Ondřej Buddeus - a brief interview

Ondřej Buddeus (1984) is a Czech translator, poet and a sporadic essayist. He translates from German and Norwegian (J. Winkler, J. E. Vold, A. Mortensen et al.) and is editor-in-chief of the contemporary Czech poetry magazine Psí vino and is writing his doctoral thesis in Scandinavian studies. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Polish and English. In 2011, he published his début text collection 55 007 characters with spaces and a picture book for adults, Orangutan in captivity tends towards obesity. He was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Prize, Bank Austria Literaris and Dresdner Lyrikpreis. In 2013, he was awarded the Jiří Orten Prize for his collection Swiftly.

Ondřej spoke to festival blogger Nia Davies...

Nia: I've been reading the poem Chatroom: The History of the Coca Cola Trademark in Central and Eastern Europe from 1990 - 2011. Like you I was born in 1984. So, though our educations began at different sides of Europe and we didn’t have to endure field trips to the same places, I share the same feeling of distant familiarity with the later events you describe in the Chatroom: the Gulf and Yugoslavia wars, Operation Enduring Freedom etc. In a chatroom you address in this poem I could say we share an awareness of world events, we are similar, ‘I am normal, and you?’ you seem to say. There's distant feeling of world 'experience'. You endure ‘field trips to Prachovské / skály and the Rwanda genocide’. The poem seems to explore the banal/shallow knowledge of online ‘friendship’. We both went to dance classes as the world trade towers came down and started work when as the war in Iraq began. This we share. I’d like to drive more too but I am scared of parking. So we must be ‘friends’. What do you think of this kind of ‘friendship’ we have? Do you find the kind of expressions and relationships one makes on the internet material for making poetry?

Ondřej: The one who is telling this poem, is actually not me. I always thought that here is speaking someone younger that me (let’s say 5 years) – so the situation is a little more complicated, because I’m reading that person's experience with the same eyebrow-lifting as you are – and perhaps with the same feelings. Is it his/her indifference (how can she/he equate a field trip to some local landmark with a genocide?) that is provoking me? Or it is not insensibility at all? (He/she knows well about what’s happening around her/him and has a very limited chance to do something). So is she/he a caring person or asocial idiot? Is she/he a guilty victim of infotainment and egoism or quite the reverse? I don’t know.

And based on this ambiguity it starts to be fascinating for me somehow – that person is speaking my language (and yours as I see, as well). Then I start to ask me if she/he isn’t too similar to me (since the “common/shared language” is an important cultural phenomenon and one of the pieces composing the identity) – and if yes – am I a person with the caring awareness or an idiot? Again, I don’t know. Do I really have to be friends with this person (yes, it is fictional, but nevertheless…)? The chatroom communication is extremely limited to the textual level (no voice, intonation, body language, gestures – so it is like all the social media an interface of role-playing-game), it brings a very special kind of friendship – a friendship-playing game. And this is something that you, me as well as that guy or girl do share and do intuitively know very well. Therefore I can hardly imagine that this identity– and relations– gaming/gambling will not be a part of what (and how!) we are writing. Or at least some of us.

Nia: can you tell me more about your ‘picture book for adults’?

Ondřej: It is a book with a very long title, namely 'Orangutan in Captivity Tends toward Obesity'. I wrote a series of three-lines poems (not really haikus) often using small paradoxes, minimalistic puns etc. There is one in English as well. It’s a kind of small subversion of the “artworld” where when you’re not speaking one special language, you are more or less invisible. It’s called “you knows”:

if be there no
English there
artist nobody!

I showed the texts to a friend, illustrator and artist Alžběta Skálová. Together with graphic designer Martina Kupsová we started to elaborate on a book which in its visuals uses the very same simper-subversivity as the texts do. And then, after all the work, we found out, that the pics and three-liners on the page compose something complex, you actually can’t separate them from each other when reading it. We knew from the beginning that it is going to be a book for “homo ludens” and because it is using the strategies of children literature, but the motives are from the adult world, we’ve created this category 'picture book for adults'. It’s nice and almost unmerchantable, because booksellers know only picture books for children or books for adults and if there is something in between, it’s rather confusing.

From Orangutan in captivity tends towards obesity

Ondřej Buddeus will be performing tonight at the final event of the festival - 'All ears' at Bangor University. You can read his poem in Welsh and English translation on the festival website.

Christine Huber - a brief interview

Austrian poet Christine Huber's work mixes poetry with sound, music and visual arts. Her recent works include Durchwachte Nacht. Gedankenstrich made together with Magdalena Knapp-Menzel (Edition Art Science, 2010), striche streichen an Audiobook with a composition by Christian Utz (audiobeans / zeitzoo, 2011),  and alles auf anfang poems with drawings by Ilse Kilic and Fritz Widhalm (das fröhliche Wohnzimmer-Edition, 2013).

Christine Huber

You can read her poem ‘boden’ - ‘the ground ‘ in the original German with English and Welsh translations on the festival website. 

Christine spoke to festival blogger Nia Davies about her work. 

Nia: You work with sound and music alongside poetry and you have also collaborated on pieces for radio. How do you place words and sounds together in your recent work? Is it a form of interpretation - i.e. do you make language respond to sound or sound respond to words? Or is there another process at work such as storytelling or the construction of an atmosphere? In other words, can you describe how do these mediums interact in your collaborations?

