Actual title wouldn't fit: What Writers Should Know About Illiteracy
If you Google “right to read” and similar phrases, you will be taken willy-nilly to two very different types of concerns.
The common concern is censorship, copyright law, and assistive technologies. The problem here is that people don’t have ACCESS to books.
My concern, much less common, is summed up in one word: ILLITERACY. Tens of millions of Americans have not been taught to read properly. They have access to books but so what? They can’t read them.
Illiteracy is a far bigger (and more intellectually interesting) problem than most educated people assume. The US is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. (More than 1,000,000 are in jail.) This is a stupid waste and, I’d say, a crime.
I’ve...
This event in part was a celebration of Best European Fiction 2010, the newly launched anthology. Aleksandar Hemon, who edited the volume, moderated this panel and did a generous job of it. He and Colum McCann began by talking about the fact that only 3% of literary work in this country is translated from other languages and that work seldom finds a mainstream audience here. European governments have helped fund this new enterprise published by Dalkey.
What follows is a very imperfect attempt to render some of the conversation that took place. Apologies to speakers for inaccuracies.
Hemon said he'd never met a writer who reads books only in his/her own language. That the project of translation is inherent in literature....
The 30 or so students from Enterprise, Business, and Technology High School in Brooklyn got stuck on the L train but arrived just in time to join a group from Fox Lane High School in suburban Bedford at a panel of authors who grew up speaking and writing in multiple languages. The students—all English Language Learners from China, Nepal, Yemen, Ecuador, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic—heard the perspectives of immigrants and the children of immigrants, those whose home language was suppressed, and those who have sought as adults to embrace the language of their parents.
Moderated by Korean-American poet Cathy Park Hong, the panel titled “Writing, Speaking, Dreaming: Authors Talk About Languages” included novelist Randa Jarrar, the daughter of an Egyptian father and...
Salwa Al Neimi, born in Syria but lives in France and writes in Arabic, Zsófia Bán from Hungary, Nicole Brossard from Canada, and Rakesh Satyal born in the US to Indian parents, met to tell an audience about taboos. They generally agreed that religion, politics and sex were dangerous, particularly if one did not represent the prevailing religious, political or sexual orientation.
Although the Jewish Bible describes the body as being good and mentions functions of the body in frank terms, Al Neimi has been censored for using Arabic, the language of the Koran, when writing about the erotic. Bán and Satyal found that otherness in sexuality was taboo. Satyal said that he wrote the book he needed as a child and didn’t...
The nearly full Great Hall at Cooper Union was the site for beautiful readings by Catalonian poet Narcis Comadira, Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh, Quebecois writer Nicole Broussard, Filipino novelist Jose Dalisay, French bestseller Muriel Barbery Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramirez, Hungarian writer Peter Nadas, Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat,...
The Cervantes Institute was the site of a love fest for Spanish independent publishing house Anagrama through the words of five of its authors. The event highlighted the crucial work of independent publishers, considered the marketplace as an enemy of freedom of expression, and celebrated the art of literary curation and the act of...
BREAKING NEWS: The Statue of Liberty has swine flu. Evacuate New York. Punish the Mexicans. And let's all OVERREACT ... please!
Yes, here we go again. Fear is back. It never becomes unfashionable, does it? Fear sells newspapers, and now we're all supposed to stop traveling. Europeans should stay in Europe, Americans should stay in America, and nobody should travel to Mexico because swine flu is going to do us in!
I doubt it but maybe it will. Perhaps swine flu is going to b blamed for every death in the US the next twelve months. It might surpass our fear of terrorist attacks and erectile dysfunction. All You Need Is Fear - isn't that what John Lennon sang...
Pen pointed out that we are celebrating World Voices while the rest of the world is putting up its hands in defeat... So this is the celebration. Nice to hear Le Clezio speaking of looking out his window in Albuquerque and seeing tumbleweed: that's very delightful, since when we look out of OUR window we see other buildings. And just as nice to hear about where his family has settled, that "we are nearly everywhere."
Creolization, he says, is a great thing, since it means adaptation to new ways of life... He remembers begging the GI's for food, having subsisted on roots, and being given Spam, chewing gum, and white bread.
Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.
Now, let me admit to something: In the midst of writing part of this essay while aboard a train, I fell asleep a few minutes ago, and have awoken now to the sound of two voices near me, both voluble--one speaking French, the other Spanish, both attending heartily to their respective cell-phone conversations.
At first, I do not remember ever reading Guo. My sleepiness shuts that door. The sound of two overheard languages, separate and yet mingling, is enticing, and so I don't mind being woken. But then, I don't have to work at understanding French or Spanish, for I can't understand them. Not really. Only vaguely can I follow the sense, in small clusters of sounds, and not in...
How might we read a novel that is also a dictionary? Or a dictionary that is also a novel? The reasonable answer: word by word. For although every novel may not demand this, and though a dictionary--unreasonably--might well, a hybrid of the two will at least invite unusually close attention from a reader. All right. But then what?
Well, when read that way, one word at a time, a book spews volumes of small and large worlds, as each syllable tips or loads. What they tell me: We can create language again, with invisible rules, as a poetics of the possible never meant to be fully understood. The syllables tell me something different from the casually measured unburdening of ordinary...
Most of academic work is esoteric and becoming more so. It may have implications that extend to the daily lives of people, yet these are generally obscured by the elaborate protocols that works in a particular field are expected to observe. Something similar may be said of political writing, since positions across the political spectrum are marked at least as much by rhetorical styles as anything else. But stories are the universal language. We may sometimes compose in one of the languages of academia, but we then try to translate into that of stories.
This is especially important when it comes to our relations with other
beings, whose visceral reality can easily become lost in the abstractions of
scientific analysis...
Perhaps animals do not have "language," at least as we generally understand the term, but every motion of a tiger conveys an enormous expressiveness, perhaps as nuanced as the words of our finest poets. What keeps this from being language is that we can hardly ever break it down into units, comparable to words, or identify structures, comparable to grammar.
I have watched groups of ravens at play in the Outer Hebrides, beating their wings, gliding, diving, and flipping over in the air. The acrobatics have no strictly pragmatic purpose, and are a sort of aerial ballet. Every turn or gesture appears charged with meaning, This expressiveness is heightened by the contrast of their black forms against the bright sky, and by their exuberant shouts. The spaces in the tips of their wings...
The current edition of PEN World Voices probably features the largest number of writers from the whole Spanish-speaking world--US included-- since the Festival's creation. This remarkable presence echoes the increasing attention that American mainstream media and audiences are paying to the so-called 'Latinization' of the United States. While some poeple regard this phenomon as a threat to American identiy, others see it --and rightly so, in my opinion- as the largely overdue recognition of a shared history and culture, an anticipation of the fulfillment of Whitmans' Credo.
This literarture is a window through which Spanish and English-language alike can take a different and challenging view of their own literary tradition, deepening in the process their understanding of the somehow disturbing, at times disorienting, but already inescapable complexity of the Hemispheric American identity.
