Living Languages

Dr Claire Launchbury reports from a recent conference in Estonia exploring transcultural memory studies.

I recently attended a conference in Tallin University, Transcultural Memorial Forms: Contemporary Remembrance of War, Displacement and Political Rupture, which additionally marked the inauguration of a new research network on Memory Studies, bringing together colleagues predominantly from the Nordic and Baltic regions where the discipline is thriving. This network showcases the different borderlines and geographical areas of collaboration that are available to this part of Northern Europe. Even down to the food, Estonia’s position on the Scandinavian-Baltic frontier and neighbouring Russia leads to different combinations: Nordic cured fish, Russian dumplings, Armenian coleslaw with olives and pomegranates all appear on the same menu. The exotic sea resort is Odessa. Traces of former Soviet architecture co-exist with a number of large shopping malls with all the usual brands. A picture-postcard old town with museums of medieval torture, ecclesiastical history also throbs with the merry antics of the Helsinki Finns taking a booze cruise or the budget airline stag partiers. These passing observations reinforced several of the issues raised at the conference with its focus on transcultural forms.

Professor Ann Rigney

A fascinating and packed programme included keynotes by Michael Rothberg, Samuel Goetz Chair of Jewish Studies, UCLA and Ann Rigney, University of Utrecht, and a screening of Common Ground and a talk with filmmaker, Kristina Norman. Papers explored a diverse range of cultural and memorial production, from northern comedy to Althusser (and that was in just one paper) as well as providing a welcome opportunity to discuss the issues at stake in contemporary memory studies.

My panel on memorial forms showcased memorial projects such as the Museum on Wheels commemorating the lost Jews of Poland and their reception in different parts of the county in a paper by Aleksandra Kubica (KCL). Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene (Vilnius) examined the palimpsestic nature of Lithuanian memorials to the Jewish victim of the ‘Shoah par balles’ or the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ between 1941 and 1944. There are 250 sites of mass killing in Lithuania and the passage from Soviet power to contemporary Europe has left many conflicting, competing and problematic traces which have an urgency to them that Western Europe might have a tendency to neglect. Indeed, this highly unsteady transition of memory was a subject returned to often at the conference.

Ernest Morgan, Palestine Railways, & a Police Constable in the aftermath of a train derailment in 1937

My own paper ‘How am I supposed to talk to you, or with you or about you?’ explored the novel Gate of the Sun by Lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, through the lens of disruptive empathy, a term coined by Amos Goldberg and Bachir Bachir to think through co-remembering the Shoah and the Nakba of 1948. In addition to this I explored the potential of the text as a productive borderspace using Bracha Ettinger’s radical concept she terms the Matrixial. She uses this to argue for the possibility of co-wit(h)nessing, instead of being separated from the other, cut, split, castrated, the uterine model of the matrixial holds open the opportunity for connection and compassion. In this way, I explored different instances of seemingly impossible coexistences at events which are narrated in the novel. I reflected on the Arab revolt of 1936-39 which intersects with the experience of my great-grandfather being on board sabotaged trains as he worked for Palestine Railways, the problems of borders and their crossing at Allenby or Qaalandia, the checkpoint between Ramallah and East Jerusalem, my own experience in 2015;  the time in late 1975 when the PLO protected and fed the Jewish population of Wadi Abu Jamil in Beirut, however cynical the geopolitics, and, finally, a sculpture by Ginane Makki Bacho made from Israeli shells that destroyed her apartment and studio in 1982. A sculpture she named ‘uterus’.

Uterus, by Ginane Makki Bacho, 1983

In these volatile political times, considering different networks, of memory, solidarity, compassion; the other memoryscapes which we might share but nevertheless not pay sufficient attention to, offers, I like to hope, a sense of renewed dialogue and through that understanding.  I am very grateful to conference organisers, Eneken Laanes and Hanna Meretoja for their intellectual leadership, organisation and warm welcome and to the School of Advanced Study, University of London, conference grant fund for supporting my participation.

References

Elias Khoury [1998], Gate of the Sun [Bab el Shams] translated by H. Davies (London: Picador, 2007);

Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (2014) ‘Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: Disruptive Empathy and Binationalism in Israel/Palestine’ Journal of Genocide Research, 16.1, 77-99;

Bracha Ettinger (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace, with foreword by Judith Butler, introduction by Griselda Pollock and afterword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press).

