Hrabal

So the bags are being packed for Vienna, a place I'm intrigued by because I've only been there once, when I was nineteen, and it's the only place I've been that I took a violent dislike to. And it was only one day! The hope this time is that I'm a little less extreme in my reactions, having said goodbye to teenagerhood a lifetime ago.

The conference is at the University of Vienna which has a very established Translation Studies program and is on the fictional translator (in film and writing). I met Klaus Kaindl who's organizing the conference at another conference earlier in the year in Vancouver; he's a very funny, droll guy and, with a couple of fellow Translation Studies scholars, who are both going to be in Vienna, we spent a day walking around Vancouver, finding ourselves at one point in a junkie's flea market. Literally hundreds of junkies selling beaten-up kettles and old TVs. A pint was taken to recover.

Ben and Brian, the other two there, are also great, super-smart and two of only five or six Translation Studies scholars in the US (along with Rosemary Arrojo, a senior colleague who is lovely, extremely open and generous, who will also be there). It's such a travesty that the subject has so little traction in the States which is plurilingual country but in complete denial about it. It'll be fun to geek out over the latest stuff with a good bunch of people.

So yesterday went really well. The round-table lasted four hours. Four hours!!!!! The other three sitpendisti are very nice and gave interesting presentations. One is from Italy, working on the relationship between samizdat and exile literature; another, Nora, is from Germany, working on the idea of the flaneur in post-1989 literature; and, Mateusz, from Poland but now in France, is working on three Central European writers and the import of their diaries and ephemera on their work. He had a very impressive powerpoint presentation, and at one point showed the diary of one of the writers, who obsessively marked his mood four times a day, when he had sex, what kind of sex etc. Some graphic drawings too. It woke everyone up.

Six or seven professors turned up and grad students; they weren't afraid of asking questions, which I like. Sometimes you go to conferences and there's not much of a reaction, so it's great to develop your ideas through answering them. And all in Czech! A few of them took us for lunch and shot the breeze about various writers etc. By the end though I think all of us were exhausted; I think I spoke more Czech yesterday than I have in the last ten years.

There was a Chinese professor there too, who translates Czech literature into Chinese (via English); it was interesting, as he talked a little about Czech literature in China. Kundera apparently was a real bestseller in the eighties and Hrabal is very popular, but Havel's work is banned on the mainland - the Professor very ably skirted around the issue. It was interesting in the context of a room full of Czechs who'd lived through Communism and write about the effect of it on literature and a guy who couldn't or didn't want to be fully open about what is and isn't acceptable in one of the few Communist regimes left. Interesting, too, what Chinese readers take from Czech writers who wrote under similar conditions.

I met up with Nora and Mateusz that evening and we walked for miles to go and see the Hrabal wall. Part of it was done when we lived in Prague, but it has been extended. Bohumil Hrabal is the much-loved, and wonderful, writer who lived in the area and died feeding pigeons from his hospital window (he was in his 80s, there's some debate as to whether it was suicide); all in all, a very Hrabalian end. The wall is beautiful, part graffiti, part-cartoon, with a giant typewriter (paper coming up over the wall) and a host of cats and books and excerpts from his writing. We went for a couple of pints and both Nora and Mateusz turned out to be very funny; it was good to debrief after a very long day.

I hadn't been able to sleep much the night before, was up till 4am reading The Three Percent Problem, which I really enjoyed - a very telling take in general on the publishing industry and the apocalyptic situation big publishers are in. Three Percent have started publishing contemporary translated literature and I'd forgotten they were behind the best book I've read in the last year, Mathias Enard's Zone - Enard's Croatian-French and it's a 500 page novel written in one sentence about a Balkan war criminal on a train. If that doesn't put you off (!!), it's an amazing book; by the end the accretion of the effect of war on the European psyche from the Greeks onwards explodes your mind.

Right, off to Thomas Bernhard land.