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In the second of two parts, Alessandro Raveggi, author and editor at The FLR, interviews editor John Freeman on the occasion of his tour of Italy, for the first issue of Freeman’s to be fully translated into Italian, by Black Coffee editions. Alessandro’s journal, The Florentine Literary Review, was created in 2016 as the first illustrated bilingual literary magazine in Italy. The first half of this interview was published in the previous issue of Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail.
You frequently use, in your introductions, metaphors related to aviation, flights, flying, from personal experiences on small flights of terror, to your reading experience with the biography of the aviator-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince. You wrote about the cultural euphoria of flying, as an editor, over a world that only when “seen from above reveals its patterns.” My feeling is that the pilots of our literary aircraft are mainly translators, they are the basic figures for an active cosmopolitanism, they are perhaps the copilots of the imagination of the writers themselves, especially today. Your work, in my opinion, emphasizes the ability of translation to demonstrate diversity using English as a lingua franca, and I think it is incisive and almost revolutionary in an American culture that, sometimes with difficulty, opens itself outside of its borders and comfort zones. What is the role of the translator and translation in the American literary world and for Freeman’s?
I’ll put it this way: without translators Freeman’s could not exist. They are crucial to getting this project off the ground. I think translation is a powerful metaphor to what it means to be alive today. What is more intimate and profound than putting another culture in your mouth? That’s what you do when you learn another language. To the tongue-tied, land-locked, shy mono-linguists among us, translators are everything, they help us appreciate the breadth and beauty of what is out there. Surely all the beauty of the world hasn’t only fallen onto English writers! So movement, metaphorical and actual, is key to making the world of letters.
If I had to present the path of Freeman’s I would use two words: poetic and committed. Is the idea of Freeman’s to reconcile these two dimensions, aesthetics and ethics, together? What is the exact formula of Freeman’s, when is it that the work feels perfect, complete? When reading the authors you choose, there emerges the idea of a search for uniqueness and variety amongst the voices, from creative reportage like that of Osorno to the most visionary and anti-realistic voices that we often write off as having little to do with civil commitment.
The roots of the word engagement in English—which means, ironically, both a promise to marry as well as a commitment to fight—begins in the French word engager, to pledge. The earliest meanings of the word in the seventeenth century in English involved a moral or legal obligation. I think in our degraded present moment, what the American critic Lionel Trilling called “the moral responsibility to be intelligent” is under threat. It is harder than ever to be intelligent. Facts are publicly assailed. Schools are underfunded. Libraries are underfunded. Everywhere one sees idiocy celebrated. Broadcast. Presented as strength. Engagement as a word has started to mean contact, as in being online, networked, constantly engaged, busy. Touching a node of discourse. This is disastrous. One used to trust, to a small degree, that the state would educate you. That is no longer the case. In America, they will not even house you or look after your health. So engagement, in the fundamental sense, has been abandoned and replaced with something much less edifying. So how are we to learn what is true? If you agree with the poet Keats, buried in your country, that what is beautiful is true, this means becoming a student of beauty as you are also a dogged seeker of truth. The two are not in conflict. They are more often than not the same thing. Understanding this, to me, is how we will survive and even lift ourselves out of moments like the present. To my mind, no one lights a torch in that search quite like good writers who see beauty. They choose what we see, they don’t show us everything, that is a fallacy of the internet. They do not rise to meet our expectations, they create new ones. As in, as a reader, I don’t think we can say, point the torch here. We look where they shed light, that is part of the surprise and the beauty of being a reader. Seeing what we were not yet seeing. That is what Freeman’s is for.
Talking about anti-realism, another sentence that struck me deeply and I would like for you to comment on—in your introduction to The Future of New Writing—is this one: “Realism is not nearly so dominant a style when you look to the world for good writing.” How do you explain this kind of crisis of realism? Does it have to do with the cosmopolitan environment, outside the limits of circumscribed realities, that our authors live in today? As if the limits of reality were broken precisely by breaking the limits of language, the imaginary, national culture and pride?
I think the biggest distributors of realism are film and television, forms of entertainment that are truly global. I’ve never been in a hotel anywhere in the world which isn’t playing an episode of Law & Order. It’s sort of reassuring in some grim way. We see something on a screen and there it is; but of course, read any good reporter, Saviano or Joan Didion, and you know everything we’re seeing has been scripted, especially when it comes to the so-called “real.” Still, how pleasing to the eye it is to glide over those surfaces! To see things as they are happening right now. The power of literature, though, has never been the boom shot. It’s been the close up. Showing us what goes on inside the head of people living perhaps just outside the crowd. As more and more of our writers grow up as exposed to film and TV as they are to literature I think the call of realism will retain power. Simultaneously, as governments around the world lie more and more—which is the only thing they can do as they become ever entrenched in corporate power—the instinct to reject realism will only grow. That tension is especially fascinating right now.
Last question: how do you reconcile your work as an editor with that of a writer? Are there any conflicts or idiosyncrasies in doing both activities?
They enrich each other but the roles are very different. As an editor, I am there to be an advocate for and listener to a writer. It is one of life’s great pleasures for me, a very pure one, loving and trying to explain why a particular writer is great and needs to be read. No one faults you as an editor for doing that, except if you tip from passion into hype. As a writer, it would be silly, and rather cheesy, to say I am my own advocate. A writer’s role is more private: I am listening to what happens in my mind, however strange, as it rubs up against the world. The two activities, writing and editing, do not seem in any way in conflict for me, since my respect for writing and writers is what makes me want to write, and it is my awareness of my limits as a writer that makes it a relief and a joy to pick up someone else’s writing and sing on its behalf.
The Italian translation of this interview appears in Forbes’ Italian subsidiary—Forbes Italia. For more Italian writing in translation, look no further: Asymptote’s list of Italian works, with writings by over thirty authors, is collated here.
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