Writing with an accent: an interview with Aleksandar Hemon

Pete Mitchell talks to Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon about translation, experimentation, memoir and why you shouldn't be ashamed to speak with an accent.

Aleksandar Hemon is famous for writing horrifyingly good books and being extremely enthusiastic about football. The prospect of interviewing him scares me witless, so I dredge my brains for football chat before we talk. All I can come up with is that the one single time I ever went to see my home team, Newcastle United, play at home, they doled out a four-nil pasting to a Bosnian team named FK Željezničar. And - heyo! - Hemon is Bosnian. This can't possibly go wrong. So, by way of impressing the great man with my knowledge of the game, I triumphantly produce this, my greatest footy experience.

'Yeah', he growls down the phone from New York, 'That's my team'.

'Oh.' Silence. 'We won', I say.

'Yeah.'           

Not the most auspicious start. But Hemon is a pleasure to talk to: sharp and scholarly, with a dry, Eeyore-ish humour. He speaks in long run-on sentences, picking his words carefully and correcting himself as he goes. He's in New York on the American leg of a tour that's already taken him around the UK, and, given how bored he must be with being interviewed, he's heroically patient and engaged.

We move on to Best European Fiction, the compilation Hemon has edited for Dalkey Archive Press for the past four years. 2013 is to be his last year as curator of the project, and he says he's immensely proud to have worked on it. 'I was really reading, y'know, more than I was editing. The way Dalkey set up the operation, which I find very admirable, is that they developed a network of scouts and translators. What would come down to me, as editor, would be a pile of about 100 manuscripts, with about three or four from each country or each language, so it was kind of pre-selected. I wish I could read everything in the original languages, but obviously that's not possible. So that put me in a situation where I had to read for a few years, a kind of survey of contemporary European productions from Albania to Lichtenstein, the UK, France... it was a perfect fit.'

Were there any challenges?

'Sometimes it was hard to pick one submission; the rules required that I not have, y'know, three stories from Norway. But the good news is that the stories that did not get picked were still translated. One of the great things about the anthology is that the anthology itself is just the tip of the iceberg, as the cliché goes - it's a vast translation project, which employed a lot of translators and kept them working. [Dalkey] pay for each individual translation, not just what I publish, and those translations stayed in circulation anyway... and they were read by agents, and read all over the world by people who read English. I'm just in the process of responding to interviews from China, because the Chinese translation of the anthology is getting published... I know a writer from Macedonia who was published in 30 languages after he was published in the anthology. I don't know how much that was a direct consequence of the anthology, but many people have told me that that's where they first discovered him. And because English is the lingua franca of the contemporary world, a Norwegian translator can read, say, Romanian writers, and to look into Romanian literature, and it has a ripple effect - and that's what I've liked about the project all along, the fact that the book is not the whole operation.'

Best European Fiction tends to celebrate all the things that, in English language fiction, might be might be patronisingly dismissed as 'experimental' (read: unsaleable). While much Anglophone fiction is still concerned with psychological realism, understated observation and prose that doesn't exactly advertise its own presence - what, in talking with Hemon, I cruelly and inaccurately call 'dinner-party fiction' - the stories in Best European Fiction are full of violent satire, Gogolesque perversions of logic, linguistic turbulence and general weirdness. I ask Hemon if he thinks there's more of a culture of experimentation in current European writing.

 'Well, I talked to a Slovenian writer whose work I like a lot, and he writes these short stories that are, y'know, they're not dinner-party stories. In a country like Slovenia, where more than fifty per cent of books are in translation, he's not far behind Stephen King in selling books. So there's no gap between best-selling books and not bestselling books. No-one sells millions of books because the country is too small, and no-one gets rich selling books there, and that kind of relieves them of the pressure to placate the demands of the market, to be tested in the market and to have literary value be assessed by the market. In countries like the US and the UK, in the end, this is the argument, implicit or explicit: 'well, it's nice that you're experimenting, but you didn't sell any books. Go to the back of the line'. Smaller countries don't have that pressure, and that allows them to be more focused on the possibilities of literature than on the possibilities of the market.'

