To the People Behind the Words: My Small Tribute to ILFD 2023
In the month of May, the city of Dublin gifted me a wonderful, ten-day-long literary festival. I say it was gifted to me because despite it being a public initiative that was open to all—the topics, guests, and location were so accurately tailored to my taste, that I couldn’t help but feel that I had received a very special present picked out just for me.
The festival took place in the park right across the street from the building where I teach English to adults. It also started on a Friday, which is the day on which teachers are expected to take the students out on an excursion in the city. I therefore had the chance to attend the festival on the very first day it was on, as well as to take my whole class there as part of their Friday outing.
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Friday, May 19th is when I took my students to the festival. Upon our arrival, I immediately noticed that Merrion Square Park had undergone some considerable changes from the last time I had seen it: it was filled with gazebos, tents, wee vans selling various types of food and coffee, and it even had a bar! The park was also constellated with colourful reclining chairs and brand-new wooden picnic tables.
The reclining chairs were sometimes arranged in pairs or groups of three to allow those who sat on them to chat in the sun; however, some people had pulled their reclining chair to the side and were peacefully reading by themselves, fully reclined. I immediately felt at home. My students picked a wooden table in one of the sunniest patches, right in front of the yellow tent where a DJ was going to start his performance in a matter of minutes.
Before the performance began, I ran to the wee coffee van, behind which stood three people whose faces would gradually become familiar to me in the following ten days. I ordered an almond cappuccino, and because I’m a creature of habit, I proceeded to order nothing but almond cappuccinos each time I decided to treat myself while at the festival.
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I should point out that my involvement with ILFD 2023 actually started approximately two weeks before the beginning of the festival itself when, on a stereotypically grey Dublin afternoon, I took refuge from the rain in the public library on Pearse Street. I was prepared to walk around the bookshelves for a while before encountering something that would capture my eye; instead it was there, on the most visually accessible shelf, a colourful booklet with a sea horse printed on it. Underneath the sea horse, it read:
International Literature Festival Dublin
19-28 May 2023
Merrion Square Park
At first, the booklet caught my eye due to its bright colours, as well as the intriguing combination of the words international-literarature-festival (wow!), but then it was the location on it that secured my gaze: Merrion Square Park.
I couldn’t believe it: a ten-day literary festival, right across from my workplace, starting two weeks from that very moment. Among the many events of the festival, the one which was most emphatically advertised by the library was an interview with the winner(s) of the prestigious 2023 Dublin Literary Award. Because the winner would not be announced until the day before the event, I decided that I would attempt to read all six finalists’ novels before that date, so that I would be able to attend the interview having already read the winning book. That’s when my journey started.
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Luckily, the Dublin library had ebook versions of all the finalists’ books on their website, so I began from the ones that were not currently on loan, and then worked my way down the list. I managed to read four of the six books before the event, and all of them were so beautiful and intense, that I found myself looking forward to my long, horrible commute to work just so I could keep reading them on the bus. Here are the four books I’ve read, in the order in which I’ve read read them:
Em, written by Kim Thúy and translated by Sheila Fischman
Paradais, written by Fernanda Melchor and translated by Sophie Hughes
Love Novel, written by Ivana Sajko and translated by Mima Simić
Cloud Cuckoo Land, written by Anthony Doerr
The two remaining shortlisted books that I didn’t have time to read before the event were the following:
Marzahn, Mon Amour, written by Katja Oskamp and translated by Jo Heinrich
The Trees, written by Percival Everett
Despite there being higher chances that the winner would be one of the books I had already read rather than one of the remaining two, it was Marzahn, Mon Amour which turned out to have been awarded the prestigious literary prize. I won’t lie: this outcome initially disappointed me, not because I had anything against the winning novel (which I hadn’t even read by that point), but because the four novels that I had read were all so captivatingly beautiful that I couldn’t believe the fact that none of them had won.
Still, I went to the event, which felt magical from the very first moment I set foot in the tent where it would take place. A young woman checked my ticket, smiled at me, and then said, “Please help yourself to a free copy of the winning novel, autographed by its author and its translator, respectively.”
I felt extremely confused and mumbled, “Wait, what do you mean free…? Are you sure…? I can just… take it?”
“Of course you can. There you go,” she said, handing a copy to me and one to the friend I was with.
