A station is a station: a stop in the seaport city of Kaliningrad, in Russia.
Born in 1959 in Rabius (Grisons, Switzerland), Leo Tuor is a philosopher, writer
and translator in the winter, shepherd and cow-herder in the summer. A great defender
of his native language, between 1994 and 1999 he published a critical edition of
six volumes of works by the Rhaeto-Romanic poet and historian Giacun Hasper Muoth
(published by Octopus in Chur). His last book published in French was Giacumbert
Nau, Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1997.
Time to spare: heading to Dortmund in the former dancing car of the Görlitz,
a 50-plus train.
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A
ride through
43 countries
The Literature
Express Europe 2000 was the brainchild of Thomas Wohlfahrt, director of the Berlin
Literature Workshop. The ride, which ran from June 4 to July 16, 2000, gathered about
100 writers from all 43 European countries, under the patronage of UNESCO.
The 200 or so cultural events, public readings and debates held in the 19 cities
where the train stopped, and the discussions between fellow writers all along the
7,000-kilometre railroad route, were aimed at showing a Europe distinct to the one
that has been emerging for some time, namely the Europe of business, money, markets
and finance.
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We
travel naked, authors without books. No one asks for our texts: this is what makes
the train so special. |
What
happens when one hundred writers spend a month without books on a train, debating
in more than 40 languages and stopping along the way to meet the crowds? For one
traveller, the Literature Express Europe 2000 did not live up to its dream of cultural
dialogue
One hundred writers
on the same train. Awesome. Unprecedented. The train started in Lisbon and was called
the Southern Express until it reached Paris. Then it went to Berlin, Saint Petersburg
and Moscow, for which it was rechristened the Northern Express. For the purposes
of the entire trip, therefore, it was the North-South Express. A legend comparable
to the Orient Express was born.
I boarded the train without any preconceptions. It was enough for me to know that
in Germany, where the idea was invented, it was called Literaturexpress Europa 2000
and in other countries the Comboio da literatura europa 2000, the Expreso da literatura
europa 2000, the Literaturtrena europa 2000 or Literaturas ekspresis eiropa, and
so on. A train with many names that all said the same thing but had a different ring
each time. In that sense, it was lyrical; what more could poets ask for?
And by the way, what would a train like this be like without cellular phones, cameras
and other substitutes for male virility? Answer: it would be worthless. Cellular
phones, extensively used during the trip by serious-looking passengers, gave the
train a distinctive feel. They were to our train what the six-shooter is to the western.
At first, there was just a train. Only as time went by did it become our train, for
all of us writers, attendants and journalists. Much to my surprise, the journalists
were very polite. They belong to our big family. We accepted them and that put them
at ease. We didn’t mind the situation, for not only were the questions they asked
very different from the common ones, but they also took a more original approach
to photographing us. They were our teammates, in the noble sense of the term.
Our train is on the Internet: www.literaturexpress.org. We travelled across
Europe at top speed, but our souls did not follow. But we are on the Internet, therefore
we are.
We represent a vast potential: the European intelligentsia on rails. All of us travelled
quietly in the same direction, in first-class. If the train disappeared in Dürrenmatt’s1 tunnel, many books
slumbering in our guts and minds would never see the light of day, and many poems
would be swallowed up by darkness. Oh, dearest locomotive, whether you look like
the mouth of a crocodile, a shark or a laughing cormorant, beware of the Dürrenmatt
tunnel! The publishers, who love us the same way that pimps love their prostitutes,
would never forgive you your trespasses.
The women and men of letters were received by the former French prime minister and
deputy mayor of the city of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé, who invited us to attend
a reception held in our honour at city hall. He did not show up and sent a delegate
to read his speech, which was probably drafted by his secretary. After the first
three sentences, translation into English and German began, which slowed the process
down considerably, though the more the sentences were put through the translation
mill, the shorter they became. To be honest, they should have been translated ad
absurdum, until the machine ground up all our languages. Then the last language should
have been translated into French, which would have given us a completely new text.
That is how money gets laundered in my country I tell myself.
Bordeaux is the city of the three Ms. If that brings to mind McDonald’s, the symbol
of the Mercure hotel chain or, if you are familiar with Switzerland, the MigrosMarkt
logo, your way of thinking is most definitely down-to-earth. For Bordeaux is in fact
the city of the writers Montaigne, Montesquieu and Mauriac.
Question: “What do you think of the train?” the journalists ask. We asked each other
the same thing. This idea is already a reality for us. For the sake of literature
we have already embarked on an adventure that no longer has anything to do with literature.
The train is nothing more than an outlandish event, by dint of which it is also a
classic short story, like a slight earthquake in Chile, the monster of Kaliningrad
or God knows what else. On top of which, no one expects us to present our works.
Our books are not on the train. No one—strictly no one—asks us for our texts. That
is what makes this train so special. We travel naked, authors without books. A library
car designed to house our writings in every European language never got beyond the
planning stage. Until Kaliningrad, we would have been best off reading a book entitled
The Critique of Pure Illusion.2
Trick question: other people are always the ones asking the questions. Now it’s our
turn. What do you think of our literature? Why haven’t you read our books? Why aren’t
you interested in what we wrote before and after 19913, and in what we are
going to write in the future? Whether we’re going to continue licking the boots of
the president of the Republic or ruthlessly continue throwing everything we think
into his face? You don’t know anything about what we write and you couldn’t care
less. You’re only interested in us because we make you look good.