Hemon's introduction to the 2013 volume, too, takes obvious pleasure in invoking the difficulty of translation in all senses, the imprecision of crossing linguistic and cultural borders. It's a classic Hemon piece, curt and obstreperous and violently allergic to the slightest whiff of platitude. '...there are plenty of books and readers', it concludes, 'who seek a confirmation for what they already know, who hope to cement the position from which it all looks solid, unalterable, and, therefore, bearable. If that is what you're after, stay away from this book.' I ask him if he thinks there's some temptation to package translated writing in overly unthreatening ways, pandering to a readership's imagined fears.

'Yeah, I think so... whilst you've got to apologise for literature, I think that in some ways it's condescending to the reader to think they'll quickly lose interest unless we somehow ingratiate ourselves with them - to not make it too complicated, not to make it too "European" for the United States because that's, y'know, anathema, it can cost you the presidential election if you speak French. ... I used to teach English as a second language, and a lot of my students were Russian speakers. And as a rule, the first thing they wanted to learn was how not to have an accent, so that they wouldn't be conspicuous. Which is strange, but I also understood why that's the case. But I would tell them that if you speak with an accent it means you speak two languages, and that's a good thing. And technically everyone has an accent, they're just different. There are native speakers and non-native speakers - you have an accent, it's part of language, and so literature that has an "accent" of any kind, you know, native or translated, should not be ashamed of it - that to me is just absurd.'

Hemon's current publicity tour is to promote The Book of My Lives, just published in the UK by Picador. It's a collection of loosely autobiographical essays previously published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy and other places, ranging in topic from his love for his hometown of Sarajevo, his obsession with football, how borscht should taste and why dogs are important, to meditations on immigrant identity and a heartbreaking account of the illness and death of his baby daughter. His novels and stories, from the Chicago immigrants' tale of Nowhere Man to the Eastern European travelogue of The Lazarus Project, have always played with the tension between fiction and autobiography, but the pieces collected in The Book of My Lives are about as autobiographical as it gets: disarmingly direct, clear-eyed, unsentimental and often hard to read. I ask him how the book came about: why a collection of occasional pieces? Was he tempted to write a full-length memoir?

'Well, I have a fragmentary mind. Even my novels are not simple A to B narratives, and this is how I spend my life - a collection of stories, as it were, with some gaps in it, and trying to put it together is what I do every day. The overarching concept is storytelling - these stories just happen to be true. In Bosnian and other Southern Slavic languages there are no equivalent terms for the distinction between fiction and non-fiction - they have to use awkward constructions to convey what to English language readers and writers is a self-evident distinction. The closest term to non-fiction that I would use to describe it to me daughters or friends or publishers is 'true stories', really ... most of these are stories that I've been telling to people in various ways for many years, and then occasionally I've been prompted to write them down. And I did, and those stories constitute large parts of my life.'

As for memoir, Hemon has well-documented opinions on the matter, and isn't shy to air them. 'I have a violent reaction to the word "memoir" because what I associate it with is the whole industry of confessional memoir. I mean, memoir covers a whole range - I grew up reading the memoirs of people who survived Stalinist concentration camps, and there's this element of bearing witness that's very important. But the confessional memoir, that's made about some problem in the past, like an addiction memoir, and then there's this public ritual, sometimes on Oprah, of admitting sins and begging for forgiveness, complete with tears and cheering and then redemption comes after that in the form of book sales - I just can't stand that. So many of those memoirs, they have this trajectory from the pit of hell towards redemption and new life, and the end of the book provides hope and things like that, and to me, I mean, I hate that. And, y'know, individual memoirs are also often stories that people need to tell, so they tell them, and I would never dream of attacking particular memoirs or particular memoir writers - it's the industrial production of it and the aura that surrounds it that I can't stand.'

It seems to me, I say, that if here's one thing that really gets his goat, that he really writes against, it's platitude.

'Yes, thank you, I try, yes. Part of what literature can do is to defamiliarise the familiar and shake up the language and reinvent idioms and make language work in a way that is not just functional. If you go shopping you don't wanna talk to the salespeople in rhymed couplets, because they would think you're crazy, you want to keep it efficient, functional, but literature - the whole nature of it is to activate dormant potentials in language, and then invent new ones. And to me that's exciting , that's part of the project of literature.'

And all I can say to that is that I'm really happy we're not talking about football any more.

Aleksandar Hemon's website

Interviews with contributors to this year's Best European Fiction series on the Dalkey Archive website