Archive / Magazine / Current / Europe as a literary centre? / Essay | 15/10/2008

A school of language

Visionary, powerful, on the move: the English author and literary vagabond
James Hopkin on the power of European literature to overcome borders.

O Europa furore! When borders go down, others go up. Now the banks are collapsing and individual countries look to save their own concerns, it seems that the idea of a unified Europe can exist only on paper, on the page, in literature. For, of course, such unification is only a fiction, a grand idea, trembling with every fluctuation in political or economic realities.

Photo: AP

'The man who loves his ''fatherland'', his ''nation'', above all else, has cancelled any commitment he might have to European solidarity'. So wrote Joseph Roth in the 1930s. Roth is perhaps the most European writer I have read. Not only because he lived an itinerant life that took him from a small town in Galicia to Berlin and then to Paris, not solely because he lived (and beautifully documented) the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War, and the social, political, inter-racial tensions leading up to the Second (born Jewish, he was well placed to do this), but because he was European in outlook. Yes, his vision was of a unified, culturally vibrant Europe yet he was wise enough to depict all those who would thwart this multi-lingual idyll: avaricious capitalists, right-wing activists, drunken expatriates, the ignorant middle-classes.

Roaming and writing

Now we are facing a resurgence of the right (all heads turn to Austria), as well as the come-uppance of capitalism (all heads turn west) – the worst recession, so they say, since the 1920s – the time is ripe for a new European literature, and this new European literature must be inspired by the writers who look beyond the borders of their own homelands. Of living writers? I'd put forward László Krasznahorkai, a great Hungarian writer, now living in Berlin, but a man who spends as much time roaming as he does writing. And also his fellow-countryman, Péter Esterházy. Both write universal works with a darkly (the former) and shrewdly ironic (the latter) European edge.

Poland's great writers

Then there's Andrzej Stasiuk, from Poland, who has been exploring Europe's hinterlands (including Roth's Galicia) for over a decade and who appears breathlessly committed to finding out what the idea of Europe means, and where is it? And what can we do there? Likewise, Olga Tokarczuk's new novel, 'Runners' (Bieguni), which has just won Poland's top literary award, the Nike, looks at the fervent migrations taking place all over the continent. What happens to the sense of home? Is meaning to be found only in movement? Or did I leave my true self behind?

Indeed, Poland, a pen in the ink-pot of history, has produced many great European writers. The collected poems of Zbigniew Herbert, perhaps the country's greatest poet, who died ten years ago, is about to appear in Europe's bookshops. Then there's Rożewicz, Konwicki, Szczypiorski whose sometimes localised details belie the European history that carry them.

Learning the languages

But where am I now? Oh yes, in the UK. (But just for a short time. For, I, too, am a literary vagabond.) And here, a paucity of translations! Few publishers take the risk. And even fewer now the world money-markets have dived towards depression. How I envy the abundance of translations I see in the bookshops of Berlin and Warsaw! How can I be European if I am deprived of so many authors? Perhaps I should give up writing, and devote myself instead to learning everyone else's language?

I'd learn the Czech of Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klíma and Jan Neruda, the Croatian of Miroslav Krleža, the Portuguese of Agustina Bessa Luis and Herberto Helder, the French of Colette and Julien Gracq, the Georgian of Otar Chiladze and Aka Morchiladze, the Rumanian of Gellu Naum, the Serbian of David Albahari, the German of non-Germans, Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, the Hungarian of Antal Szerb and Sándor Márai, the Ukrainian of Igor Klekh, the Estonian of Jaan Kross, and the Russian of Andrei Bitov, one of the best living novelists, untouchable on homelands, landscapes, ecology – a writer we are in dire need of.

All is one

'I never go ''abroad'' anymore,' wrote Roth. 'That's a left-over notion from the days of the stage-coach.' Nowadays, that's even more true (assuming a sliding-scale of veracity); we simply wheel our suitcase of books and belongings over the un-patrolled border, swap SIM cards in our mobile-phones, sieve our coins for the right currency, check how to say 'please' and 'thank you' and 'good day' in the next language, and continue on our way. So the question to ask is not: does European literature exist? But: does a European reader exist?

And only you can answer that.

James Hopkin

ames Hopkin, born 1969, is the author of the novel 'Winter Under Water' (Picador) and the stories, 'Even the Crows Say Krakow' (Picador). He ...
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