Amsterdam Wereldboekenstad

Babel aan de Amstel
24 april 2008

Voor dit symposium, in het kader van ‘Amsterdan Wereldboekenstad’, werd ik gevraagd deel te nemen aan een workshop en daarvoor een in het Engels gestelde tekst te schrijven.
Tijdens deze ‘workshop’, een gelegenheid die eigenlijk gewoon een forum betrof, en waarbij nauwelijks meer mensen in het zaaltje zaten dan achter de forumtafel, sprak ik de volgende tekst uit.

Language, experiment and editing in Dutch literature by migrant writers

All wrong notes are good
Charles Ives

I am an editor. My expertise is mainly on the field of literary editing and translations, be it novels, poetry or literary works of the nonfictional kind. I know the workings of publishing houses and acquisitional editing from experience. At present I work for the “Intercultural Literature Conduct” of the Dutch Literary Fund, by searching for and promoting of new intercultural writers.
I used to work for a small publishing house with a great interest in the “internationality” of literature. Many or most of the literary books we did publish showed, though written in Dutch, a tendency towards this “internationality” – or whatever you want to call it, crosscultural, foreign, new European – both in content, style as well as marketing possibilities. This interest was a result rather of the love for good, strong and beautiful literature, of a more European, or even global, public interest, which at the same time changed the Dutch literary landscape.

If we stick to this metaphor, we can clearly see the changes the Dutch literary landscape has ondergone say, the past fifteen years or so. One of the most striking changes has been the rise of a totally new generation of young writers of Moroccan origine, starting off with writers like Hafid Bouazza, Mustafa Stitou and Abdelkader Benali. At the same time a wave of Indonesian, Chinese, Surinamese, Turkish and African writers began to wash over this landscape, while at present Irakese, Iranese, Pakistanese, Croatic and many more fill the palette, almost all of them writing directly in the Dutch language. And that’s where in my opinion something very interesting started off.

These writers live here, and make use of the local language – Dutch. They speak Dutch, they write in Dutch, and on the way they change it.
Many words and idiomatic expressions in the Dutch language were created by the Jews, with the result that the Dutch idiom is leavened with Yiddish elements, and so is Dutch literature. At present our language is exposed to the influence of Indonesian, Chinese, Surinamese, Moroccan, Turkish, Arabic and many other spoken and written languages. In the big cities one can hear fair haired young people speak a language or dialect composed of many of these elements. Moroccan writer Khalid Boudou speaks in his novel The Schnitzel Paradize of a “linguistic rumbling pot”, a new kind of slang.

The Dutch language has an open idiomatic structure – it always welcomes foreign idiom (and has always done so) and the richness of the heritage of the Dutch language is “multicultural” in character. This holds as much for literature, and therefore, publishing. Many of those writers have their literary merits, all have their distinct style – which is not always and not by everybody felt as being “Dutch”, and indeed has a rather “international” feel to it. But the truth is, these writers transform the Dutch language, enrich it in an idiomatic – not necessarily neological – way, and by transforming the linguistic idiom they transform literature, and at the same time, the ways of publishing, editing, promoting. Some of these writers mastered this language, which is not their mother tongue, in a very short time, for others it functions as a second writing language. But the merit is: they write, they use whatever they find, they transform, they combine, they show a different eye on culture, on language, on life. These writers inject new rhythms, new ideas, new symbols, new imagery, and new metaphors – in short, an entirely new idiom – into our rich mother tongue. The result is a heretofore unknown kind of rhetoric. Foreign writers using the Dutch language show possibilities hitherto unknown to the original users of the same language.
But it is not only the “newness”, that urges a publishing house to look for “foreign” writers. The stories those people relate, are of a more global, international character, they surpass the national boundaries in all ways, and though substantially they may contribute to Dutch literature as a whole, they do the same on an international level. While Dutch critics may sometimes feel unsure what to say about it and try to assault these writings on more conventional grounds, mistaking Dutch literature for straightforward white writing, elsewhere several of these authors are well-translated, get good reviews and are read for what they are: writers of a new kind of global literature. They’re all writers with a voice of their own, not very Dutch, sometimes experimental, sometimes straightforward, but always with that international tinge.

Editing writers from that many different cultural backgrounds is a challenge which suits me very well. Everyone of them opens up a whole new world for the editor’s eyes. Before starting the actual work I have to read the work several times, to get accustomed to the writer’s rhythm and idiom. Whatever I do, I never allow myself to interfere with the special tone, the author’s own idiom and rhythm. This business is not like editing the next Dutch author complaining about the girlfriend who has rightly forsaken him – the kind of literature I’m definitely not interested in – but about finding the author’s register, the inner beauty as much as the technical, the way language and symbolism are used, all elements that make the manuscript special. The same holds on a structural level. The way these authors tell their stories differs in many aspects from that used in the so called “normal” Dutch literature, in terms of chronological order, the use of flash backs, dreams, songs and the like, economics of characters, perspective, et cetera, et cetera. If the register and idiom differs from what we’re used to in Dutch literature, there is no reason to flatten that out to a more conventional use of language, if an author from a rather remote background sounds in our ears at first possibly a bit too flowery, again there is no reason to level this and turn it into a dead landscape, a literary wasteland. An editor should be quite reticent in this respect and not weed and trim until nothing is left of the different flavours and colours. This unusual use of the possibilities of our language is exactly why I like them, and probably why they are being published, and why the public buys and reads them. And it is funny to see how the most famous and most loved of these authors have at least one thing in common: their prose or poetry is to a large extend experimental, free and uncommon— un-Dutch, I would say.

What James Joyce did artificially (though Joyce too was an immigrant, a self declared exile), these new writers achieve naturally. Editing and publishing these so called “New Europeans” is never boring – it’s a joy to see that all the effort you put in editing, promoting and selling them, is worth the while – for all of us, writer, publisher, editor, agent, translator, and last but not least, reader: never a dull moment. Maybe it is the reticence of the editor, the care of the publisher, and the strength of the author, that in the end convinces, or – and that’s the word I like – seduces the reader.