AN ENGLISHMAN IN VERONA

With a view to the interior…

Renée Sigel talks to Tim Parks.

Whenever Tim Parks has come up in conversations I have had about books and writers, there is without fail, this flutter of excitement and exclamations of how he is a…must read !!! kind of writer. Descriptions inevitably vary from ‘daring’, to ‘brilliant’ to ‘extremely funny in a dark sort of way’…etc, and hungry book swaps follow with an undercurrent of possessiveness: “You give it back to me when you’re done, and don’t forget…Promise me! And each time I could swear I was amidst a bunch of teenage groupies.

Literati’s senior editor Andrea Gardner had even been in contact with him several years ago. I was amazed to discover how close by he lives. I never imagined I would be boarding a train with her to Milan to meet this ‘literary pop star’. We met up with him on the concourse outside the University where he lectures: it was mid-exams and we agreed to a quick lunch. A brisk walk to a sidewalk café nearby, sandwiches, Italian espressos and forty minutes later, I got kissed on both cheeks with thanking us for having made the trip and apologies for him having to rush off. Our chat ranged from writing and translation to life in Italy as a foreigner and then of course, his passion for soccer, something which he and Andrea have in common, her son being a phenomenally talented eleven year old.

For all his success and formidable literary reputation, he doesn’t wear an iota of smug celebrity. His wit and charm underscore a self-effacing manner which modestly carries a razor-sharp mind, wonderful humour and monumental literary talent. Pretty impressive for a ‘nice bloke’!

During the lunch he mentioned Kunder’s attitude to translation and I figured it was as good a place as any to begin.

Literati:  I am fascinated by your preoccupation with Milan Kundera for starters. Do you like his writing?

TIM PARKS: I read four or five of the novels way back and enjoyed them, yes, but what I've been fascinated by more recently is the position he takes over translation where he imagines that a style that has been developed involving a pattern of deviation from normal ways of saying things can be translated with the same deviations in another language and that these deviations will have the same meaning.  that is, Kundera's belief in the total translatability of a text, so that it has the same status in every language seems emblematic to me of the writer's desire, and the modern individual's, to be everywhere and always himself, with the same identity, etc. Whereas one of the truths that most narratives convey is that identity actually exists and is formed within a system, a group.  Change group and you change.  Change language and the text changes, however scrupulously faithful the translator may be. That said I am one of the most scrupulously faithful translators.

Literati: You are held in great esteem for your translations of such writers as Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, and Roberto Calasso for example and have brought you a certain distinction. In approaching a text you are about to translate, which aspects of the process between source text and target language are paramount to you?

TIM PARKS: This is very simple. The key thing is, do I have the resources in English to create a prose that sounds to me like the original (this is vague I know, but I’m trying to be honest rather than academic). It is above all a question of intuition. Do I get this voice (in the Italian) is it something I can reconstruct in English. I have turned down some translations (Busi, late Pasolini, Brizzi) because it seemed to me I could not reproduce the voice.

Literati: I sensed from your critique of him in respect of his attitude to translators, you wish he were not so ‘’godlike’’ in his approach to his material: could this be perhaps because, as starting point, he espouses the values of self-effacement rather than supporting literary or critical dogma, and in reality does exactly the reverse with an apparent air of “supreme authority” (Kundera’s own term), or what Perry Meisel in Beautifying Lies and Polyphonic Wisdom, 1988, describes as ‘singular instructiveness’?

TIM PARKS: Perhaps I have already answered this.  I would only say that the fact that the books offer self-effacement as a value suggests how much the morals offered in modern novels, particularly literary novels, can be taken for granted; that is, we know, at the end of the day, what values will be offered in a literary book of the liberal west.  We know what 'the good' is. However, every art form is an act of seduction, and borders on coercion. It rearranges the mind of the reader or spectator, who succumbs. Among recent authors Thomas Bernhard seems to be the one who most thoroughly explored this aspect of writing.  And Beckett too. The classical text is The Tempest.  Prospero, the artist magician, gets everybody to do exactly what he wants to do.  Then makes a gesture of self-effacement at the end...

Literati: This idea of ‘sameness’, this emblematic significance of the writer's desire, and the modern individual's, to be everywhere and always himself, with the same identity is symptomatic of what in your view? Do you believe all writers desire the sameness of identity and presence everywhere- I couldn’t think of any worse fate personally?

