being reinvented in Spain and the Scandinavian countries. But if you live in England you will find no such abundance. When we checked through our original list of 120 contestants, we found that we had to disqualify writer after writer, not on grounds of quality or stature, but because they were not generally available in English translation. Frequently they had been translated back in the 80s or 90s, but the publisher had allowed the translations to go out of print. So we were unable to consider, for example, Peter Handke or Michel Tournier or Christoph Ransmayr or Antonio Lobo Antunes or Rachid Boudjedra or Fernando Vallejo - and so on. No doubt publishers have difficulties of their own to struggle with. But to an outsider the British publishing industry can seem like a conspiracy intent on depriving English-speaking readers of the majority of the good books written in languages other than their own. Alberto Manguel is surely right to point out that the same laxity, fifty or sixty years ago, would have meant, for the English reader, no Kafka, no Camus, no Calvino, no Borges. The judges hope that the advent of the Man Booker International Prize will encourage British publishers to reverse this trend. No other single outcome could, in our view, matter more.
I ought to give you some inkling of how we reached our decisions. Between our shortlist meeting and our final meeting in London we were saddened to hear of the death of Saul Bellow. We had been re-reading his fiction and re-discovering its capacity to refresh and surprise, so we had a special reason to mourn his passing. It left us with 17 writers and the problem of judging between them. What rules should we follow? Since this was the first-ever prize of its kind, we were, in a manner of speaking, Robinson Crusoes, marooned on an island where no human foot had trodden before - though like Crusoe we had our helpful Man Friday in the shape of Ion Trewin, the administrator of the prize, for whose unflustered efficiency we are grateful. He attended all our meetings and it must have struck him, as it did us, that most of our discussions issued in imponderables. Not that that stopped us pondering them. The matter of translation itself raised difficulties. Since some writers had to be read in translation, which is a disadvantage, should they be awarded bonus points? On the other hand, that would mean penalising Margaret Atwood or Ian McEwan or John Updike for writing in their own language, which seems absurd. Then again, not all translated writers are disadvantaged to the same degree. A writer whose brilliance lies in his ideas - Milan Kundera, say, or Stanislaw Lem - arguably loses less in translation than a writer of poetic extravaganzas like Gunter Grass, or a writer like Kenzaburo Oe whose language, Japanese, has subtleties and complexities that no Western language can match. Should the odds be adjusted accordingly? Quite apart from these unanswerable questions there is the matter of originality and how much it matters. Achievement in fiction could obviously take the form of being original and inspiring imitators. Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, invented a new way of writing, magic realism, and it has been much imitated. How many points should that score? Should it score at all? After all, some of the greatest writers - Shakespeare, Milton - have notoriously had disastrous effects on their imitators. Then again, originality is culture-specific. Naguib Mahfouz's brand of realism might not seem original to a Western reader, but within his own culture it was entirely new. How much should that count for?
More important perhaps is a writer's influence on readers. Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook may be said to have changed the thinking of a generation. Many women readers testify that it was a landmark in their lives. That is clearly of great moment. But it raises the question of the purpose of fiction, on which the judges soon found they differed. Should fiction move, or should it instruct, or both? And which is more important? I quoted at one meeting Kundera's remark that Western music teaches Europeans to worship their feelings and is, in effect, "a pump for inflating the soul". The same could be said, I suggested, about much Western fiction. "But", one of the other judges protested, "inflating the soul is exactly what I want".
I must not give the impression that we disagreed about everything. There were some books that captivated us all. Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Declares, we all felt, came close to being a perfect novel - brief, tragic, inspiring. Do read it if you haven't yet. We agreed on some principles too.
We felt that an important truth had been stated when Azar Nafisi remarked - it was in a discussion of Muriel Spark - how writers must show that individuals, in the ordinariness of their lives, matter, and how this is, indirectly, a political achievement, because it is what totalitarianism denies. We agreed, too, when Alberto said that fiction, at its best, should take you into a region where you can't conclude anything - a point that Azar developed when she spoke of Philip Roth's "disturbing way of creating questions not solutions". You'll gather from these reminiscences that I was taking notes pretty busily at our meetings. And who would not? Listening to Azar and Alberto discuss literature is - to paraphrase Philip Larkin - like having a direct telephone line to God. Both of them are readers on a heroic scale. Azar could be said to have left her homeland for the sake of literature. Alberto's vast personal library, housed in a converted medieval priory in a village near Poitiers, was the scene of our penultimate meeting. Its holdings are so comprehensive that he was able, before we arrived, to arrange neat piles of all the shortlisted authors' works on his library table.
