Literature Crossing Borders 2017
DCI promotes literature crossing borders
Literature helps people to achieve more nuanced perspectives on the world, in a reality of constant headlines and images from countless news outlets. This makes it paramount to let literature – and the writers producing it – travel across borders. This serves a double purpose; writers get new input and their texts unfold themselves in new contexts. This develops the international world of literature and contributes to better intercultural understanding. In 2017, DCI played a part in carrying out several initiatives furthering international literary exchange.
In Spring, poetry blossomed in Warsaw, when the first edition of the project Poems in the City was carried out. The poetry promotion was organized by the local branch of EUNIC, as a continuation of the earlier Poems in the Underground. The aim of the project is to bring poetry from European countries to the citizens of Warsaw – even those who would not normally be interested in the genre. 27.000 poems from 17 countries was distributed across the city in a wide variety of ways: printed on coffee-to-go cups, on bookmarks, and at bus stops and subway stations. One of the represented poets was Danish Thomas Boberg.
The month of May saw the release of a special edition of the estimable Russian magazine ”Zvezda”(Star) containing translated texts by ten contemporary Danish authors. DCI in Russia helped make the special edition a reality. It was presented at the Anna Akhmatova Museum on May 25th. The Danish contributions was selected by then Chairman of the Danish Author’s Society Jakob Vedelsby. Vedelsby’s own novel ”Moon Shadows” was published in a Russian translation later in the year, together with ”A girl and a boy” by Morten Brask.
An event with future potential took place during the festival Vild med ORD (Crazy about Words) in Aarhus. Authors from Denmark, Germany and France met for a conversation, marking the beginning of the cooperative exchange project Texte|Tekst. The intention is to strengthen relations between the literary scenes of the three participating countries, over the course of the following years. DCI in Brussels is a partner of the project, which has been initiated by the aforementioned Jakob Vedelsby. The exchange will mostly consist of presentations of texts by authors from the respective countries that has not yet been translated to the other two languages.
Before his regretful passing in 2016, historian Hans Bagger put the final touches on the important and weighty work “Peter den Store i Danmark i 1716” (Peter the Great in Denmark in 1716). In June of 17 the book came out in Russian, and was presented at DCI in St. Petersburg, which had also supported the translation.
The art of comics is a common love of Belgium and Denmark and it is a literary area that gains more and more attention. In the autumn of 2017, comic artist Halfdan Pisket was invited to Brussels to participate in the Passa Porta festival, as one of three illustrators documenting the goings on of the event. That visit resulted in Pisket being granted a residency during Passa Porta 2018. More Belgian visits by Danish cartoonists are scheduled for 2018.
Peter Høeg in Russia and other fruitful authors visits
September 2017, was the moment when Russian readers finally had the opportunity to experience Peter Høeg, when he visited St. Petersburg. The visit was the result of 20 years of repeated requests from DCI and was arranged in cooperation with the Consulate General and the State University.
Peter Høeg met a large crowd of fans at the Erarta Museum, and later from the Presidential Library of Boris Yeltsin, where a live connection was established to seven libraries in different parts of Russia, selected from many more that had wished to be part of the event.
Høeg was far from the only Danish writer contributing to cultural exchange in Europe. Kim Leine took part in Literature at Jasna in Warsaw, a series of authors meetings presenting high quality literature. Kim Leine’s breakthrough novel ”The Prophets of Eternal Fjord” was published in Polish in 2016.
The poet Rolf Sparre Johansson met his Latvian colleague Inga Gaile for Poetry in the Dark in Riga, where they read from their works, had a conversation and answered questions from the audience. Geeti Amiri, author, radio host, and eager voice in political and societal debates, participated in Writers Without Borders in Riga, a cooperation between the Prozas Lasijumi literary festival and EUNIC. The event brought five European authors with migration backgrounds together for an exchange of ideas about cultural identity.
On the southern hemisphere the authors behind the crime novel-pseudonym A. J. Kazinski, Anders Rønnow Klarlund and Jacob Weinreich, visited the 63rd annual book fair of Porto Alegre. Three Kazinski-books has recently been published in Brazil and the interest in Scandinavian literature is on the rise.
DCI would like to thank all the authors, publishers and festivals for their collaboration with us. Without these relations none of these projects would exist.