Jacques Jouet and Anita Konkka in Dialogue




In summer of the year 2000 Anita Konkka and Jacques Jouet took part in the unique pan-European project called the Literature Express Europe 2000. The journey started on 4 June in Lisbon: the Literature Express ran the route of the historic North-South Express, with 107 authors from 45 countries on board. The train traversed the continent in a great arc, crossing the Iberian peninsula, France, Belgium, Germany, and Poland, up to the Baltic States and Russia, turning down again via Byelorussia and Poland to Berlin, where it arrived on 14 July. After the journey, the authors contributed a written piece to the book Europaexpress: Ein literarisches Reisebuch (2001). Below is their original exchange of letters. (Some of the awkward phrasings by Anita Konkka have been purposefully preserved in this translation).

Paris, 17 September 2000

Dear Anita,

For the trip, I brought along a story. It tells of men inventing brick and mortar (and architecture thereafter) and building a tour, in order to have a look at what goes on là-haut (upstairs). Divinity, disapproving of such pretension, condemns them, imposing two punishments (peines) upon them: geographic dispersion and the plurality of languages. Rather monstrous of divinity, wouldn't you say? But it failed to think of everything: men reacted by inventing travel (train travel) and translation. Plus, they discovered they could learn several languages.
Since it is absolutely desired that something be brought back from one's travels, I seem to have returned with this tale, which I have nourished, recounting it over and over at differing stages. Soap wears thin more quickly; toothpaste empties faster from its tube.

Jacques


Dear Jacques,

I remember that in those ancient days people journeyed east. They wanted to make a name for themselves, built the tower. Familiar, isn't it? Godhead got a terrible fright when he saw the unfinished tower. He exclaimed: “Behold, the people are one, united in a single language, and now they are building this tower. Henceforth nothing that they imagine will surpass them. Go to, let us down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand each other's speech.” Divide and conquer, thought Godhead. But his was a vain attempt.
Indeed, as you said, men are inventive. One day a man invented the train of Babel. (In Hebrew “Babel” resembles the word balal, which means “to mix”). There were 100 writers on board, and we spoke 98 different languages, as it had been written. And it was very true. We were all journeying from the edge of Europe eastward. The tour lasted sex weeks; oh sorry, I mean six. Sex is Swedish.
All languages went into disorder. I lost my tongue. And in my mind the confusion persists. On the tenth day of the journey I limped along a street in Paris. Across the street there was a shop, and in the window there was a sign: Une autre idée du pain naturel. My left foot was in pain (blisters on my toes). Heck, I thought, this, if anything, is natural pain-but what kinds of ideas do Parisians have about pain? Might they be somewhat more spiritual or emotional than my pain?

Anita


Paris, 19 September 2000

Dear Anita,

If we were 100 writers (perhaps 103, but ok, we can round it off) and if we spoke 98 languages, for 98 of us our own language was indecipherable, and 2 of us were mute: you and me. You're always exaggerating! Besides, the story is much too vast a cloak for a single reality.
Bread (Le pain) and pain (la peine)… As soon as store brings out “an other idea of something,” the only difference between the non-other idea and the other idea is that the other idea is sold at a higher price. The advantage of pain is that it is not for sale (or is it?…). Varvas? Toes covered in blisters… but the voyage was not a walking tour! How did you manage to get blisters on your varvas (one of the Finnish words with which I am the most familiar)?
Last night, I dreamt I was in an elevator with a horse.

Jacques


Helsinki, 20 September 2000

Dear Jacques,

It is not I but Frenchmen who exaggerate. I read in the French program, that there are "100 auteurs, 43 pays, 98 langues" in the train. Ever since then, I wondered who the other mute could be. I would never have guessed, that you were that “Autre.”
How did I get the blisters? you asked. That's another story. I must confess, I bought new shoes, put them on, and went to diner and to dance in the disco called the Cabaret Sauvage. That was the simple cause of my pains. My very old grandmother would have said: “It serves you right. The wage of sin is suffering.”So I limped along in the streets the next day and fooled around in the passageways of the metro. I would have needed Ariadne's thread to find the right exit. I had completely lost my bearings. Otherwise I felt at home in Paris, a blackbird sang bluely in the yard of the hotel - it sounded as if Hungarian, and I slept well without sleeping pills (for the first time during the journey). I had no bad dreams until in Dortmund. Some animal, maybe it was a bear or a bull tried to rape me. It was very hairy. I think it must be the bear, because my name is not Europe. Nothing like that has happened to me for years. I wonder, why that only happened in Dortmund, in such an ordinary German city, where everybody was sitting by the TV watching football, the World Cup matches.