Now our work is over, and we have returned from the land of Brobdingnag. But we have brought one of the giants back with us - Ismail Kadaré. A distinction that we had not foreseen between the English-language writers on our shortlist, and the writers in languages other than English, is that the foreign-language authors tend to have firsthand experience of the 20th century's darker side, which the English-language authors have mostly been shielded from. Gunter Grass witnessed the defeat and devastation of his country. Kenzabuo Oe lived through the atom-bomb attacks on Japan, and the sudden extinction of its traditional culture. A.B. Yehoshua observed the birthpangs of modern Israel; Naguib Mahfouz, the turbulent history of 20th-century Egypt. Mahfouz has never completely recovered from an assassination attempt by Islamic militants in 1995. Milan Kundera saw his country betrayed by Britain, overrun by Germany, and brought beneath the heel of Soviet communism. These experiences do not make them greater writers. But they supply a subject matter that, if they are equal to it, inevitably lends their work an additional significance.
Ismail Kadaré belongs to this company. He saw his country occupied by the Italian Fascists, then overrun by Greek forces, then invaded by Nazi Germany, and reclaimed by Communist partisans. After the war, during the terror of the Hoxha regime, he dared to attack totalitarianism and the doctrines of Socialist realism. In 1975 he was banned from publication for three years, having offended the authorities with a satirical poem. In the 1980s, fearing for his life, he and his French publisher conspired to smuggle his unpublished works out of Albania, disguised as translations from the German. To read such novels as The General of the Dead Army, or Chronicle in Stone, or the satirical fantasy The Palace of Dreams, banned in Albania immediately on publication, is to see these events transfigured in fiction. More recent tragic events are viewed, and viewed not with an outsider's detachment but firsthand, in Kadaré's Elegy for Kosovo, and in his historical novel The Three Arched Bridge, which has been read as a chilling parable of the new barbarism that has swept the Balkans. Reading Kadaré reveals, too, a deep ambivalence about traditional Albanian culture and in particular the practice of the blood feud which, in his perspective, is central to it. In a novel such as Broken April the blood feud seems noble and heroic. It is inextricably linked with the epic tales preserved by Albanian folk-singers which, as Kadaré's novel The File on H speculates, may share a common origin with Homeric epic. The Communists saw the blood feud as a barbaric anachronism, and burned down the Castle of Orosh where the Book of Blood was preserved. That seems like cultural vandalism. Yet Kadaré is torn over the issue. In his novel The Wedding he seemingly applauds Hoxha's 1967 speech against so-called "reactionary survivals" like the blood feud. The heroine of that novel, a young girl who has escaped from traditional peasant life to work in a factory, is elated by what Communism has given her. For her the old life meant "a black kettle, a rope to haul firewood, filth and beatings". Now she has hot showers, clean underclothes and bobbed hair. It seems like heaven. By contrast the hero of a more recent novel, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, recoils both from the cruelty of old Albania and from the modern Western fashions that are obliterating it. I quoted Alberto earlier saying that fiction should take you into a region where you can't conclude anything, and you'll see that is a region where Kadaré feels at home.
Finally, Azar's requirement that writers must show how individuals, in the ordinariness of their lives, matter is another test worth applying to Kadaré. He has said he is not a political writer, which seems untrue, until you reflect that he persistently makes the political personal - just as Shakespeare did in Macbeth, a play Kadaré remembers copying out at the age of 11. Before I finish I'd like to read you a brief passage from my favourite Kadaré novel, Chronicle in Stone. It comes from the start of the story where the narrator, a little boy, is describing life in his parents' big stone house in an Albanian town surely not very unlike the town of Gjirokaster where Kadaré was born.
"Outside, the winter night had wrapped the city in water, fog and wind. Buried under my blankets, I listened to the muffled, monotonous sound of rain falling on the roof of the house. I pictured the countless drops rolling down the sloping roof, hurtling to earth to turn to mist that would rise again in the high, white sky. Little did they know that a clever trap, a tin gutter, awaited them on the eaves. Just as they were about to make the leap from roof to ground, they suddenly found themselves caught in the narrow pipe with thousands of companions, asking ‘Where are we going, where are they taking us?'
"Then, before they could recover from that mad race, they plummeted into a deep, dark underground prison, the great cistern of our house.
"Here ended the raindrops' life of joy and freedom. In the dark and hollow cistern they would recall with dreary sorrow the great spaces of sky they would never see again, the strange cities below them, and the lightning-ripped horizons.
"Sometimes, playing with a mirror, I would send them a slice of sky no bigger than the palm of my hand, which would flicker on the surface of the water, a fleeting memory of the endless sky."
What I said earlier about the inter-connectedness of cultures certainly applies there. The animating, childish imagination, for which even a raindrop cannot fall to the ground unnoticed, is universal. The passage might have come from the start of Dickens's Great Expectations. But it is not just about childish imagining. The fate of the raindrops, crowded into a dark prison, asking "Where are we going, where are they taking us?" is going to be the fate of millions of human beings as the novel proceeds. When it begins, the Second World War is about to start, and we learn later of the atrocities war brought to the little Albanian town. It is the forging of that unexpected and terrible link between childish playfulness and a horrifying political future that gives the passage its depth and brilliance - a depth and brilliance characteristic of the work of the master story-teller Ismail Kadaré.
