Seagull Books

Crafting books like works of art. World literature in translation. Philosophy. Culture. Theatre. Cinema. Art. Performance. Photography. Chronicling the Human Condition.

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‘The Red Sofa’ by Michèle Lesbre—An Excerpt

In Michelle Lesbre’s The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbour she has just left behind, Clémence Barrot.

On a dirt road, a man was rolling a cigarette. He was standing by his green sidecar, a gigantic Beetle, a companion in solitude. The man and his machine, together. I could recognize his gestures from afar—Gyl used to roll his own cigarettes, too. He would keep the pinch of tobacco in the hollow of his hand, crumble it with his fingertips, spread it over the fold of the paper and close the whole thing after a little lick of the tongue on the edge of the gummed paper. The smell of honey and hay floated in the air, even though I was behind the window of the compartment and the man about ten metres away. I could almost hear the rustling of the tobacco, I could imagine the deft fingers, the absent-minded, mechanical gesture. A suspended moment in time, an intimate ritual. Not so much a glance for the train that was gathering speed again and I thought that’s what travel was like, too, waking up somewhere in Siberia, but where? To see a man rolling a cigarette, to lose him from view very quickly and to remember him always. Even today, I sometimes think of the brief apparition of that stranger I caught in a private moment and of others who have mysteriously settled into my memory, like silent witnesses of my wanderings.

I was at a point in my life when the insistent presence of the world, the lack of power of all discourses and worn-out theories tormented my days and my nights. It seemed I had nothing to hold on to, time wanted to swallow me up, was swallowing me up. At any rate, it felt like all our hopes were slowly, inexorably reaching an end. I was not the only one to perceive that insidious erosion of the certainties which had filled our youth with enthusiasm, but what really frightened me was the feeling, shared by some of my friends, of being unable to do anything but sink into this realization. In a novel about the death of theories, I had read: ‘We wonder just how seriously we had taken them.’ I resented the author for his cruel hypothesis. That world we dreamt of, that lovely utopia—to be oneself, completely oneself, but also to transform all of society—could that be mere childishness? Was that merely consoling us for being the orphaned heirs of the crimes committed in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, crimes that some of our elders had pretended to be unaware of ?

As for Gyl, he didn’t want to abandon everything that had lent meaning to his life up to then, the idea of building an ideal world. On a whim, he had gone to live at the edge of Lake Baikal, to paint, perform plays with the people there and put on plays by Vampilov who had spent his whole career in Irkutsk. His choice worried me, but I could understand how both symbolic and desperate it was. No point trying to hold him back, no one and nothing had ever held him back. For the first six months he had written often, telling me he had time to go fishing for omul in the lake and make kites for the children.

And then, silence.

I had left without telling anyone except for the magazines I was working for and the old lady in my building, seated on her sofa at the end of the long hallway. I was thinking of her as I walked through the corridor in the train to get to the samovar. Same worn rug, same faded curtains. I was sure she didn’t miss me. In a way, with her failing memory, she was the absent one, alone except for a few women helpers who came every day to attend to her in that apartment, immobile behind its closed doors. Twice a week I would go down one floor to read to her a bit, or to tell her about the life of women who were dear to me because of their insolence, their courage, their sometimes mischievous minds and, often, because of their tragic fates. The reading would put her to sleep but those extraordinary lives held her attention so much that sometimes she took herself for Marion du Faouët, Olympe de Gouges, Milena Jesenská or Anita Conti, that woman who photographed the high seas and pursued her passion to a ripe old age. They all revived her—at some point she would get up, eager for the animation of the real world out there, for adventure. We would walk downstairs arm in arm to go have a drink at the cafe across the street and then hobble back up the stairs to the red sofa, where I would leave her in a state of gentle euphoria.

Michèle Lesbre’s The Red Sofa, translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball, is published by Seagull Books and available to buy from here. 

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‘Mokusei! A Love Story’ by Cees Nooteboom—An Excerpt

He ordered a second espresso. One thing at any rate he was sure of, as he looked at the face of the girl who put his order in front of him, that it was not the Japanese in her that had attracted him in the first place. It was the Japanese within the Japanese, he could not express it any more clearly than that. To him, there would always remain something unreal in all those closed faces, but hers had by nature a double layer, not the plastic model of the Westernized doll’s head with the clipped eyelids that you saw everywhere around, but a mask underneath the mask, as if an older layer of the population, of the people was present inside her. Mongols, Ainus, Kirghiz, a magic, unknown tribe of nomads, a clan from the steppe that had settled within her, so that through her you were connected with long- lost times, with something that no longer existed and that would never come back. 

That was how she had looked at him, again this time, when he said he wanted to go out for a short walk. He always had to take care not to lose himself in her gaze for too long, otherwise he would lie sleepless beside her for hours. He had quickly opened the rice-paper sliding door and had stepped out. But before reaching the outer door he had turned around once more. She was already half-undressed and stood in the narrow opening, a white erotic statue, a scarcely moving image against the bare interior of the Japanese room. His vision became double, that of a lover and a photographer. The lover knew he should not have looked back, because she would be lost to him as a result; the photographer, on the other hand, caught the entire image all the more eagerly in a frame: the rice-paper doors, the panels in the narrow wooden surrounds, painted with mountain landscapes in light grey shades, fine, washed brushstrokes hinting at rather than representing nature. Because the door had been slid aside, the landscape no longer matched. It seemed as if even the imagined world had become double, had shifted to one side, while in the centre a void had occurred, behind which, in the middle of the room, she rose like a goddess of doom.

The first time he had seen her, five years ago, her face had received the name that he still muttered to himself, whenever he thought of her. Snowy Mask. He had come to Japan for an utterly banal purpose: to compile a travel brochure for a distinguished, though of course commercial, organization. But even if it had been a documentary about cement works or prisons, he would still have come. His world, and this was a fact to which he had resigned himself, was the world of brochures, of ephemera that no one would ever look at again; the decay, the sell-out, the morass. It wasn’t actually so much a question of having resigned himself to it—he had taken a decision about it. He knew he wasn’t good enough to be so independent that he could choose his own subjects, and even if anyone would, it was hardly possible to make a living that way. He had once baffled De Goede, when the subject cropped up, by showing him his favourite photograph. 

