WRITING

In L’imaginaire des langues, a series of interviews between Lise Gauvin and writer Édouard Glissant, Glissant tells how today a writer who does not know any other language does consider when writing, even unconsciously, the existence of other languages around them …

In March 2012, I walked through Blues Before Sunrise, an installation by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, together with someone whom I hadn’t seen in a long time and who used to just be a colleague from Brussels. The 275 streetlamps in the park, emitting blue light instead of white, didn’t only transform the night, it turned acquaintance into friendship. McQueen…

Well, dear Canan, it started.
Please pray for all of us.

These are the words my colleague, fellow literary translator Hanna sent me on Thursday morning 24 February 2022 from Lviv, where she lives with her daughter, her son and her husband. Her e-mail followed an exchange …

I wrote the word “uncaring” on a torn piece of paper the other day, a gesture stirred by the world we currently live in. As I was reading one social media post here, a newspaper opinion piece there; I grabbed one of my many fountain pens which I delicately fill with ink stored in glass bottles (writing needs its own pace) and marked the red paper. “Uncaring”, I read out loud as I placed the paper on one of my library shelves, the one with the non-fiction books. Every day, I look at the black ink on the red paper as rage boils in my heart, mind and soul. I am tempted to join the online cacophony of what makes me angry. But I decide to wait and reflect (writing needs its own pace).