TIM PARKS: Obviously it is to do with the idea that the individual exists separately from society, that he has a ‘true’ identity. It goes together with Freudian psychology and Joycean visions of the psyche. In the artist, this translates into wishing that one has produced something at once absolute and available to everybody all over the world. A delirium. But seductive.

Literati: Do you think this relationship between coercion and self –effacement more of a self-conscious artistic tactic nowadays as compared to the heyday of Lawrence, Henry/Arthur Miller, Jack Koureac or is it intrinsic to the act of creating ?

TIM PARKS: Either it’s a tactic or a wonderful act of self deception. For most artists, at the deepest level, everything short of worship is an offence.

Literati: In his collection of essays The Art of the Novel, Kundera speaking of how novels are made and why, describes how the novel and its history constitute a specific form of knowledge not to be confused with philosophy or psychology and passionately disavows any inherent political agenda. There is a commonality of this to authors who refuse to be labeled or catagorised. To what extent do you believe this has to do with the necessity to maintain autonomy as an individual voice or is the issue here more to do with the supreme authority of linguistic style over everything else?

TIM PARKS: Kundera is absolutely right here, though we needn't think of art as a superior form of knowledge. A writer becomes more and more aware of the inadequacy of language to represent reality, of the arbitrary way words split up the worlds of phenomena and feeling into discreet blocks of meaning, the way tired mechanisms trap the mind in received ideas. The discourse of the newspapers is overwheLiteratiingly a rephrasing of received ideas. The style of a good novelist is one that is seeking to expose those mechanisms and avoid the traps, though how far this can be done it's impossible to tell, given that we are condemned to thinking in language. This is why the kind of novel we're talking about resists straightforward political statements and proposals. To get things done in the world, on the other hand, one has to be straightforward and propose things... Samuel Beckett's trilogy remains the work that most wonderfully discusses all this.

Literati: Do any of these sentiments hold true for you as a novelist?

TIM PARKS: I'm very aware of trying to set up a narrative and a style that brings the reader close to experience by breaking down the patterns of expectancy people usually have. As I say, this isn't done 'to be experimental' or intellectual, but simply because one is constantly aware of the way life and language are quite separate reaLiteratis. The more experience you have, the less language seems able to speak it. Yet you write with language.

Literati: It seems aLiteratiost obvious these days how few writers today seem prepared to tackle such issues or other, more contemporaneously relevant ones: take your recent novel Europa* for example, which is described a dark, suspenseful comedy and which as quoted in The Times is “guaranteed to intrigue and more often than not, have you squirming and wincing.” Within that dark, suspenseful comedy, there is much more at stake than just offering readers an entertaining read: nostalgia, cliché and obsession become a canvas for deception and betrayal which extends way beyond Jerry and Vikram’s own tragedies…How much of the larger hidden history to the novel lies in your life on European soil as a foreigner and being able to maintain two dissimilar viewpoints (internal and external) of continental life and thinking?

*Europa was short-listed for the Booker Prize,

TIM PARKS: Well, obviously the whole tension of the thing is autobiographical, not in the sense of narrative events, but anxieties, concerns. Otherwise, why else would one write it. In this case deception in love and deception in politics are constantly run alongside each other, and what the reader must constantly ask himself is, is this analogy true, or is it a sign of sickness on the part of the narrator.

Literati: D.H.Lawrence as you mention in your essay on the Mondello prize wrote that the novel as a form is good as it cannot tell didactic lies and for Kundera, the sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what a novel can discover.  Contemporary life during the last century has experienced an intense politicization of the global landscape: when writers describe their work as arms against dictatorship or memory against forgetting, what would you say the novel has become today?

TIM PARKS: Clearly the novel is a thousand things. Clearly since many people have little aesthetic sense they tend to judge novels on their politics rather than their artistic achievement.  It's easier and safer.  But it's silly to try to say what the novel has become when you have Harry Potter on the one hand and Coetzee's Disgrace on the other.

Literati: JM Coetzee is clearly an author you admire greatly: what is it about Disgrace which distinguishes itself to such an extent?

TIM PARKS: It is the clarity with which the story (the very exciting story!) takes on the whole question of the social use of language and the terrible things that have happened. It is also a novel that has no time at all for political correctness, but at the same time is not just eager to bash the phenomenon. On song, Coetzee is a genius.

