| Friday, April 27, 2007 9:06PM | | | | Disparate Postcards and Bad Manners | Posted By: Aaron Hamburger
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| Tags: Maslowska, Postcards, Nonaka, Senocak, Wallner | Postcards: Capturing Place was the first panel I attended without a Q & A component, and I have to say that I think it suffered as a result. While the intent was supposed to be glimpses into different worlds, presented by four writers from four different parts of the world, the net effect was an hour of readings, albeit interesting readings, that had little to do with each other. And the theme of how place was captured, wasn’t really addressed.
Polish author Dorota Maslowska began, reading in Polish so fast that it was a wonder to me that even the Polish people in the audience could understand her. Since I certainly could not understand her (I know a little Czech which is sort of like Polish, but not enough), I scrutinized her fashion choices, which impressed me, particularly her neo-80’s haircut, which gave her a kind of punk glamorous look.
When the translator read her work in English, I was further impressed. One of the “fragments” which Maslowska presented from her novel suggested the modest proposal of bagging up a local beach into plastic packages of sand to make a profit. Another examined the Polish tradition of local fairs, “a very good opportunity to meet all the mentally challenged people of the city,” as Maslowska’s translator put it. A bit surprising, since the translator was from the Polish Consulate in New York, who you’d think would want to present her country in a more flattering light, but all the more entertaining for us in the audience.
Next came Tomoso Nonaka from Japan, who read a short story about an Iranian in Tokyo who becomes acquainted with a “hobgoblin, not a goblin.” The concept sounded interesting, but I think something got lost in the translation here, as the language was so abstract that I found my mind wandering.
Zafer Senocak, a Turkish-German writer whom I’d seen on Wednesday in the At Home in Europe panel, commanded the audience’s attention immediately with opening lines like, “I have no idea why I always imagined the Nazis in pajamas.” Or “Heinrich was a historian writing a history of circumcision in Germany.” As he continued reading, Senocak spun imaginative meditations and tales that asked potent questions about the role of history in modern Berlin life.
The final reader, Michael Wallner read from a historical novel called April in Paris, about a German translator who works for the SS during the German occupation of Paris in World War II. This translator has some adventures in a whorehouse, but at this time I was distracted by the man sitting in front of me, who kept leaning back as far as he could in his chair in order to stretch. However, the room was so tightly packed that the result was that his head and arms were often a few inches away from my face, and I did not want them to be there. His nearby friend showed even less audience etiquette when, while leaning forward in his seat, he sneezed all over the woman sitting just ahead of him. If either of you happen to be reading this blog, I hope you’ll issue a public apology in the comments section.
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| 4-28-07 11:01AM: Timothy Liu said...
It seems that uch effort is taken to bring writers from all over the world yet one suspects very little planning is done once they arrive at the festival--just go up there and do your thing seems to be the spirit--and what you so often end up with are a series of performances without a platform. Would it be too much to ask the writers to get together beforehand, even for a coffee, to coordinate their interests, to see if there might be some overlap?
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