Anita


Paris, 20 September 2000

Dear Anita,

You speak to me of Paris, but I cannot answer you by speaking of Helsinki.
It was in Tallin, if I'm not mistaken, that we were the closest.
How curious, we are conversing in two languages, thanks to your abilities and to the language dubbed dominant. Still, Albanian is not a minor language, since it is dominant in Albania, as is Rumanian in Rumania. But not Byelorussian in Byelorussia, for, in Byelorussia, if I've got it right, the press, television, and schools are all in Russian.
If by breaking and entering, I managed to slip into the skin of the second mute among the 100 authors (I note that you are not contesting that you were indeed the first), it is because speaking only one language, French, does not in theory suit me. And yet, I have never succeeded in convincingly speaking any second language. It's a kind of infirmity. To know but one language is to know none, including one's own. I-who so willingly calls myself a polygraphist, a polytheist, a polysemist, and a polygamist-I realize that I might well have started by becoming a polyglot. Occasionally, I pretend.
It's rather extraordinary that there isn't a single European language; consequently, there isn't a European literature. Babel is paradise and I will never forgive Mallarmé for having called the world's languages “imperfect in that they are plural.” Or, rather, long live imperfection and impurities.

Jacques


Helsinki, 21 September 2000

Hey, hey Jacques, you are on your home ground, but don't forget that I am only a tourist both in French and English. I do stupid mistakes. I know neither rules and manners nor the connotations. I'm word-blind. I stumble over words, I mishear, miswrite, misconceive and misread (when you write upstairs I read up stars). Mere misunderstandings all lifelong. I'm not quite sure, what you mean when you say you managed, “by breaking and entering, to slip into the skin.” Maybe it is a French idiom-nothing to do with skin slipping on skin? In this way we are each other's “l'autre.” There is always the language barrier, you knocking on one side, and me on the other side of a wall.
The dialogue is going to be difficult, because I must get along with English, which “is a simple, yet hard language. It consists entirely of foreign words pronounced wrongly,” as Kurt Tucholsky said. I am not able to talk in an abstract way/in the abstract in English. I can only communicate through stories, dreams and poems. There are mediums which hide and show what's is hidden. I have a particular story in mind, about an interpreter and four men, but it is not the European story, because it has been told by Rumi. But let's leave it untold, because it is not party of European literature. Instead, you could say more about "un train qui siffle dans la nuit/ C'est un sujet de poésie." Or recount something about Europe. Whose Europe?
There is not only one European literature, you said. C'est cela! But what is European literature? Your books, my books, and the books of many others. During our tour of Europe, I would drop into bookshops. I saw heaps of the book-hamburgers. Throughout the continent from the west to the east they sold the same titles and names-John Grisham, Stephen King, Colin Dexter, etc.-, like in the shopping centre of Munkkivuori (the suburb of Helsinki where I live). Side by the side, in a tight row on a bookcase in the back part of the shops is where I would find European literature, i.e. French, German, English, Spanish and Italian books in translations. There were no copies of Estonian, Ukrainian, Slovenian or Byelorussian, to say nothing of Finnish literature. But does it matter at all? I prefer world literature. I 'm not a whole-hearted European.