Dr Claire Launchbury, Centre for Cultural Memory, Institute of Modern Languages Research

The IMLR successfully hosted an event sponsored by the Cassal Trust on 11 March 2017 – the one-day workshop ‘Turkey and Islam in France and Europe’. Censored Turkish-French novelist Nedim Gürsel (The Daughters of Allah) met cultural memory studies fellow Matthew Mild (the workshop’s organiser), who here discusses the contribution of this multiple award-winning author.

Nedim Gürsel

While a second Muslim travel ban is effectively being challenged in the States and the anti-Islam party was recently defeated in the Netherlands following a row over campaigning/democracy in Turkey, as was its Austrian counterpart not long ago, our IMLR/Cassal Trust one-day workshop looked at a wide range of subjects, from Joseph Downing’s talk about Islamophobia in France and Jocelyn Wright’s contribution on French banlieue literature (the French elections will happen soon) to the Turkish-French film Mustang which we watched after our conversations. The public quickly began to interact spontaneously with Professor Howard Bowman during his engaging presentation about trauma and long-term memory, which we found refreshing and helpful in discussions of migrant trauma and nostalgia. It was an honour to welcome as our guest speaker the Turkish-French author Nedim Gürsel. I think that his contribution from a Turkish-French intellectual position was timely, in the present international climate.

Nedim Gürsel teaches Turkish literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, and is research director for Turkish literature at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is an author of novels, short stories, travelogues and essays that have been translated into several languages. His writing uses multiple forms, mixing lyricism, love songs, humor, the epic genre, eroticism, and fantasy. Gürsel’s awards include the 1977 Turkish Language Academy Award, the 1986 Abdi Ipekçi Award for his contribution to peaceful Greek-Turkish relations, the 1990 best international scenario award from Radio France Internationale, the 2004 Fernand Rouillon French-Turkish Literary Prize, and the 2013 Mediterranean award – the author was knighted by the French government for his services to art and literature in 2004.

While offering consecutive interpreting from French at our workshop, I couldn’t help but notice his enthusiasm addressing a London audience at the IMLR. Gürsel opened his talk by sharing his experience being censored and legally prosecuted in Turkey, where he faced a trial for publishing his novel The Daughters of Allah. He spoke about chroniclers of crusades and authors of chanson de gestes epic poems who first engaged in vitriolic attacks of Islam and the prophet Muhammad in medieval France and Europe. I was impressed by his whole-hearted commitment to fostering a nuanced and many-sided discussion of European-Islamic relations. I wondered what he thinks about Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the affair of the Danish cartoons, and he surprised me on both issues.

Though he did not agree with my suggestion that the Danish cartoons attacked a vulnerable minority using a satirical medium typically reserved for corrupt politicians and businesspeople, as has been widely maintained in critical cultural studies literature, he said he thinks – like I do, too – that Rushdie’s irony was perfectly respectful and beneficial. Nedim Gürsel set the tone for our useful conversations throughout the day. His contribution was an ode to the witnessing that defeats silence.   

Matthew Mild, Fellow in Cultural Memory Studies, IMLR

Professor Catherine Davies discusses the world premiere of the Guildhall School‘s production of The Tale of Januarie. This project received support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the ‘Cross-Language Dynamics’ OWRI Project at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

It’s not every day we have the chance to see a new opera and I had no idea what to expect in the Guildhall’s production of The Tale of Januarie. I knew the libretto, written in Middle English, was based on Chaucer’s unfinished The Merchant’s Tale, adapted by playwright Stephen Plaice. I knew the composer, Julian Philips, but I’d never heard his music. How would the opera be staged and performed? What would it look like, how would it sound? In the event, it was a gripping, sumptuous experience lasting three hours, a joy to hear and behold. The costumes, the lighting, the scenic effects, and above all the edgy music and singing, made this a memorable performance. Full credit is due to the director Martin Lloyd-Evans, conductor Dominic Wheeler, the orchestra and the singers, especially John Findon as old-man Januarie and Joanna Marie Skillett, his young bride, May. This is the story of a sex-obsessed Januarie who marries a pretty girl and is made a laughing stock when she deceives him with his handsome young servant. For the purposes of this blog, however, I want to draw attention to the complex interaction in the opera between music and text. What were the challenges and opportunities faced by Stephen Plaice when adapting Chaucer’s famous tale? How did Julian Philips match his music to a Late Middle English text? These questions form part of the AHRC’s Open World Research Initiative’s research project on modern languages, communities and translingual practices led by the IMLR.