Literati: My own fascination with Kundera is how he observes the politicization of kitsch and its linguistic manipulation into propaganda into something of an art form: this need ‘’to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection'' - To what extent do you believe the mythology of the novelist and the art of the novel itself, has suffered a similar fate in our current literary milieu where the notion of celebrity is more identity than status? 

TIM PARKS: You hardly need to trouble me to get the answer, a great deal.  However, worth noting here is how Kundera is in love with his own rhetoric which is rather more foregrounded than the fairly obvious point he is making (a point made in novels since back in the eighteenth century). As he writes he gazes in the mirror and admires himself. It's disquieting. The reader too is encouraged to congratulate himself on combining superior intellect with superior self-knowledge.

Literati: You mentioned several times several statements Kundera made were somewhat disingenuous?  I have found the same to be true of Nadine Gordimer for example. Isn’t this something which applies to many writers, who find themselves caught up in their absolute truths, which in the public domain, under open scrutiny are not plausible and they find themselves to be revealed to be just like everyone else – bringing into question pretty much the nature of Kundera’s ‘’supreme authority’’?

TIM PARKS: Again, yes. Nadine Gordimer is very much a case in point. Many novelists look fairly second rate when they move away from fiction. Not so Coetzee, Beckett, Borges. But those are big names to appeal to. Brodsky, Heaney.

Literati:  Do you see an endangerment of the species in the light of the publishing industry’s narrowing mainstream to blockbuster bestsellers and the diminishing relevance of editorial driven publishing policies?

TIM PARKS: I see hard times ahead for my bank balance, if that's what you mean. Obviously the extent to which publishers are sales driven, the extent to which they passively accept a TV constructed taste rather than seeking to construct taste themselves is not a happy situation. Also, the effect of globalisation on the industry is eliminating the local and even national contexts. One either has to be a megastar or disappear.

Literati:  Having written about the value of a prize for literature in translation, what is your appraisal of the current emphasis on prizes in general?

TIM PARKS:Obviously it is part of the desire to create celebrity and hence sales, and also to establish some consensus about what is good. This would be all very well if the judges really had time to read all the books that are eligible.  Anybody who has sat on the jury of a prize knows how arbitrary the process is.

Literati:  With the emphasis on rebellion being what it is these days, is there a danger of marketing executives turning the moral conscience of the novel into a dissidence which becomes a designer label literary genre?

TIM PARKS: This goes back to what we said about Kundera and self-effacement. Rebellion against authority is one of those necessary ingredients of the serious novel, the way a corpse is necessary in a detective story. For those who are genuinely rebellious there is the problem of appearing conformist as a writer.

Literati: Isn’t the danger here of non-conformity resulting in being labelled experimental or worse?

TIM PARKS: There is always a danger of being labelled something or other. The thing to keep a grip on is that, in art, acts of apparent rebellion are the usual thing. They can be tiresome. (Movies with Robin Williams). Society has learned to ‘cleanse’ itself in the cinema with Ken Loach, or in print with Saramago, while then going about its business as it always has done. This is a rather perverse mechanism, perhaps it replaces the ceremony of sacrifice, which someone like Bernhard sought to expose. As one of his characters – an actor – remarks the more I insult the public, the more they applaud. My own strategy is simply to avoid getting engaged in this dynamic. Take no position. Just look at the world, experiences, and try to say it.

Literati: Would you agree that perhaps the best safeguard of the integrity of the novel is its very elasticity of form?

TIM PARKS: You would be surprised how little I put such questions to myself. Words like 'safeguards,' expressions like 'integrity of the novel' they mean very little to me.  What keeps any art alive is the artist who comes to his work because he wants to express what he knows and feels in such a way as to enchant others. Since each person brings something of their own to fuse with tradition, there are always bound to be new takes on the world. The important thing is to keep the desire for celebrity at a minimum. 

Tim Parks:
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written eleven novels including Europa , Destiny, Judge Savage and, most recently, Rapids, as well as three non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy (most recently A Season with Verona), and a collection of essays: Adultery and Other Diversions. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso. He lectures on literary translation in Milan and has published a book, Translating Style, which analyses Italian translations of the English modernists, plus a collection of essays Hell and Back that ranges from Dante to Leopardi, Borges and Rushdie.

Photo credit: Brigitte Friedrich

Other Works by Tim Parks in This Issue:
Different worlds - an essay on the limits of translation by Tim Parks (pdf file)
The Mondello Prize (English & Italian)
Tim Parks' Fiction

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