Anita


Paris, 25 September 2000

You are right. It is unfair that we are not using Finnish in this dialogue. Were you to write to me in Finnish, necessity would have me go the Finnish Cultural Institute (a ten-minute walk from my home) to beg for a translation. It's doable. Where there is a desire to speak, there is never a “language barrier.”
I regret the too brief appearance of Rumi. Who said we were only allowed European stories?
I did not say that there isn't a single European literature. It's much more serious than that: there is no such a thing as European literature at all, since a literature is necessarily written in a language, at least to begin with. I am clearly saying in a language, not in a nation. Here, I am going make an untranslatable pun: ça soufi comme ça (that's Enoch already), enough ideologies of universal literary imperialism! What's that?, our little narrative or poetic poops should automatically concern 6 billion human beings? What a bore! I want to demonstrate (show (off)) the language that I know intimately. And, of course, I prioritize a readership that is also intimately familiar with that language. It's got nothing to do with France, and everything to so with French. This being said, I do entirely trust translation and apprenticeship (see the story/fable of Babel).
I have another story. It is the tale of how, little by little, the Sphinx was devouring the young generation of Thebes. No one knew how to answer to her question about the animal with four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening. One day, a young imbecile responds that this animal is man, and the Sphinx kills himself. And the young imbecile thinks he has saved Thebes. But he has only made matters worse by dragging Thebes down into the absence of questions. The only possible reply to the Sphinx of Thebes is a plurality of replies, ad infinitum: the animal in question is potentially the entire nomenclature of Linné (including the species discovered since)-for example, the horse who runs in the morning, rears in his elevator at noon, and has a shoe replacement in the evening. Accordingly, the question is permanent, the Sphinx lives on and endlessly questions, the young generation lives on and endlessly answers.

Jacques


Helsinki, 25 September 2000

As I see it, in the evening the horse changes into a horseshoe and brings good luck. Among other good omens, one of the most conspicuous is to meet a piebald (black-white spotted) horse. Sometimes the horse may turn out to be 'un Cheval qui tombe les quatre fers en l'air,' and then its name is Nightmare. But how on earth did the horse land in the lift? The answer is not essential. Everything is possible in dreams. One night I woke up when the voice of a man said in plain Finnish: "Kaikki on mahdollista" (Everything is possible). It was clearly worded -as is the riddle of the Sphinx-but I had no idea, what it indicated. This happened at Malbork. Maybe the voice hinted at the great train tour, about which I dreamt ten years previously. There is no time in dreams and myths, everything repeats itself, and young fools like me (grin) try over and over again to reply to the riddle of the Sphinx. That's the basic European myth. In other words, the identity quest and question: ”Who am I.” But if Oedipus had known who he was, would he have been any better off? Well, that's enough of that.
Let's return to Rumi. His story goes something like this: There were four men and they had but one coin. They went to the market. The Persian said: "I will buy some angur." The Arab said: "No, because I want inab." The Turk said: I do not want inab, I want uzüm." The Greek said: "I want stafil." The four men started to fight because they did not know what was behind the names. They had information but no knowledge. If there had been one wise man present, he would have known that each in his own language wanted the same thing, grapes. Such a man could have reconciled them saying: "I can fulfill all of your needs. If you trust me, your one coin will become as four; and four men at odds will become as one."

Anita


Paris, 29 September 2000

Indeed, how did the horse come to enter the elevator, that vertical train? Admittedly, he wants to climb the animal ladder. At noon, he stands on his hind legs, but he doesn't last long. He has no time to compose his Kalevala, his Chants de Maldoror, nor to make love frontally.
When I attempt to retell the story of the Sphinx of Thebes, I refuse the notion that it is a story about me; it is the tale of language. I refuse the notion that it is a story about Oedipus; it is the tale of the Sphinx. It suffices that young women and young men answer the Sphinx in the tale, and not horses or koalas. Here too, it is still a question of the mono-, of the whole, of the one. Monotheism should offer some progress over polytheism, a single original language. In translating the Bible, the Septuagint should independently, miraculously finish with the exact same text; the Persian, the Turk, the Greek, and the Arab aught all four be looking for the same grape, and Europe aught to be one….
Besides, I must admit it to you, the horse in the elevator neighs a little at the notion of a European union. However, on the other hand, he fiercely favors its expansion. Our voyage included all of Europe's languages, not merely those of the rich. That, in itself, was great!
Funny, in a legal context in French, the word for expansion (élargissement) denotes “the release or freeing of a prisoner.” Europe of the rich is imprisoned; we must urgently ensure her broadening. And, once she is some forty strong, we'll broaden her even further.
By the way, are you familiar with the Camarguan saying that I have just coined: “Who dreams on horseback, dreams in horse tongue”?