‘I always carry it with me,’ he had said, timidly as if it were childish to always carry with you what was dearest to you, like a taxi driver keeping the picture of his wife and children on the dashboard. He had stuck the photograph to the inside of his camera case. It was his talisman, his amulet, but that was nobody’s business. It was a page cut from Zoom. For a moment it had seemed as though De Goede would burst out laughing. His slightly rotund, soft, white body wrapped in a too-small kimono, had sunk lower into the chair, the hand with the signet ring had held the photograph away from him; he, Arnold, was not allowed to look at it now. But he knew it by heart, as if he had taken it a hundred times. It was a photograph from 1858 and there wasn’t really anything in it. He had first seen it in the Notman Photographic Archives, in the McCord Museum in Montreal. His attention had initially been drawn only to the shape, for while the two bottom corners were rectangular, as they should be, the two top corners curved rather oddly so that the whole photograph was shaped like a tunnel, a dark tunnel at that. ‘The prairie on the bank of the Red River, Humphrey Lloyd Hime’, it said—and this was exactly what the picture showed, a grey, leaden, old-fashioned plain in which prairie and water seemed to merge into each other without distinction. The horizon was a straight line; above it hung an equally desolate sky of a lighter grey, without any nuances. Two fields of grey, in fact, one darker, one lighter. And yet, when you looked longer, something like movement began to appear in those dead expanses of grey, a fraction of the light in the upper area had imparted itself to the darker area below, so that something of the light which had shone on that sombre river that day had been preserved; few streaks, a few patches, a flicker, just as the light of the stars tries to speak of something that happened before there were people and would try to do so even if no people had ever come into existence, although in that case the question arose: Why or, rather, for whose benefit? 

In the foreground you finally saw, if you went on looking long enough, a faint, almost dirty line that was supposed to represent the bank, the beginning of the flat, no doubt muddy, land on which the ridiculous photographer must have stood with his tripod, drinking in light in order to record this sad, empty scene without people, trees or animals. 

Albumen-silver from a glass negative. It moved him in a way that made him afraid to speak of it, for if he did he would have to say that you really ought to cry when you looked at it. 

‘Mono no aware,’ De Goede had said. 

‘I beg your pardon?’ 

‘“The pathos of things”. That is a notion they have here, you’ll hear it mentioned plenty of times. It means exactly what it says. It sounds like it, too.’ 

‘Mono no aware,’ the photographer had repeated the words and had never forgotten them. They fitted the photographer exactly. 

‘What would you most have liked to photograph, if you didn’t have to do all this rubbish?’ 

‘Stones.’ 

De Goede had laughed, and what was worse, he had been unable to stop, until Arnold Pessers realized that this was meant to indicate a special kind of agreement. But that was all a long time ago.

Mokusei! A Love Story by Cees Nooteboom, translated from the Dutch by Adrienne Dixon, is available from Seagull Books. You can buy your copy here. 

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‘Ursa Major’ by Yves Bonnefoy—An Excerpt

Ursa Major

Is it cold?

I don’t know, yes, maybe.

Are you holding on to me?

Yes, don’t be afraid.

Don’t let go of me, I’m so scared!

Do you think I’d want to let go of you?

No, but where are you? Where are we?

I don’t know. In the sky.

Are you sure? My feet are deeper and deeper in water.

That’s the sky’s water.

I hear voices, cries.

Voices? Me too, I’m afraid.

Look to the left! Colour!

Hold on to me, hold me tight!

And those people on the road! Is it a festival night?

No, those are beasts, great big animals.

No, children. Only children. I’m afraid.

Don’t let go of my neck. Keep talking!

What’s that, what’s that fire?

I don’t know. The same thing as those stars, perhaps.

I wonder why the sky is so close, at night.

I’ve stopped asking questions. I just look. No, not even.

Let’s go into this room. But oh, it’s water!

We’re going to wade.

We’re going to cry and shout. We’ll understand everything.

You, yes. Me, I’m going on ahead. I won’t be turning back.

Oh, don’t leave me. The stars are shining, the sky is shimmering.

The Bare Foot, the Things

Cautiously, she stretches one bare foot, then one entire leg out from under the Garden of Eden’s sheets. It touches a ground.

Ooh it’s cold!

What is it? he asks, from the depths of his sleep.

How to know? Things, the things.

The things? What is that?

I don’t know. Some stones, water running over things that feel like stones. I dip my foot in, it’s cold.

Tell me, what’s a thing like?

I don’t know. Like everything, like nothing. Like inside, like outside.

Does it move?

Maybe not. It’s breathing.

Everything is breathing.

Yes, but this breathes—in a different way.

Ah, tell me! He sits up, opens his eyes.

In a different way? By not moving. By rolling from level to level. I poke it with my foot, it rolls downstairs, I hear it bounce off the steps, with a pause where the staircase turns, you remember. But it is quiet, despite the noise.

I remember. Light slipped through the closed shutters. It was dawn, it was cold.

I heard those noises in the staircase, I was afraid.

Don’t be afraid any more, my friend, let’s go back to sleep. Why imagine that there are worlds?

But you exist! Don’t you?

Do I know whether I exist? We used to go out, it’s true, we’d go into the field; it had been raining. And those hailstones sometimes in the grass. Tears: tears are melted hailstones.

I hear sounds, I think they are harvesting the grapes! Come to the window, we’ll look and we’ll see. With my foot—oh, without even thinking—I’ll touch the baseboard under the window.

I am very fond of you.

And me, I am sitting right beside you on the bed. It really is morning, isn’t it? With my bare foot I touch a cold tile.

Ursa Major by Yves Bonnefoy, translated from the French by Beverly Bie Brahic, illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee, is available from Seagull Books. You can buy it here. To purchase a limited-edition large-format edition, accompanied by a signed print, please contact Seagull Books at [email protected].

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‘Like Bits of Wind’ by Pierre Chappuis—Some Excerpts

One of the central figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets, Pierre Chappuis has thus far only been represented in English translation in fragments: a few poems here and there in magazines, online reviews, and anthologies. Like Bits of Wind rights that wrong, offering a generous selection of Chappuis’s poetry and prose from the past forty years, drawn from several of his books. In these pages, Chappuis delves into long-standing questions of the essence of life, our relationship to landscape, the role of the perceiving self, and much more.  His skeletal, haiku-like verse starkly contrasts with his more overtly poetic prose, which revels in sinuous lines and interpolated parentheticals. Together, the different forms are invigorating and exciting, the perfect introduction for English-language readers.