In the opening Q&A, chaired by Cormac Newark, Guildhall’s Head of Research, Stephen and Julian shared their creative experience. They emphasised the strange familiarity of Middle English – seemingly English but not quite, with its obvious Anglo-Saxon and Norman French roots jarring on modern sensibilities. Middle English, said Stephen, is like a foreign language you know fairly well, and writing Middle English was like writing two or three languages at the same time. It was a treat for him to work on the libretto, to create a final act in an unfinished tale, and to recreate the sense of fizz produced by the collision of the old and the new. For Julian, every single word in the libretto had to be weighed for its sound and its meaning, so that accents would fall in the right place, alliterations stressed, and the sonorous and highly coloured quality of the language maintained by the music. Elisions were important, eliding vowels as in Italian or German texts. Words ending in consonants, so unhelpful for singers, retain their final vowels in Chaucer’s English – so sickness is sicknesse, which gives the composer and singer scope for triple rhythm, sound and emotion. The composer can mine the text for its rhythmic qualities, for metric flow and tempo.  For Stephen the challenge was how to keep the momentum of the strong narrative drive; for Julian the challenge was how to respond to the language in his music. Both agreed that Middle English had had a profound effect on the opera at every level: structure, rhythm, text and music all interacting in sympathetic dialogue.

To quote the programme notes, ‘Bringing Middle English to opera, a genre that didn’t exist when it was spoken, reveals how languages are never “dead”, that they still have unexplored colour and vibrancy’ and, I would add, can still communicate – especially when much can still be learned from Chaucer’s tales.

Catherine Davies, Professor of Hispanic and Latin American Studies
Director, Institute of Modern Languages Research

For the third year in a row the IMLR, in cooperation with the DAAD and supported by the Goethe Institut and the Swiss and German Embassies, successfully hosted the prize-giving ceremony of this year’s German writing competition on 1 March in Senate House. Here Stephan Ehrig talks about the competition and awards ceremony:

Ulrike Ulrich (l) & Anja Tuckermann (r)

At a time when the media has been full of heart-rending tales of human flight as well as heated debates on migration and the so-called refugee crisis, it seems all the more important to widen one’s perspective and empathise with the human destiny and personal stories behind the numbers. Consequently, for this year’s German writing competition the entrants were asked to continue storylines on themes of migration and flight, based on launchpad texts provided by German-speaking authors Anja Tuckermann (Berlin) and Ulrike Ulrich (Zürich).

Very much to the jury’s delight, the competition attracted a wide range of interest: of the 69 entries, 39 came from secondary school students and sixth-formers, and 16 from undergraduates, amongst several postgraduates, native speakers and others. The judges commented that submissions in all categories were surprising, touching, complex, and a joy to read.

Prize winners with authors Anja Tuckermann and Ulrike Ulrich

This became clear during the awards ceremony in Senate House on 1 March which provided a great opportunity for all prize winners not only to meet the two authors but most of all to present their endings to a wider audience. Having already spent the afternoon in writing workshops with both authors, reading out their own texts certainly was the highlight of the evening. The range of creativity and linguistic skills was most impressive, and each author found their very own personal way of approaching the difficult task of seeing the world from a migrant’s or refugee’s perspective – a perspective that mostly was very far from their own experience – and on top of that in German. All prize winners mastered this difficult undertaking gracefully. Some of the texts displayed a variety of hopes and fears at the immigration desk, while others set out to confront the audience with the impossible demands refugees face when meeting their new neighbours who want to discuss their traumatic experience with them, at a time where this is the only thing they try to escape. Some texts describe the overpowering feelings and the impossibility of communication when one is only left with the fading image of what used to be home, “where my son follows the streams into the mountains and the horizon promises all or nothing.”