Jacques


Helsinki, 4 October 2000

I agree with you on the idea of the European Union. It's dull like a marriage of convenience. Doesn't inspire to write in the Mayakovskian way: "I take from the pocket of my baggy trousers/ My purple-coated passport/ Read it, envy me/ I am a citizen of the European Union."
Well, I'm now back from St. Petersburg. I took a tour of the most impressive monstrosity I have ever seen. It was a huge unfinished dyke constructed as protection against the floods rising from the Gulf of Finland. But the dyke construction stopped ten years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now the site is an enormous wasteland. All that's left is but grit and gravel, concrete blocs and a dead bridge in two halves. It's a highly inspiring place. Young Russian filmmakers like to direct films and make music videos in that setting. I invented a story there telling why there are floods in St. Petersburg, why "mysterious waters, now there rise", as Pushkin chanted/sang. History tells us that Swedish prisoners built the town. The work was so hard that ten thousand builders perished. But actually they were Ingrains, my people, who lived in that area. The town was built on their bones. The Ingrian women lost their husbands and sons. Their sorrow was immense, but they dammed up their grief and put a hex upon the town (in bygone times, those women were rune singers and well-known for their power to chant charms-there are lots of their charms in Kalevala). Mysterious waters are their tears. Every seventy years or so, their tears come pouring out in floods four meters high. Believe or not, it's true and it's the only possible explanation for the St. Petersburg floods.
During our Babelian train tour no place made so strong an impression on me as that dyke site did. I think the whole journey was like a long dream, sometimes a bit boring like those countless cocktail-party, in which we were involved, sometimes a bit nightmarish, particularly when I lost my way. And it got lost very often, even in St. Petersburg! I was all the time so dumfused (dumb + confused) about the babble of tongues. Somehow I felt that I had no time to learn anything about Europe. After all, did it really exist?
Back to horses. You asked if I know Camarguan sayings. Unfortunately I have no good dictionary of French sayings and idioms. And to be honest with you, I had never heard of Camargua before going to the library to read the Grande Larousse. At first I thought that it was some fabulous hippoland full of talking and singing horses. I agree that the lift trip is too short for making great love or epic, but a warm-blooded horse can, at least, fall in love in the lift of Ostankino on his/her way to Seventh Heaven.

Anita



Paris, 5 October 2000

Dearest Anita,

I am a louse. I persist to write to you in my comfortable French. Please respond to me in Finnish, or else I will start writing to you in English, or worse, in Europano: ich vais escribir ti in anglik or…
Why am I such a louse? Because Camargue (near Arles, close to the Mediterranean) is inhabited by three species of natives: horses (you are perfectly right about it being a hippoland), wind, and mosquitoes (the Camargans are going to kill me). That's why I invented the saying; mosquitoes and wind do not have dictums. Horses, however, just might.
I love to invent dictums because it's paradoxical. That is, unless all dictums be invented.
For me, our voyage was a pleasure. Why? First, because if you put me by a window on a train, my mouth opens and eight, twelve, twenty-four, two hundred hours later, I am in the same place, my mouth still agape. I am terribly docile. (Here, by the way, is another saying I've invented: “If your nose stinks, everything stinks.”) Luckily, during our trip, we still had to arrive, regularly, take our luggage, check-in before checking out, check-out after having checked-in, successively discovering 19 hotel rooms, if I'm not mistaken (I am counting the two couchettes). How extraordinary, to stay in 19 hotel rooms in six weeks. A first for me. I want to become perfectly mobile.
But seriously, I recall the elevator in Lisbon; I recall the cheeses of Malaga; I recall the Swiss pavilion at the expo in Hanover; I recall a long conversation about Kosovo with Fatos Kongoli in Kaliningrad (it could have taken place in Camargue, but I was not altogether indifferent to its happening in Russia); I recall dried fish displayed like gladioli at the market in Riga; I recall a long exchange in Moscow on the comparative philosophies of France and Russia, before an audience in the Turgeniev library; from Minsk, I recall the young Byelarussian writers, and their blocked elders; I even recall having eaten, in Minsk, sieniä (one of the Finnish words with which I am most familiar)-was it prudent? Etc., etc., etc.. I recall plenty of things that I do not necessarily feel licensed to make public, things that lend me no authority to speak of cultural Europe.
It's bizarre, every time I hear the word Europe, I think of my African friends and my ardor wanes. That's my own Mayakovsky.
I think of you and of your Ostankino???, which is a superimposed Eastern multiplex made accessible by elevator, or is it a character from the Kalevala (I am going to find out)?