All night long the black leather notebook has stayed open to a blank page.

In the morning, snow.

                                                                                             (hiatus)

Between the trees gleams the gilded edge.

December dark and bare.

The evening has closed in on itself.

                                                                                       (at night)

Splendour!—

And the last tatters of night remain snared in the sweater of the snow.

Woolly is the cawing.

                                                                 (November, in the vineyard)

Broad  Daylight

Having reached the ridge of the combe, the sun withdraws even more.

In such a confusion of haze (moving, at the edge), the forest, itself subjected to pitching back and forth, would drift were it not, pillar of the east, here and there a scotch pine.

Vanished, the path (in broad daylight, brilliantly!), engulfed or almost by the influx, the flow of dead leaves that, at best, have left a wine-coloured trail; may it lead back to the faultless light of the morning!

High spots, low spots like upstrokes and downstrokes equally shared in the light.

Snow: for an instant its full sovereignty.

Pierre Chappuis’s Like Bits of Wind: Selected Poetry and Poetic Prose, 1974–2014, translated from the French by John Taylor, published by Seagull Books in 2016, is available here.

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‘Bergeners’ by Tomas Espedal—An Excerpt

Just as the River Gaular sweeps past Sygna and narrows to a waist, suddenly cascading into a wide, powerful waterfall, so strong and foaming white that the river no longer resembles water but looks like a falling mountain, you can see Storehesten rising to a high, bluff summit, as if the peak is collapsing and reaching up at the same time, it’s just an illusion; you see the mountain through shards of water splintering in the air. The boy stands on the slippery rocks just below the waterfall, its vapour sprinkling his face and hair, small droplets of moisture beading his jacket and trousers, and the water soaking him as he stands there in the sun. A pale rainbow above the falling water, above the waterfall that roars so loudly that he can hear no other voices above the voice of the water, it’s calling to him. Now and then he sees a salmon launch itself in a high arc up the waterfall, inside the waterfall, as if the fish is searching for a place in the torrent which is still, a place where it can rest. Where the fish can rest before it jumps further up the fall, until at last it leaps into the calm river water. It seems impossible. Roughly, the salmon is washed down by the weight of water, down to the bottom of the waterfall again, into the seething cauldron where the fish lies waiting. The boy watches the salmon make another attempt, a new jump into the wild water. It seems impossible. The boy begins to cry, tries to dry his tears with the arm of his jacket which is wet. Now he realizes that he’s soaked, through his jacket and trousers, to his skin. He didn’t mean to cry, he never cries, about anything, even about the worst things, never, but the mist from the waterfall trickles from his hair, down into his face and eyes.

New York City. The Standard Hotel. Room 1103. The loveliest room I’d ever seen. So transparent, so open, so white and severe. We stood in the doorway looking through glass across the bathroom and bedroom and lounge and through the windows to the city and the lights up high that were reflected back through the glass panes through the room to the doorway we stood in. The city was in the room. The room was in the city, like a transparent cube with glass walls. A hexagonal room with beds and pillows and duvets soft as wax. Light yellow curtains. A sofa bed upholstered in thick, grey woollen material. A brown leather chair. A large mirror. A plate-glass wall separating the bathroom with its shower and oval bathtub; egg white and with the rough texture of eggshell, so that everything in the room imitated nature, or was nature pressed together into a cube between other cubes in the city. New York nature.

The streets criss-crossing beneath us. Fourteenth Street making a beeline for Union Square where there was a flower market. We filled the hotel room with flowers. They smelt sweet and heavy in the dark, and when we awoke in the morning, with the window open, we heard the buzzing of bees in the room. New York night. So light and mild. So sleepless and silent once the sounds had stretched out into the city and turned into a long, deep note of traffic and helicopters, sirens and hooters from ships on the Hudson River; we didn’t hear them. At night, when Janne was asleep, I would sit with my legs dangling out of the window of this tenth-floor hotel room and smoke. Sometimes, I’d suddenly be gripped by an irresistible impulse; I wanted to hurl myself out of the window. The thought was so overwhelming and powerful that I had to force myself to move away from the window, step by step towards the bed, lie down next to Janne and place her hand on my chest. Almost attaching myself to her. Spreading her hair across my face and entwining my legs in hers. Now I was secure. Now I was safe. I was firmly bound to her. I felt her calm breath, my pulse slowed, my heart beat normally; I could rest. But the following night it would happen again, I would sit alone at the window and be assailed by the thought that I’d never manage without her.

Bergeners by Tomas Espedal is translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson and published worldwide by Seagull Books. You can buy your copy here.

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K. G. Subramanyan Lecture

Friends,

 I am highly flattered by the request of Darshak Itihas Nidhi  to be a part of this programme. But, I confess that I feel like an intruder in this assembly. I am not a historian or a scholar like most of you. I am a muddle-headed artist who tries to employ a large variety of art practices—irrespective of origin or provenance, provided they relate to the contemporary realities—and manages to reanimate the existing environment. The only reason that I was persuaded to accept this request is the knowledge that in the last few centuries transoceanic and intercontinental commerce—the basic theme of the seminars—has grown in size and sophistication as a medium for the drastic transformation of global culture.

 People travelled for trade and commerce and this brought sequestered cultures, each having varied differences, in direct contact with each other. These encounters eventually made them analyse and revaluate age-old postulates and reach out for a global consensus about the nature of the world—the essence of the life, needs and desires, dreams and aspirations, and means of mutual communication. Several categories of modern knowledge related to human communication, philosophical thought, science and creativity come from the critical encounters between various cultural notions and practices. May be, there are still many questions to be answered, problems to be solved, and confrontations to be defused; but the world has evolved, it is not what it once was.

 The main concept of these seminars has been understandably designed to examine intercontinental commerce; to locate the places and people involved, identify the institutions, the intentions, strategies and techniques, and study the cultural interactions between diverse communities. The few words, I shall say here, will be primarily related to this last question, particularly the changes in the nature of the cultural interactions—changes in the character of the source factors. This question is at the centre of my interests today, though it may be peripheral to the theme of the seminars. For taking this liberty to jay walk, I crave your indulgence.