Christine: For all my collaborations I can say that they were really collaborations - so I cannot answer what came first or second. Mostly the composer came to me with a sort of setting - they had the idea, e.g. a story or a subject / theme and also some texts, but often these texts were too long or they did not fit perfectly. So my job was to make them short enough for a composition or to find new words that would fit the given setting.

Why did they come to me? My poetry works with sounds - in this context the sound and the rhythm is the most important factor. These composers never had problems following my poetry. They understood perfectly that it is about music and not about making sense, that making-sense is something deriving and at the same time vanishing - like melodies in the context of new music - and that most of the work consists of constructions made from words. Or to talk outside the context of music I describe my work as sculptures made from words, trying to be as abstract as possible.

Nia: What is for you the ideal way to experience poetry? Reading alone or listening to performances or recordings? And: Is there something about radio that allows you to do what you want to do with a piece?

Christine: All the mentioned varieties 'to experience' poetry (by the way a wonderful formulation) are, to my mind, different emanations. And I would not like to miss one. But I, myself, cannot read poetry without a voice - that means, when I read I always have a sort of speaker in my head. If i know how the author reads his poems so it is this voice, otherwise I invent one. 

In terms of radio, in Austria, the Austrian broadcast union has not much space for poetry and the space that is given is within a strict scheme: 7 to 9 minute pieces, read by an actor or actress, a lot of music between the poems, twice a week. Private radio stations are not concerned with poetry at all.

Nia: Can you tell me something about the poem 'boden' - or 'the ground' as translated into English by Peter Waugh and yourself. My feeling is of a voice or voices placed or moving through somewhere between groundedness and flight, the experience of being present in the 'noisy' world but also being somehow winged - 'wings like hands on ground'. Can you tell me something about these earthly wings? And how did the experience of movement work on language when you wrote (and translated) this poem?

Christine: What you describe as "earthly wings" - I cannot give much commentary. I tried to start from scratch and like all beginners I had not very much awareness of what I was doing (or at least I tried to work as if I did not have too much awareness of what I was doing). I just try to trust my experience - in all kind of senses - in writing poetry. The translation (Peter Waugh made the first draft and I worked over it) helped me to realise that there is a construction there much more then I had originally planned. Nevertheless I skipped two stanzas - they seemed OK in the German version, but the translation showed that not every word had found its proper space until then.

To me it is interesting that your questions do not mention the grammar, which I like to call 'broken grammar'. I always make mistakes, on purpose. I use the rhythm of a sentence and turn halfway through it into a new period. What a hard time we had to find solutions in the English language! On the one hand it should not sound wrong, on the other hand it was meant to show that the grammatical rules are, like 'making sense', something that can always be discussed anew, at least within poetry.

Christine Huber will be performing at events tonight in Bangor, in Caernarfon on Monday 21st and at other events across the festival. Find out more on the festival website where you can also read Christine’s poem ‘boden’ translated into Welsh and English.

Vassilis Amanatidis - a brief interview

Vassilis Amanatidis is the author of six poetry collections and two books of short stories. He studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His poems and stories have been translated into ten languages and he has translated into Greek the works of well known writers and poets, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, e. e. cummings, Anne Carson and Witold Gombrowicz.  

Poet and festival blogger Nia Davies asked him about his poetry. 

Nia: Alexis Ziras has said that your work has no ‘apparent roots in contemporary Greek poetry’ and it is ‘connected with those works of literature which submit their grammar to the immense territory of the imagination’. How do you respond to this? Which contemporary poets (or artists more generally) do you feel a strong connection to in this immense territory and why? Can you describe this territory of the imagination?

Vassilis: The closer you are to your mother (and your first-mother language) the most secure you feel. This maternal bond makes you feel extremely special to your mother (language). Growing up is a procedure that involves an irrevocable sense of loss. This loss is valuable. Upon it we build ourselves, our poetry. There we decide which kind of poet we want to become. In order to grow up as beings and as artists we need love, acceptance and limits. If we don't get them we are filled with panic. But panic is the synonym of our illusion of omnipotence, autonomy and differentiation. We don't need panicked poets. We need poets who understand that maternal sameness is what makes us eternal children, but otherness and togetherness is what we need. This is the only way: from the 2-as-1 we go to the 1-as/with-all.

So I am not different and unconnected. I am just differently same, differently connected. And this is the immense territory of the imagination. A bridge between uniqueness and individuality, between the child and the grown-up, between this and that.

You can read more about Vassilis Amanatidis's work and a poem in English and Welsh translation at: http://www.northwalesinternationalpoetryfestival.org. 
Vassilis will be performing in Bangor on Thursday 17th of October:

International Encounters 
Thursday 17th October, 19.30

Terrace Room 3, Bangor University, £6/8

Some of the most exciting contemporary poets from Wales and across Europe create encounters between languages in a multimedia context, with translation into Welsh and English. Astrid Lampe (Netherlands), Marie-Louise Chapelle (France), Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl (Iceland), Vassilis Amanatidis (Greece), Violet Grigorian (Armenia), Hasmik Simonian (Armenia) and Ifor ap Glyn (Wales).