Jacques

Helsinki, 8 October 2000

My dear Jacques,

Don't ever think of writing in English or Europanto or whatever. Humour is the first thing to disappear in a foreign tongue. I very much like your puns, although je n'y vois souvent que du bleu. Maybe we ought to write this duologue in Latin or Spanish. Tres cosas hacen a los hombres sages: letras, años y viajes (a Spanish proverb). Though I 'm no wiser after this six-week tour of our brave new Europe. Otherwise Europe seems to be very fragile. There were many new glass buildings everywhere, especially in Berlin.
By the way, Camargue is like St. Petersburg by way of its mosquitos, winds and horses. I remember throngs of mosquitoes keeping me awake in an Oktyabarskaya hotel. And I remember a sad-looking mare clattering along Nevsky Prospekt at midnight. I remember two metallic horses flung out four hooves above Fontanka-originally there were four horses, but two of them had run away from their pedestals just a couple of days before the literature train arrived. I remember the white nights, actually they were lurid yellowish nights, when all horses, metallic and real, as well as the whole city seemed to hover in the air, and I was so unhappy, my heels bleeding or long walking and around searching for the house where my grandmother lived before she was expelled from the town. I simply couldn't remember where the house was.
Well, we have committed ourselves to write on our experiences of the trip and about our experiences with Europe inter-alia. I'm musing how to write about private experiences in public without being fictional in form. I have never before tried doing that. Ought I write my memoirs? Impossible, because to write memoirs of oneself is to write of the fellow travelers as well, and then there is “the risk of invading their personal privacy.” Need I ask for your permission, if I'd like to write that I remember you swimming in the Baltic Sea at Svet? Svet-what was the name of that place near Kaliningrad?
It was a strange experience for me to travel with others on so tight a schedule. In some ways, I'm a flâneuse by nature. I used to travel alone around Europe by train and bus. Never by air. Didn't ever dare ascend Ostankino, Eiffel or any other tower either. Therefore I hold no high opinion on Europe. But perhaps it is a little wider after our grand European hotel tour, even if the journey was so hurried and sometimes a bit troublesome like a led dance.

Anita


Paris, 10 October 2000

To some extent, this trip was terrible. We were given a vague mission and our implicit expectations were not necessarily shared. I recall Brussels, and that idiotic reception on the benches of Europe, as if we were among the elected… elected monkeys…. How idiotic!
Writers are often tempted to think that it would be safer to read us first. How true, indeed. To brandish a writer without having read them is a bad idea. To accept being brandished in this fashion is yet another. But perhaps you weren't even there.
I do not know if we need Europe, but we do need relations between us. What's more, we already have them.
Today, by way of the good old mail, I received a letter from Fatos. And Aleksandar Gatalica sends fresh news from Belgrade.