Darshak Itihas Nidhi has chosen cross-continental trade and commerce as the main theme, naturally, due to Gujarat’s long coastline which has made it one of the major gateways of India. Our country is special, kind of an ‘underbelly’ of the European continent. It has a long coastline on the east, opening to the Bay of Bengal, and an equally large coastline on the west (which leads to the Gujarat coastline), to the Arabian Sea. These routes can be extended towards the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other. It is a kind of ‘cultural crucible’ where various streams from the East and the West intersperse, and eventually develop a fountain of cultural resource spreading across various regions. The diverse nature of this country is known to everyone present here, but I choose to reiterate for the sake of argument. India has nearly one-seventh of the world’s population. It has two-dozen linguistic groups with highly developed literary traditions. And, special dialects spoken by smaller groups, more than twenty times that number. It is also home to most of the major religions and their allied institutions. All these factors make this country a major site of multiculturalism in the world, and account for its cultural history for over three millennia. Furthermore, the longstanding trade and cultural contacts with various countries clustered around the Mediterranean Sea, and almost all the regions of Central Asia, China, Japan, South and Southeast Asia has encouraged the spurt of astonishingly original cultural forms in each place. For instance; the tallest statues of Buddha in Bamiyan (Afghanistan), which was destroyed recently by some local political or religious fanatics; there is hardly a temple site in India that can rival the temple mountains in Angkor Wat or Angkor Thom (Cambodia); or Buddhist monument comparable to the one in Borobudur (Indonesia) and so on.

The catalogue of the recent exhibition on Indian textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London reproduced some exquisite examples of fabric that was produced in Gujarat for patrons outside its borders. Unfortunately, we have no specimens of these in the country, nor the needed expertise and the talent to produce comparable quality of textiles today. For nearly three millennia, Indian cultural panorama had been rich and diverse. The richness and variety came from the direct, often face-to-face, interaction between people—the producer with the consumer, artisan or performer with the patron or the public—and an informed relationship with the rest of their society. It gave the product or the work a voice or quality, apart from its basic utility, enabling a form of communication that enlarges and refines the perception of people; making each worker an ‘artist’ and each consumer a ‘connoisseur’. This practice welded all activities together, into an organic tradition, which evolved with time and took advantage of the changes in cultural circumstances.

However, this network was upset by the industrial revolution as technological improvements narrowed the horizons of traditional practices. With the help of machines, with greater or lesser resources, the volume of production of an object increased and its utility factors were attributed according to the process. Moreover, greater production necessitated wider distribution predicating the negligence of old traditional cultural implications. Thus, the product became a ‘commodity’ accessible to the mass market. This perfunctory transformation has affected our cultural panorama through the years. Though our country has had an amazing multiplicity of workmanship and artisanry from very early times, their presence has progressively decreased. Even if we still have a great variety, it does not have the same quality or excellence that made most of these products magnificent museum pieces. So, whenever we want to present an alternative picture of our country’s culture, in trade or publicity meets, we always return to history and showcase traditional artefacts or techniques—the contemporary scene is perpetually found wanting.

Our notion of progress makes this inevitable; also due to our global relations, and some of our own choices, while other factors arise from external pressures. The intimacy or the direct relationship between the maker and the user—the producer and the consumer—that used to develop naturally in the pre-industrial society rarely exists now. In today’s industrialized economy the market mediates between a consumer and producer. It matches a consumer’s needs or demands with a product or service, but creates a distance between the two sections. We have a great variety of market executives who concentrate on increasing the measure of the ‘market size’ and try to manipulate choices of the consumer and the producer. To them, both entities are ‘categories’ or ‘target groups’ not individuals. They envision large bodies of these ‘categories’ around them. Moreover, markets function and flourish in the urban centres where large sections of people with diverse needs and demands coexist. Naturally, the industrial economies want to urbanize the world in order to keep together an accessible body of producers and consumers. And, since they function in a globalized network, it affects their plans forward.

Keeping in view a substantial growth in country’s economy, our enthusiastic prime minister wants to promote the development of smart cities—comparable to those in the developed countries. This is not an easy task, especially, in light of the disorganized state of our modern cities and their inability to improve infrastructure in the stipulated time. The ‘Make in India’ campaign beckons foreign companies to invest in India necessitating the establishment of such infrastructure. Nevertheless, he means well, and, follows the widely prevalent global trend. And, such investments may materialize in India due to large working population and relatively low wages. But, the question we have to ask ourselves is: Will foreign investments upgrade our industrial stature and resources or keep us underdeveloped, dependent on the investors? And, will it improve the life of the common man?

Before we spell out what such an improvement should entail, there is another important factor that has come to play a major role in our lives—the information revolution and the multifarious channels of connectivity it has opened up. In the initial stages, a Bangladeshi economist gave cell phones to village women that built the bridge of communication between them and their menfolk working in distant countries, transforming the quality of their lives. Mohammad Yunus, as you all know, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his astonishing strategy. Over the last few years, digital technology has advanced by leaps and bounds and the Internet has laid out an extensive information network. It promptly transmits news all over the world audio-visually, and maintains a dependable archive. Digital technology has also entered the field of banking, accounting and commercial transactions. Now, with the advent of smartphones and tablets all these have come into the hands of individuals. And, along with it, the ability to read literature, watch movies, play video games and enjoy other forms of entertainment. Also, the bloggers, Twitter and Facebook fans form a closely packed social networking circuit—a silent tower of Babel. A large section of smartphone enabled individuals are able to virtually see and talk to each other in real time—with this kind of versatility, the smart phone has become indispensible to most people.

This is globalization at an astonishing scale. It has evolved far ahead from what the first sailors who crossed the seas could have anticipated. Though interaction between cultures, in earlier centuries, and growth of global consensus could have motivated some of them to visualize a multicultural world. But the actual result is a lot different. The developed world exploited the underdeveloped countries in various ways and this generated tensions of various kinds. These conflicts still persist, some of them have led to periodic eruptions of irrational violence in recent history. A god-fearing group that believes in the brotherhood of man, feels threatened by the strategies of some of the developed societies, and even some of their compatriot groups. They are compelled to use certain destructive devices which the developed societies have imposed on them.

Furthermore, the widespread urbanization and market economy has reduced the rural agriculturists into faceless workforce and subjected their produce to a ruthless distribution system that has altered the structure of operation. This should prompt us to rethink our objectives. We have to think of an alternative lifestyle that will challenge the overactive market economy which has multiplied our choices beyond rational needs; encouraged an environment where we live as strangers and fulfil predetermined economic roles. It has offered a highly resourceful communication system at our service that connects us across the globe instantaneously, but more image to image and less person to person.

Instead of smart cities or towns, we should think of an economy that develops a constellation of ‘smart’ villages. We need to build small congregations of people who have some kind of emotional kinship with each other, who value and protect their environment. A mosaic of these will make a better and more dynamic country—than the bloated mega-state that our present administrators plan to build—and will probably become the positive response to Mahatma Gandhi’s ominous words, ‘If the villages perish, India will perish too’. Surely, Mahatma envisioned India as a nation with a message to the world.

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‘O To Live Again. At 90.’ Mahasweta Devi’s Keynote Address to the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2013

‘O to live again!’

‘Was yesterday not full of a thousand possibilities? That was the life! What has changed since then? You feel weak, insipid, a dreadful, debilitating listlessness worse than malaria fever . It is far, far worse. You are alone.’

‘O to live again!’

Words. From I know not where. A writer in anguish? Perhaps. At my age the desire to live again is a mischievous one! Having arrived at a netting distance from trapping my 90th year—like catching ‘butterflies with nets of wonder’ as the song goes—I must confess this is wishful thinking. Besides look at all the ‘damage’ I have already done by being around longer than was expected! At eighty-eight or is it seven I move forward often stepping back into the shadows. Sometimes I am bold enough to step back into the sunlight. As a young person, as a mother, I would often move forward to when I was old. Amuse my son. Pretend that I couldn’t hear, or see. Flail my hands about like in a blind man’s game, or make mockery of memory. Forget important things. Things that had taken place but a moment ago! These games were for fun. Now they are no longer funny. My life has moved forward and is repeating itself. I am repeating myself. Recollecting for you what has been. What is. What could have been. May have been.

Now it’s Memory’s turn to mock me.

I am haunted by ghosts of so many writers, characters from my stories, of people who I have ‘lived’ and yes loved and lost. Sometimes I feel like an old house that is privy to simultaneous conversations of its inhabitants. Not always a privilege!  But ‘what happens when a person has reached the end of her strength?’ The end of strength is not quite a full stop. Nor is it the last station where you get off the train. It is simply a slowing down. An ebbing of vitality. The thought that I began with, ‘you are alone’. Considering the setup from which I came, it was very unexpected that I would turn out to be like this. I was the eldest in the house. At that time, I don’t know if you’ve had the same experience, every woman’s first sex experience came from the family. And from a young age, I had a strong physical attractiveness, as I’ve been told—and this also, I knew, I felt it. At that time we were very influenced by Tagore, was in Santiniketan, falling in love, whatever I did was with great gusto. This kind of experience I’ve had a lot. From 13 to 18 I was deeply in love with one of my remote cousins. There was a suicidal tendency in his family, and he also committed suicide. Everyone started blaming me, saying that because he had loved me and hadn’t got me, he had killed himself, which wasn’t true. By that time, I was in close contact with the Communist Party, and felt that it was such a waste at that young age. I felt, Why did he do this? I was crushed. The whole family accused me. From 16 onwards, my parents and especially my relatives would despair—what can we do about this girl? She’s so outgoing, she doesn’t understand her body’s attraction—it was considered vulgar. I hate middle class morality. It’s such a sham. Everything is suppressed. Writing became my real world for me, in which I lived and survived. Forward. Backward. My writing process is anything but haphazard. Before I write, I think a lot, mull over it, till it forms a crystal-clear hard core in my brain. I do all the homework I need to do. Take notes, talk to people. Find out. Then I start expanding it. After that I don’t face any hitches, by then the story is in my grip. When I write, all my reading, memories, direct experience, acquired information, come into it. Wherever I go, I jot down things. The mind remains alive and I forget things too. I’m actually very happy with life. I don’t owe anything to anyone, I don’t abide by any rules laid down by the society, I do what I want to, go wherever I want to, write down whatever I like, roam around. The air I breathe is filled with words. For example. Parnanar. Made of polash leaves. This refers to a strange ritual. Say a man has died in a train disaster. His body couldn’t be brought home. His relatives then, using straw or other materials—the area I speak of is full of the flame of the forest tree, the polash. So they use its leaves to make a man. Paap purush. Something out of folk belief. Doomed to eternal life. He keeps vigil over other people’s sins. He appears. Doesn’t appear. He has not sinned himself. But he keeps account of everybody else’s transgressions. Of their paap. Ceaselessly. And so he walks the earth. Taking note of the smallest things. A goat. Punished. Tethered to its post under the blinding sun. Unable to reach water or shade. Then the paap purush leaves behind his words. ‘That is a crime. What you have done is wrong.’ ‘Tui ja korli ta paap.’ Actually it is not a person. Merely the embodiment of an idea. It might be a punishment. He may have committed some grave crime. Shey hoyto kono paap korechhilo. Some unforgivable sin. And so now, he is doomed to be a paap purush through all eternity. And in fact, there is never just one paap purush. There are many. Just as there are many places that believe in this. And there are so many more beautiful words. Bengali words. Chorat. Meaning planks. Then, dak shankranti. This refers to the Chaitra shankranti. Dak maaney dekey dekey jai. Those selves who are extremely conscientious, vigilant, only they can hear this call. Of the old year as it leaves. Questioning. The old year ends today. And the new one begins tomorrow. What have you not done? What have you still left to do? Finish it now. Garbha daan. This is very interesting. A woman is pregnant. Someone promises her that if a daughter is born, she will be given this and this. If a son is born, then something else. Garbha thaktey daan korecchey. The gifting has happened while the child is still in the womb. This legend claims that the unborn child can hear this. And can remember. And record it in its mind. Later, he or she may ask that person about the promise. About the garbha daan that is still due. Our India is so very interesting. Take for instance the pardhi tribe of Maharashtra. Denotified tribals. Because they are tribals, girl children are in great demand. The husband of a pregnant woman can easily auction off or sell the unborn child. Pet ki bhaaji. Petey ja aacchey. What’s still in the womb. Nilam korey dicchey. Auctioning the fruit of the womb. Hell has many names. Narak-er onek gulo naam acchhey. One name which I like in particular is oshi patra bon. There are so many kinds of hell. Oshi means sword. And patra or a kind of plant with sword-like leaves. An entire forest of such plants. And the dead soul must walk through this forest. The sword-like leaves tearing into him. You are in hell, after all, because of your sins. And so your soul must now suffer this agony. Whenever I come across an interesting word, I write it down. All these notebooks. Koto katha. So many words, so many sounds. I’ve just been collecting them wherever I came across them.

Let me end by telling you about a theme I’m going to write on when I have time, leisurely. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. The only way to counter globalization, just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree. Let your son’s tricycle lie there. Let some poor child come and play, let a bird come and use the tree. Small things. Small dreams. After all, you have your own small dreams, don’t you? I claim elsewhere to have always written about the ‘culture of the downtrodden’. How tall or short or true or false is this claim? The more I think and write and think some more, the harder it gets to arrive at a definition. I hesitate. I falter. I cling to the belief that for any culture as old and ancient as ours to have survived over time and in time there could only be one basic common and acceptable core thought: humaneness. To accept each other’s right to be human with dignity. People do not have eyes to see. All my life I have been seeing small people and their small dreams. I feel as if they wanted to lock up all the dreams, but somehow some dreams have escaped. A jailbreak of dreams. Durga, watching the train [in the novel, Pather Panchali]. An old woman who simply craves sleep. An old pensioner who finally gets his pension. The people evicted from the forests, where will they go? Common people, and their common dreams. Like the Naxalites. Their crime—they dared to dream. Why shouldn’t they be allowed even to dream? As I have been saying for years, repeatedly, the right to dream should be the first fundamental right. The right to dream. This then is my fight. My dream. In my life and in my literature.

This speech was delivered on the opening day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, January 2013, by Mahasweta Devi, who celebrates her 90th birthday today. Seagull Books is proud and humbled at once to be her publisher and wishes her a long and healthy life. 

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Benedict Anderson: On Blindness

Seagull Books is deeply saddened at the death of its author and friend Benedict Anderson. The following is an exchange of letters between him and Seagull publisher Naveen Kishore on the issue of blindness, the theme for the 2015–16 Seagull Books catalogue.

*

Dear Ben,

Men will pluck their eyes. This is known. Out of shame. And horror. Over a deed committed. Often more imagined than the truth. Sometimes as a gesture made drama. Other times. In the solitude offered by the forest lit exclusively by twilight. Silhouetted against a sky perceived as unforgiving. And definitely unsung. Except by the denizens of the forest who will in time turn this monumental act of blindness into myth and legend. Sung as stories to flood the consciousness of minds to follow. For generations. Unseen. Unheard. Except by the smaller gods. The ones who do not matter as much in the hierarchy of godliness. In shadow or in the harshness of light. Manmade or that of the sun. In any season. It is not important. What is of interest is that the desire to offer up the sacrifice of sight, or in this case hindsight, as atonement is universal. Across cultures. Almost desperate once the urge rises. Like bile. From the pit of  one’s stomach. No amount of reason can talk you out of it once the die is cast. The seed planted. In the head. 

You just have to go through with it. There is no room here for grief. Love, N

*

Dear Naveen, By the machinations of some evil or vengeful god, it came about that the handsome, clever, well-meaning, kingly Oedipus fell in love with a older woman whom he did not recognize—he only saw her. It seems that his queenly mother did not recognize him either. They were married and seemed happy because they saw nothing but only happiness. Then some god explained what they were doing, to hurt them, and while the mother killed herself, Oedipus blinded himself, left his palace and disappeared in the deep forest. I think that in those days, only men did this, while women killed themselves. I am sorry to say that Freud grabbed this ancient story and decided that all male babies everywhere had the fate of Oedipus. But they could be cured. I think of stories about tough young Indian males who so love Mother India that they will do anything for her, no matter how horrible. Will some of them blind themselves? Or is that already done, in a special way? All the same, Oedipus blinded himself because he knew it was his god-given fate. He could understand what the gods had done to him. It wasn’t really a case of personal penance. It might be like the early times in India when wives were expected to be burnt alive on their husbands’ pyres. It was, wasn’t it, their fate? You may remember Sophocles’ last play, composed when he was very old, about blind Oedipus. He had composed Oedipus the King when Oedipus knew nothing. Ben

*

Yes, dear Ben, I agree about your take on old Sigmund who, in his own way, was blinded too, seeing darkness for what he thought it was! Some form of a malaise to be treated like one big Collective Disease rather than focussing on one individual fate at a time! Imagined, or self-inflicted, as in the case of Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra in our very own Mahabharata. Where the self-infliction took on the act of blindfolding oneself into a life of non-seeing out of loyalty to a husband born blind. Then again, if one were to open one’s eyes to ‘other blindnesses’ . . . the husband in this case is comparable to Lear who, though not actually blind, was blind after all, was he not? Allowing himself to be led into ‘not seeing’ the youngest daughter for her virtue and her concern and her honesty and her affection . . . like Gandhari’s husband who, unlike the blindness of romance—which suggests a certain inner brilliance that the blind cling to and ‘see’, unlike us so-called wide-eyed ‘seers’—was in fact completely taken in by other people’s machinations, so he was twice-blinded . . . I am very interested because this seems to go across cultures, this ‘blindwish’, as if it’s the worst suffering the male can inflict on himself by way of atonement for acts knowingly or unknowingly committed . . . the horror of recognition and knowledge . . . awareness dawning that this is what has been done . . . innocently or deliberately. Then again, there are those that refuse to atone or take responsibility. Are there instances of this in contemporary myth-making in your part of the world . . . the one you left behind and the one you so feel at home in . . . or in film or theatre, novels and poetry . . . this blindness? Love and hugs N

*

Dear Naveen, Silly of me. I forgot that Sigmund’s Oedipus Complex starts from the beginning of life, and the baby (male) knows nothing. None of our males can remember that early phase, but we are, he says, stuck with it. Yes, the beginning of the Javanese Mahabharata, and the enmity between the cousins of the Pandawa and Kurawa lineages . . . I don’t have the right books here with me but I think the trouble started with the spooky time when Gendari gave birth to the Kurawa all at once, with Destarastra as the father. When D was near death, he turned over the kingdom to his younger brother Pandu. If I am not wholly stupid, Pandu was blind, I don’t know when or why. But it was in his reign that the tragedy started. My memory is really terrible these days. Big hug, Ben

*

Dear Ben, I know! The grand epic defeats me too! I often find myself mixing the cast of characters. Pandu was indeed the younger brother but it was the other way around! Pandu turned over the kingdom to his blind elder brother D! Interestingly, blindness features differently here, because, according to our version of the story, Pandu was born as a result of the union between his mother Ambalika (whose sister Ambika was the mother of blind Dhritarashtra! Both were the widows of Vichitravirya who died early) and Rishi Vyasa who, in deference to his mother Satyavati’s instructions, slept with—or, as they would say in those days, ‘visited’—both the sisters. Having been told to keep her eyes open so that her son would not be born blind, Ambalika—though successful in keeping her eyes open—couldn’t help turning pale at the sight of the formidable Vyasa. As a result of which Pandu was born very pale! Luckily, he wasn’t blind, though blindness does feature strongly . . . Love and hugs, N

*

Dear Naveen, As soon as I sent you the message this morning, I discovered a strange little booklet to the effect that the Kurawa actually were not that bad. The writer is an old communist who Suharto put in jail for years in miserable conditions. There I saw my mistake. As you say, it is D who was the blind older brother of Pandu (who has a kind of albino). The old communist writes that when Gandhari was told to meet D, she was appalled because of his blindness, his dirty clothes, his rough moustache and beard. At first she didnt want to marry him, but soon became very attached to him. There are pages about a mysterious time when she had a hundred Kurawa babies in her womb all at once. The Javanese mostly think that the Mahabharata took place on Java, and that all the main characters are Javanese. Of course, they change it like crazy. Their favourite is always Srikandi, who is the only woman who is a great warrior, who shouts at people if she is annoyed, including her irresponsible but handsome husband Arjun. In the old days, I liked to tease people by asking them why she never had a baby. Unsually, they had never thought about this and didn’t know how to reply. Old male scholars would laugh and say, ‘That’s how the Javanese are.’ They don’t know that Srikandi is actually a male warrior—he was too good in battle, so one of the gods got irritated and changed his body into a woman’s. But his brains, rationality and courage all stayed male. Did Arjun know about this? He always makes me feel that he was a bit dumb. Big hugs and love, B

Collage by Sunandini Banerjee, Senior Editor and Designer, Seagull Books.

Benedict Anderson’s book The Fare of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand is available from Seagull Books. You can purchase your copy here.

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at Seagull Books

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Ceramic cow on the publisher's table. #ceramics #cow #sculpture #sunlight #wintersunshine (at Bhowanipur,Kolkatta)

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Fresh off the press! 'Grotowski's Bridge Made of Memory' by Dominika Laster. #polishtheatre #poland #theatre #theatrestudies #theater #theaterstudies #Poland #polishculture #performance #performancestudies (at Seagull Books)

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Fresh off the press. 'This Strange Idea of the Beautiful' and 'The Philosophy of Living' by François Jullien. #frenchliterature #philosophy #china #translation (at Seagull Books)

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Fresh off the press. 'In the Congo' by Urs Widmer. #literature #germanliterature #swissliterature #prohelvetia #translation (at Seagull Books)

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Extract. ‘The Anchor’s Long Chain’ by Yves Bonnefoy

They say Boats appear in the sky And from some of them The anchor’s long chain may rattle down, Down towards our furtive land. The anchor bobs over our fields and trees Seeking a place to moor, But soon a wish from above yanks it free; The ship of elsewhere has no use for here, Its horizon lies in another dream.

It may however come to pass That the anchor is heavy, unusually so, And rakes the ground, rumpling the trees. Someone saw it snag a church door, Catch the arch where our hope fades, And a sailor shinned down The taut, jerking chain, And freed his heaven from our night. Such anguish as he toiled against the vault Both hands grappling with his strange iron— Why must Something within us lure our minds In this crossing our words attempt All unknowing, towards the other shore?

Translated from the French by Beverly Bie Brahic. 

Available from Seagull Books.

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Extract. ‘Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits: Or, Why the Democracy Given to Us Must Become One We Fight For’ by Robert Menasse

Among all the monsters—from the basilisk to Count Dracula to King Kong—the public official assumes a particularly prominent place. Its fantasized being is not merely the product of the anxiously lusting dreams of the individual philistine, who must repeatedly fantasize his or her own danger and demise so as to ultimately be able to dream about a felicitous salvation. The fantasized public official is truly a phenomenon of society as a whole. The character of the civil servant is constituted from the negative images of all social classes, trade groups and professions: the civil servant is privileged and, at the same time, as unsophisticated as a provincial aristocrat; displays lower-middle-class stolidity and pigheadedness; is as addicted to regulations as a labour representative and, at the same time, as indolent as a member of the lumpenproletariat. As bigoted and perfidiously clever as a peasant, the civil servant can concoct nonsense as creatively as any entrepreneur who cunningly creates the demands he or she then claims to be able to meet; and, like all welfare cheats, is obsessed with reproducing him- or herself savagely and at the taxpayers’ expense. 

It’s amazing how this artificial figure, this pieced-together fiction, wanders like a ghost with sustained success through the collective imagination, never collapsing to death in the light of day. For in contrast to Count Dracula, for instance, everyone has actually met a public official in reality. Furthermore, if you divide the average family size by the proportional amount of civil servants within the adult population, then statistically two out of every three people must have a father, an uncle, an aunt, a sister, a father-in-law, or, at the very least, one other close relative who works in the civil service. There is no other profession with which more than two-thirds of the European population has such close family ties. (Germany and Austria lie exactly in the statistical middle.) One of the greatest sociological enigmas is why that empirical fact and the concrete experiences resulting from it do not lead to eliminating the unrealistic mental image of the civil servant wandering through the collective imagination—or at least better align that image with reality.

Having said that, one substantial change has recently occurred regarding the image of the civil servant. When most people now think of a ‘civil servant’, they no longer think about a magistrate in their hometown or a ministry official in their state capital, nor do they think about their child’s teacher or a police officer they’ve met on the street. Instead, they immediately think of the ‘bureaucracy in Brussels’. Eurobarometer surveys clearly indicate how closely many citizens associate the EU with ‘bureaucracy’—and vice versa. ‘In the consciousness of Europe’s citizens, the EU is a remote, bureaucratic juggernaut.’ The main reason for their ‘Euroskepticism’ (36 per cent of those surveyed in 2011) or ‘rejection of the EU’ (42 per cent) was that ‘far-reaching political decisions were made by officials lacking political legitimacy’. More than 70 per cent of those surveyed had a ‘very negative’ or ‘somewhat negative’ attitude towards European officials. As to the rationale (multiple answers were possible), the majority cited: ‘overregulation and beureaucratization’, ‘aloofness’ and ‘privileges’. Nowadays, ‘Brussels bureaucracy’ is the catch-all that many people repeatedly and generally use to express that which, in their day-to-day experiences or in their consumption of the media, provokes criticism, resentment or rage.