I was shocked. Never in my life had I been given a beautiful brand-new book for free at an event whose entry ticket was also free. I looked at its cover: it was beautiful, and its colours reminded me of the ones of the Papers Publishing website. I reflected that this too had actually turned out perfectly for me: had the winner been one of the books I had already read, I would have received the free book after having read it; instead, now I could read this book for the first time on my beautiful physical copy.
When I did read Marzahn, Mon Amour, I was completely delighted: this novel is a collage of vignettes which each succeed in vividly painting a new, memorable character in very few pages. It’s hard to say whether I liked it more or less than its wonderful shortlisted rivals, but each of them was undeniably special. I would recommend to anyone who has enough time on their hands to go through this list and read all six books: I bet you won’t be disappointed!
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For the ten days of its duration, the festival constituted a peaceful oasis where I could go to decompress every day after work. At lunchtime there would always be a DJ, and I would sit and eat my lunch on one of the wonderful reclining chairs. After a few days I got comfortable enough to take off my shoes and socks and let my toes sink into the fresh grass as I read in the sun.
On top of the interview with the author and translator of Marzahn, Mon Amour, I attended many other events, including the launch of the Summer 2023 issue of The Stinging Fly, preceded by an interview with its editors and its founder. The Stinging Fly was celebrating its 25th anniversary on this occasion, which made the talk even more special, as its founder and editors recounted how the magazine had gotten started and then evolved over a quarter of a century.
The festival also gave me the chance to participate in a workshop on editing short fiction with editor So Mayer. During this two-hour workshop, we examined a short story called Wants, by Grace Paley, and then proceeded to apply what we had learned from it to a short story written by us that we had been asked to bring along. This exercise made me more aware of the way in which sentence structure, punctuation, and paragraphs can affect the pace of a story.
Another fantastic workshop I had the pleasure to attend was intriguingly called Try Your Hand at Translation. As a multilingual person who has always been interested in the process of books translation, I couldn’t miss it. In this workshop, award-winning translator Laura Watkinson gave us each a section of a children’s book that she had translated from Dutch. The section we were given was in Dutch, but we were also provided with a bad literary translation created through Google Translate. Our task was to improve the bad translation by recreating the rhythm and rhymes contained in the original Dutch. After reading our hopefully-improved translation, Laura would reveal how she had worded that section in her official English translation. Having twisted and turned the text in every possible way in the attempt to improve it, we felt immense relief when provided with Laura’s wonderful translation.
Finally, I attended two talks; one featuring writer Beata Umumbyeyi Mairesse and another by Douglas Stuart. Beata took us on an incredible journey covering multilingualism, racial identity, and knowledge transmission in families from the viewpoint of a Rwandan genocide survivor. She explained that the genocide is not ‘unspeakable’, as it has often been defined, but ‘unhearable’ instead. Her challenge as a writer was talking about a subject as violent and painful as a genocide in a way that people were comfortable hearing (or reading). Not only was her talk undeniably brilliant, but she also took the time, during the signing of her book All Your Children, Scattered, to talk at length with each one of her readers, as well as drawing beautiful illustration next to each one of her long and pondered dedications. I felt extremely lucky to be able to converse with this strikingly kind writer, and I am looking forward to reading her book.
The last talk I attended was also the very last event of the festival, during which Douglas Stuart discussed his latest novel, Young Mungo. In this book, similarly to his previous novel Shuggie Bain, where Douglas tells the story of a working class boy growing up in the East End of Glasgow in the early 1990s. His novel skillfully investigates themes such as alcoholism, poverty, motherhood, and queer love. Having lived in Glasgow for four years myself, I had already devoured both of Douglas’s novels and had even already attended a reading by Douglas last year; still, hearing him talk was no less inspiring, educational, and entertaining the second time aorund.
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With all this in mind, I would like to humbly dedicate this first installment of my Papers Publishing column to the International Literature Festival Dublin, which has made me feel hope in a time where this feeling is becoming less and less common. The literary community is unique insofar as it can compress itself to exist, communicate, and travel in the form of ink on bi-dimensional pieces of paper, or digital words on screen. However, that makes coming into contact with a slice of this community in person all the more special: it is a wonderful reminder that those words, those stories, those pages, are in fact people, who learned to turn their ideas into journeys made of ink and paper. To ILFD, and to the people behind the words, thank you.