(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Møllebyen Literature Festival has in recent years established itself as one of the most important literary festivals in this country. Not only that: The House of Foundation (H // O // F), which hosts the festival, has with its outstanding bookstore and exquisite book publishing become a cardinal point in the production of interesting small books in Norwegian. This year, H // O // F has among other things released Olivier Cadiots Poetry art – a poetics formulated as a linguistic exploration of the translation work. A good example of thinking is as much form as content.
"Learning Norwegian through French, discovering Norwegian grammar as a translation of French inflected forms that do not exist in Norwegian, is an approach that seems to be in good agreement with Cadiot's work," Gunnar Berge notes in the book's afterword. Initiatives such as H // O // F give cause for hope on behalf of literature at a time that is still defined by Crimea and bestsellers.
Dream-boggling. The theme of this year's literature festival is Europe. One can hardly, considering the current situation, imagine a more relevant topic. "Our goal is not to put together contributions that point in one intellectual, aesthetic or political direction, but rather a range of inputs that have in common that they are surprising and do not relate to established thought patterns," we can read on the festival's website .
Certainly – the catalog published in conjunction with the festival, along with several related books published in parallel, serves as an archive for exploring Europe as a dream and reality with literature as a platform. As in Cadiot's book, form and content are explored, but the goal here is to clarify the image of a continent that is becoming dreamless and riddled with myths.
Power and powerlessness. Several people have claimed that Angela Merkel is no longer just Chancellor of Germany but has become the head of the entire European region. We see this in the negotiations with Greece, where the Greek parliament and people are subject to the EU hawks. Do we see a new form of colonialism based on debt?
"I can no longer see a road in any way," writes Pernille Berglund in her poem "Krononatur (from an ongoing process)". Here she tells about her grandfather who tried to regain the right to use his seat in the European Court of Human Rights, after an unresolved case in the Swedish judiciary. He died before anything else happened. The individual citizen does not have much to say against power. "It's about money and knowledge: having knowledge of how the court works and having the means and time to go to trial."
City and country. The dream of Europe is becoming a nightmare. IN Enlarged face writes Jeppe Brixvold together myth and reality, with Zeus as a wild ox in the center. In the original Greek myth, he rapes the woman Europe, before she later gives birth to the children who will give rise to the peoples of the continent. Europe was conceived during an atrocity that extends all the way into our days, where the Greek world of gods has been replaced by the euro and Deutsche Bank.
Today, it is the poor countries that play the role of the weak, while the EU tops and the economic troika have become Zeus in a new form. "In fact, the EU has moved towards an ever-increasing difference between center and periphery. Germany is the economic and thus ideological center, the often reprimanded periphery is currently Greece and Spain. For the same reason, a protest movement like Podemos has formed in Spain, which suddenly reveals a new south-north ideological difference in Europe, "writes Brixvold.
Money and culture. The dream of Europe today has become an economic dream, according to many of this year's contributors to Møllebyen Literature Festival. What was originally a trade union has become a framework for a policy in which even what is not economic is reformulated in economic terms.
I «EU. Europe. Identity politics »Staffan Lundgren points out how the EU makes culture a financial matter. "We must realize that culture is an important source of nourishment and stimulus for Europe's social and political bodies," reads a vision document authored by the European Commission's Culture Committee project. New depiction of Europe.
Literature can not protect us from a reality out of control, but it can help to see it better.
What do you answer to something like that? George Caffentzis suggests in the article "The Three Dimensions of the Class Struggle" that capitalism consists of several time courses: that there is also a time outside capitalism, in the common areas – the commons, as he calls them – that have not yet been converted into monetary value or translated into commodity status or commodity form. There are resources, places, thoughts that everyone can use regardless of class or money supply – for example, the commons in nature, but also language, love and thus literature and art.
Community enlargement. "The truly subversive purpose of the Occupy site is to transform public spaces into public spaces.
is. A public space is, after all, a space that is owned and opened / closed by the state, it is a res publica, a public matter. A public space, on the other hand, is opened by those who occupy it, that is, those who live in it and share it according to their own rules, "Caffentzis writes with Silvia Federici in" Commons against and beyond capitalism. "
These are the commons we must hold on to and continue to compose. The weakest can still write a story that redefines the coordinates of the European dream, so that what is common can be expanded. Literature is one such platform.
Defenseless language. Ingvild Burkey paraphrases Inger Christensen's Alphabet. "The apricot trees exist, the apricot trees exist," Christensen wrote, revealing a poetic wonder at the fact of reality. But throughout the collection of poems, there is a constant pressure on the viewer. "The atomic bomb exists, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, Nagasaki, August 9, 1945." Around the simultaneous events, threatening as they are, Christensen raises a conceptual language skeleton based on a mathematical system, namely the Fibonacci series. Despite the threats that are gradually included in the writing, she creates a "poetic shell", an immunizing form that protects against the dangers that are painted.
With Burkey, poetry is no longer a safe place. "The apricot trees are cut down, the apricot trees are burned," she acknowledges. The poem is not protected by the literary institution, she suggests, but in return it appears better as orienteringtools. In Burkey, poetry is fine-tuned as a reality-reproducing tool, because the person who writes locates himself in the language itself as more exposed and defenseless than in the poem that is rewritten. Are not the apricot trees, then? Yes, but «no one can // live on apricots anymore».
Dream Work. The individual must be given a time that can compete with the time of capitalism and the time of neo-colonial Europe. By telling each other stories or creating images of our own reality, literature enters into a conflicting relationship with the financed dream of Europe that we, when its visibility is demonstrated, must think through.
It does not have to be so dramatic – it can go slowly, even if the thought work and poetry relentlessly draw a separate room that has room for dreams again. "Bornholm clock depicts Eternity in an old Peasant Wife's Living Room," writes Eva Tind. The details, the trivial, the personal and the slow must be allowed to own space. A ticking clock will be allowed to put pressure on the time of big capital – which is already putting pressure on us, on Europe.
Literature can be a possible guide, because without a will to reinvent the ability to dream of Europe, it looks dark. Such dream work is in operation in Moss in August.
Røed is a regular reviewer in Ny Tid.
kjetilroed@gmail.com.