Nowadays, it’s clear that reality has even less of a chance of correcting the fantasy image of the civil servant given that the remote Brussels Eurocrat has superseded the homegrown official as the epitome of the public servant. At the same time, the emergence of the Brussels bureaucracy has not only ‘transported’, as it were, the civil servant, it has also fundamentally redefined him or her—but that transformation has yet to enter the public consciousness. The Brussels bureaucrat is not only socially perceived as an Other, he or she is simultaneously—and primarily—an Other in the classical sense of the term. The person no longer serves a public institution belonging to his or her nation and no longer swears loyalty to the nation, but instead serves a supranational institution, such as the European Commission, whose task is to push back the special interests of the individual nations and ultimately overcome the nation-states, including the one the official comes from. 

The Brussels bureaucrat, along with the bureaucratic apparatus of the European Commission, works for the common interests and towards communalizing the parameters of the current 28 member states, and thus consistently against the government of his or her own country as well as against all national bureaucracies. We’re therefore dealing with a bureaucracy that contradicts traditional bureaucracies. Historically, the Brussels bureaucracy constitutes a completely new type. It is the first one not bound to its ruler or its government, and the first one to consistently call state bureaucracies into question and, when appropriate, correct or rescind their policies and decisions. That alone is a fascinating state of affairs. Moreover, it’s an expression of great historical reasoning if you consider the devastation resulting from the blind ‘administration’ of so-called national interests, to which the European unification process represents the historical answer. But even I only learnt that after having moved to Brussels to get to know the ‘bureaucrats’—the real ones, that is, in the flesh and in person.

I encountered one surprise after another, as if there had been a secret agreement to debunk all of the clichés and fantasies about the Eurocrats and invert them in reality.

Translated from the German by Craig Decker. To be published by Seagull Books in March 2016.

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‘QU’IL VIVE!’—A poem by René Char

This land is only a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre

In my land, the tender proofs of spring and poorly dressed birds take precedence over distant goals

Truth waits for dawn beside a candle. The window glass is grimy. To the watchful, it’s of no importance.

In my land, you don’t question a man who is moved. No evil shadow falls on the capsized boat.

A grudging good-day is unheard of in my land.

You borrow only what you can give back with increase.

In my land, the trees have many leaves. Their branches are free not to bear fruit.

Nobody believes in the good faith of the victor.

In my land, we give thanks.

(Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson)

Inventors and Other Poems by René Char is available from Seagull Books. 

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Pettigrews, Glasgow

I’m moving to Berlin. I don’t know for how long. One evening I sort through the clothes hanging in the cupboard in my Finsbury Park flat. At the very back, always there, but I haven’t looked at it in years, my only suit. My mother bought it for me when I started university. It was ‘off the peg’, but had to be adjusted to make a good fit. This was the only time I was ever asked the question, ‘Does sir dress to the right or the left?’ The suit is grey, no stripe or pattern, one vent, the trousers had turn-ups. Later, the legs were tapered and the turn-ups removed.

The moths have been at it. The holes aren’t big—one in a lapel, a couple in the jacket breast, one in the back. I can’t remember when I last wore it. In a pocket is an invitation to a reception at the German Embassy in 1986. I’ve no recollection of the event. The suit would then have been 20 years old. The lining of the trousers, the inside of the pockets have turned from off-white to a dingy, nicotine cream with age. I hang the suit up on the cupboard door and think that I’ll throw it out tomorrow.

The next day I take the jacket down, count the moth holes, brush some dust from the collar with my hand and carry it into the kitchen, intending to drop it in the bin. The jacket is folded over my arm. I unfold it and    open it out, revealing the label on an inside pocket, Pettigrews Glasgow. I’m incapable of carrying out my decision. I feel panic, dread, revulsion at     the thought. Pettigrews, Pettigrew & Stephen, a store, long gone, on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow. Not as refined as Copland and Lye next door, but nevertheless a big, respectable, old-fashioned department store, specializing in ladies’ and gents’ clothing and in furnishings and with  scents, hosiery and haberdashery on the ground floor. In the basement, approached through the dark smoking lounge, which later became the bedroom furniture department, was the barber’s, which could also be reached from the lane running parallel to Sauchiehall Street and Bath Street, that is, without actually going through the store. This was where my mother took me for a haircut once I had entered the High School, a Saturday ritual repeated every two or three weeks. She would sometimes sit on the worn leather bench, waiting and watching, after she had told the barber what was required, not many words beyond short back and sides, but not too short and leave a fringe at the front which can be combed back. I remember only one of the barbers: a tall, erect, flushed man with a pockmarked face and red hair en brosse and a red moustache. Perhaps there was something military about the straightness of his back as, expertly expressionless, he inclined his head to my mother, then cut my hair, running the electric clippers down my neck and up behind my ears, and accepted the tip my mother had passed to me beforehand (she had already paid for the haircut itself) and which I may even have held tight in my fist the whole time—6d, could it have been 6d?

Pettigrews Glasgow. I hang the jacket up again. I hadn’t thought about the store or the barber’s for a long time, but it’s not that memory which held me back from finally putting the jacket in the bin and the trousers after it and pressing both down onto the tea leaves and the lunchtime leftovers and the other rubbish. It’s as if by bundling the suit up and crushing it down, I would bundle up, crush and throw away the hope my mother had placed in me at the beginning of my manhood, as she saw it, and along with the hope her pride, her so often disappointed pride in me. She was still quite a young woman then, when she bought me the suit, a little over forty, and in her smile that day, and on other days, I now recognize a shyness and I see in it the unspoken longing for an escape from what she saw as a fateful history, in which it was impossible to tell apart German history and that of her family, but from which I was nevertheless to break free, taking her with me in the end.

Martin Chalmers

from the Seagull Books catalogue 2011

Martin Chalmers has translated some of the best-known German-language writers including Herta Müller, Elfride Jelinek and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

Click here for Seagull Books translated by Martin Chalmers