The evening also gave the stage to Anja Tuckermann and Ulrike Ulrich who then read out their versions to the stories, and the surprising new endings to the plot left everyone excited that they had taken part in this literary and cultural endeavour. At the end of the evening, all participants were awarded various books for future encounters, and all organisers and supporters shared the uplifting sense of seeing so many (young) talents in Britain engaged in writing texts on such a difficult topic, and in a foreign language.

Stephan Ehrig, Fellow in Modern Languages (Germanic/Central European), IMLR

Stefano Jossa and Katia Pizzi talk about the Festschrift celebrating the recent retirement of Professor Jane E Everson (Royal Holloway University of London)

‘Academic’, in daily conversation, tends to mean ‘of no consequence, irrelevant’; and yet, to disprove conversational language, there are people who, more traditionally, think of ‘Academic’ as synonymous with ‘concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship’, to the extent that they devote their lives to Academy and the study of its historical background and social meaning. ‘Chivalrous’ is similarly not a more fortunate idiom, since it has generally come to mean ‘ridiculously old-fashioned’; and yet there are people who think of chivalry as an aristocratic ideal, referred to a time when women and men were more generous and courteous.

Professor Jane Everson

Among those who still value academy and chivalry, a prominent place has to be given to Professor Jane E. Everson, who has devoted most of her scholarly career to understand the dynamics of Italian chivalric poetry and was the recipient of the AHRC-funded Italian Academies project (2010-14). Professor Everson has been serving the field of Italian Studies loyally for more than forty years and has recently retired after teaching at the Universities of Oxford, Reading, Leicester and London, Royal Holloway. To pay homage to her honourable career, two colleagues at Royal Holloway, Stefano Jossa and Giuliana Pieri, gathered a collection of essays for a Festschrift, entitled Chivalry, Academy, and Cultural Dialogues : The Italian Contribution to European Modernity (Legenda).

The book was launched at the IMLR on 15 February 2017, with talks given by Professors Corinna Salvadori (Trinity College Dublin), Diego Zancani (Oxford) and Martin McLaughlin (Oxford), introduced by Katia Pizzi, in the presence of Professor Everson. The event combined scholarly engagement and personal tribute in a way that it would be impossible to discern whether the main focus was the dedicatee or the book itself. Far from being a collection of scattered essays, the book aims to mirror Professor Everson’s scholarly interests in chivalric poetry, the Italian academies and Anglo-Italian relations, often explored in an archaeological manner (in Foucaultian terms) to ascertain their legacy in our time.

In a brief introduction, Stefano Jossa explained the genesis, both professional and emotional, of the book, bridging between Italian early modernity and European modernity to pay homage to a scholar who always worked on the ‘success of the unsuccessful’ as a means to contrast pop drifts of University culture in the contemporary media-dominated world. Admonishing that we learn more from diversity than homogeneity, Professor Salvadori tantalisingly explored the first section of the book, highlighting the presence of a chapter on Professor Everson’s lifelong scholarly interest, Il Mambriano by Francesco Cieco, as well as on Ludovico Ariosto’s masterpiece, the five-hundred-year-old Orlando Furioso (three chapters), Francesco’s Berni’s Rifacimento of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando, and some fifteenth-century cantari.

Following on from this, Professor Zancani stressed in an illuminated way the connection between Professor Everson’s work on the Italian Academies and the six essays included in section 2, exploring a number of personalities, academies, works and fine-art practices, from Giulio Camillo, Marcantonio Piccolomini and Angelo Ingegneri to Galileo and from the Thesoro politico to copper engraving. Finally, Prof McLaughlin affectionately recalled his friendship with the dedicatee, taking it as symptomatic of the route of Italian Studies in the UK, in order to introduce the third and final section on cultural communities and Anglo-Italian relations, including essays on oral Petrarchism, Machiavelli’s use of jokes, Sebastiano del Piombo’s hieroglyphs in the portrait of Andrea Doria, Shelley and Dante, Gramsci and Kipling and Soldati and music.

This was a most successful event: best wishes to Professor Everson to carry on and go further in her research. The plus ultra reproduced on the frontispiece of the book, from the original Atlante Veneto (1691–97) by Vincenzo Coronelli, is a reference to the Argonauts’ journey and an appropriate motto of Professor Everson’s life and works.

Dr Katia Pizzi, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, IMLR

Dr Stefano Jossa, Reader in Italian, Royal Holloway University of London