Tag: Granta

Blog/

Currently reading (part 1)

latest reading

Through the letterbox fell two parcels yesterday, one from Germany and one from Wales, although both in English, luckily.
A Bee’s Breakfast is the latest anthology from Beautiful Dragons, a Facebook-based collaboration and the brainchild of Rebecca Bilkau. This is the third ‘Dragons’ anthology I’ve contributed to and I think it has the most beautiful cover art of the series. Previous themes have included the table of elements (my element was Osmium, and I learnt a lot about it in my research!) and constellations. This time it’s all about the counties of the UK, so there are 126 contributors. I’ve only skimmed through so far but already I sense an underlying disquiet – it’s fascinating to see the country through the eyes of others, and particularly now when the burden of Brexit weighs heavy on the nation.

My county was the Isle of Wight, which I have at least visited a few times – I confess if the choice had been between Clackmannanshire and the The Copeland Islands (google it!) I’d have been a tad stumped.  I took a traditional tack and thought of Tennyson, but I had a bit of fun by taking his long poem ‘Enoch Arden’, doing a little ‘erasure’ on it and re-creating a new, short poem which I hope is suggestive of both the island itself and Tennyson’s own life. All the words are actually his – hopefully that counts as ‘found’ rather than ‘plagiarism’.

From Wales has come the latest issue of Envoi, from Cinnamon (my publisher!!) – and the excitement at seeing ‘First Salsa in Cusco’ on page 46 was almost eclipsed by getting my name on the cover! Yes! What writer doesn’t love a byline?? ‘First Salsa’ has been a loooong time in the fermentation – the first drafts were written in December 2012. Anyway, it’s out there now, and I actually still like it, so it will probably be the oldest poem in the new pamphlet.

And finally, Granta, which I usually start by reading the photo journalism and poems, although this issue is the latest special featuring the ‘Best of Young American Novelists’. So fiction all the way. I like the fact that Granta is always introducing me to new work often by people whose names are new to me. It feels exotic, feels mind-opening. It also tends to stay by my bedside until the next issue arrives, as a short story is the most I can manage before falling asleep.

 

Events/

Granta Japan launch

Granta 127 Japan in Brighton
Lucy North, Yukiko Motoya and Asa Yoneda

A fascinating evening yesterday in Brighton at New Writing South for the launch of the latest issue of Granta magazine issue 127, Japan, published simultaneously in English and Japanese. Two of the contributors, Yukiko Motoya and Hiromi Kawakami, read extracts of their work in Japanese, and their translators then read the same passages in English.

I know absolutely no Japanese but there was something beautiful and magical about hearing it spoken, words running over you like music, for the listener to make of it whatever they wished. Yukiko read from a mysterious short story called ‘The Dogs’, and when questioned about the open ending she admitted she didn’t necessarily know what the story really meant. She also talked about her writing process as being rather like two rivers – one herself, her life, and the other the writing (or ‘the muse’ I suppose); the rivers sometimes flowed very close to each other, and that was the time when she was able to cross over into the writing, to step into it, but at other times, the ‘writing river’ was a long way away from her. I really liked this description, it made complete sense in that writing poetry feels like that too. And the idea that you can’t force the rivers together, but when the moment is there, you have to recognise it and grab it.

Hiromi read from her essay ‘Blue Moon’, about her experience of reading haiku in Moscow, a very moving piece, and this then set the discussion going about the issues (or not) of translation, and whether ‘all translation is mistranslation.’

Not only was everything being translated during the evening, but we had questions from the floor in Japanese also. By the end of it I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy and re-ignite my lapsed Granta subscription. The cover is beautiful:

Granta 127 Japan

… and if you think there’s something slightly other-worldly about the image of the mountain, you’re right – it’s actually made of tin foil. Not everything is what it seems, eh?