“Why did you join this trip?” a journalist asks me at the Gare de l’Est in Paris.
Or was it the Gare du Nord or the Gare Saint Lazare? I really don’t know anymore.
All those train stations start looking the same after a while. Let’s get back to
the question. The journalist asked what I think of religions. Damn! That wasn’t it.
It was, “Why did you join this trip?” Or something like that. It didn’t matter, just
so long as the answer was clever and well-founded.
Here you go then: I am on this trip because I wanted another chance to escape from
my mountains and my native language, Rhaeto-Romanic, which is spoken by a mere 40,000
people, almost all of whom know each other. We sometimes feel cramped and would like
to get out into the so-called wide world to hear and speak other languages. This
journey seemed like a godsend to satisfy that basic need, though I will not conceal
the fact that it was also inexpensive and accessible. I also wanted once and for
all to answer a crucial question that every mountain-dweller asks and that Schiller,
who was not a mountain-dweller but a poet, put in the following terms: Father, are
there countries where there are no mountains? I left, fully aware of the risk that
this train could turn into a nightmare, into a train of madness. The reasons that
led me into taking this trip are so to speak, practical and cognitive at the same
time.
A look back: Madrid is astounding; Paris takes itself seriously; Lisbon, destroyed
by the 1755 earthquake, is by far Europe’s most disillusioned city. It is the only
one that has not repressed its past. It has the oldest soul.
What will be left of all these cities one day? Wind.
A preliminary summing-up: in a train compartment, five Tertullians4 are discussing in Spanish,
Rhaeto-Romanic, Occitan, French and Catalan whether Europe is only made up of cities
and pollution. The discussion started with the fall of the west (that is why this
train of “well-being” is rolling east), then shifted to the skirt-chaser who answered
to the name of Picasso, street brawls between hooligans in Brussels, the poor organization
of the literary train and the exasperation of many of our fellow writers who have
had more than enough of wasting their time and would like to be taken more seriously.
Later, the little group took a close look at the concept of literary freedom before
coming to the overall conclusion that only a writer who does not depend on any publishing
company can claim he or she is free.
On the approach to Dortmund, we organized a group prayer session to ask for a hotel
that was a little more presentable than the pigsties where we stayed in Brussels.
And our prayer was answered. In this magnificent German city, we were put up in lavish
suites. For two nights we felt like Nobel Prize winners, considerably lifting our
spirits, which had been sagging since Paris.
At the Hanover Expo2000, we were caught in a sudden downpour. The thunder, lightning
and wind were a deliverance after the torrid heat of the day. My shirt sticking to
my skin, I ran all the way to the Schweizerpavillon (the Swiss pavilion), which attracted
me so irresistibly that this was my fifth visit.
For once, Switzerland was illustrated neither through cows nor Alpine horns. There
was no facade, but an open maze with 50 entrances that doubled as exits. An open
Switzerland.
Hanover was our last stop in the west. It was also the longest day.
Our encounter with the east: on both sides of the presidential palace gate, men of
steel were holding their semi-automatic rifles planted in front of them like heavy
candelabra. They stared and never blinked. We found that idiotic but got used to
it. We walked between the steel men and through the house before reaching the garden
to drink and chat. The thoughtful president delivered his eulogy. For the occasion,
we were the dead, invited to an umpteenth reception. A whisper was on everyone’s
lips: the president is said to be a writer himself.
On the train the dissidents were few and those who played the game many, shaming
the memory of all the writers who have died in camps and wars. This train had its
share of those who had adapted their principles to suit the circumstances, knuckled
under to regimes and now were at war memorials laying wreaths that had been given
to them. Their servility is disgusting, something to cry over.
Somewhere, at a certain point, the train had to turn into a political train, to the
dismay of a great many passengers, since we were supposed to be taking part in a
kind of official mission. We were guests, or even diplomats, who were not supposed
to give anybody lessons, even when we travelled across dictatorships where some of
our colleagues had been imprisoned. Our train was not supposed to degenerate into
a train of resolutions or protests. What’s more, the train’s guardian angels bent
over backwards trying to prevent it from turning into a dragon. Dragons are unpredictable…
1. Reference
to the German-language Swiss artist and writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who wrote
a short story called The Tunnel (which is about a train and all its passengers
vanishing in the Berthoud tunnel) and painted The Catastrophe (1966), which
depicts two trains derailing as they come out of a tunnel.
2. Kaliningrad, formerly known as Königsberg, is the birthplace of the 18th-century
German philosopher Immanuel Kant, author of The Critique of Pure Reason. Once
the capital of East Prussia, it came under Soviet control in 1945.
3. Year of the dissolution of the USSR.
4. Tertullian, a brilliant second-century theologian and polemicist who was born
and died in Carthage, had a major influence on debates over the arts during the Middle
Ages. |