Jacques


Helsinki, 21 October 2000

I was lucky enough not to be invited to that reception. You know I'm not happy at official receptions and cocktail parties, except when they are garden parties. If Hell exists, it is an everlasting EU reception. Meanwhile you were suffering in Brussels as an elevated, exalted ape… (if not a horse?) I enjoyed my stay in Flanders, meditating under an old tree at Villa Mont-Noir and having a country dinner, peeled potatoes and a big pig roasted on a spit, at an open-air restaurant called Het Labyrinth. It was not a hot or cramped place, regardless of the name.
For some time, at back of my mind, I have had the word élargissement which you said also means “mise en liberté d'un détenu.” Oh yes, of course it makes sense, I think, the enlargement means setting a prisoner free. But I don't think about the enlargement of the EU. My angle is slightly different. I remember a Midsummer' s night dream I had during our journey. I was a guard woman transporting prisoners by train. They ran away from the train at one station and I couldn't stop them, inexperienced as I was in my new occupation. The train left and I remained on the platform. There was a ticket machine and above it this text: “This machine works only in the rain.” The sun was shining. I took off from the station with a forbidden book under my arm and went to bathe in a river. That happened at a Latvian village. But in reality I was in Kaliningrad. On the previous day I was going to check on Immanuel Kant's dilemma: how to cross the seven bridges of Köningsberg without stepping twice on the same bridge. I never got to any of those bridges, but landed instead in a large park. It was like a land of the living, a lot of people spent Saturday (Saint Jean) evening dancing, singing, playing accordion and drinking vodka there. They were at large (en fuite) from their poverty and the dullness (boredom) of everyday life. The Russians (not all peoples) are wide-screen people. They are at their best when they have a lot of room, time and freedom. They say: poguljat na vole, vyjti na volju, “to celebrate in freedom and to get to freedom.” Probably, “enlargement” for them means above all to set the soul free by celebrating, traveling and drinking lots of vodka.
In several senses, our journey was un voyage d' élargissement , wasn't it? But as regards the mission you mentioned, I think that writers are not good missionaries, thank heavens!

Anita

Paris, 25 October 2000

Dear Anita,

Proposal: Literature is a collective activity. What do you think?
Jacques

Helsinki, 25 October 2000

We are just about to finish our joint venture, and you ask if the literature is a collective activity. Dear Jacques, what else could it be? You have acted as a catalyst for me, and I have given impulses to you, isn't that true? Maybe the final outcome is not what we expected or imagined, but in any case it is some kind of literature, at least I think so. One thing is for sure, literature is always collective-as collective as language and dreams are-because no one is writing or dreaming in a vacuum. When I am writing, I am in a dialogue with the living and the dead writers, from classic Chinese and Russian writers to modern French or Finnish writers.
Before we put the end to our dialogue, I'd like to return to your story about the Sphinx. Some days ago I read purely coincidentally a poem about the Russian Sphinx written by Alexander Blok. That Sphinx was quite different from the Western Sphinx, who always asks rationalistic riddles. But according to Blok the Russian Sphinx is emotional and ambivalent. She never asks, she is mute, "grieving and exulting, bleeding black and bloody tears. And she stares at you, adoring and insulting with love that turns to hate, and hate - to love." Maybe there will always be a large gap between Western and Eastern Europeans, because of two completely different Sphinxes-and I sense that I'm always hovering on the boundary of those two worlds. Sometimes I understand the riddles of the Western Sphinx, sometimes not, but as you said, it is stupid and dangerous to try to solve riddles. Am I right?

Anita

Paris, 26 October 2000

Dear Anita,

Last night I said to myself: ok, I will send a question off to Anita, henceforth a friend of mine in letters and in spirit. Anita will respond and we will have finished our first collaborative piece. But things never happen the way we tell ourselves they will. So, Anita, answer my question, but complete your reply by sending a new one. To that question, my reply is categorically negative. Not in order to try what's stupid and dangerous, but in order to imagine already having succeeded.

Jacques


Helsinki, 31 October 2000

Dear Jacques,

Marvelous to be your friend 1300 years after Li Po!
I will consider what you have said.
I have nothing more to add, for last words are mostly beside the point.

Anita

PS. Imagine that! There are just now 10 000 plastic bears decorating the street Unter den Linden in Berlin. The artist is planning to show the bears in Paris to find an answer to his question “how can the boulevards of this world communicate with each other.”

-Translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel