C'è ancora spazio per le grandi storie? | con David Damrosch | Il Gomitolo Atomico #53

Ajouté : 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I was social media.

[00:00:18]Prosper.

[00:00:51]Grandoto.

[00:01:13]Most of us read the same books. Uh that's maybe one or two% of all literature. But what about the other 98%?

[00:01:23]The poetry of 8th century Persia, the novels of contemporary Albania, the epics that shaped the Bible itself.

[00:01:31]David Damrush has spent his career chasing those overlooked stories. He's a Harvard scholar, a founder of the Institute for World Literature, and one of the world's leading voices on how text circulates across time and culture.

[00:01:48]His first book traced how Gilgamesh influenced the Hebrew Bible. His later work, like what is the word literature, argues that books don't just live in their original language and original cultures. They take on new life in translation, in circulations, in the hands of readers far away from where they began. He's published widely, edited massive anthologies, and even taught hundreds of thousands of students online. Most recently in 2023, he was awarded the Batsan Prize for his contributions to world literature. So if you want to understand why literature matters, David Damro is the person to talk to. And that's exactly what we're going to do today. Welcome, David.

[00:02:33]>> Thank you so much.

[00:02:34]>> Thank you.

[00:02:34]>> It's a pleasure to have you here. Well, I'd like to start with a a big uh maybe slightly unfair question. Does literature still matter in society today? What is its role beyond pure evasion? Pure escapism, escapism.

[00:02:52]>> I think it matters more than ever in new ways. I think we're under threat. uh in terms of environment in terms of society, globalization has had a very ambiguous double effect. The world is getting smaller and it is falling apart.

[00:03:09]Uh the globalization has opened up new vistas for world literature. World literature studies used to be basically Western Europe and now we have hundreds of of countries uh dozens and dozens of languages to look at. So it's a problem of scale and scope but it's the same as a problem of environment. so many environments around the world, so many cultures fighting with each other. And I think that um one thing that's always very much struck me um I think um the British romantic poet Percy Shelley writes a defense of poetry and partly he's talking about the aesthetics of course he's a great poet but also he says what we really need in society is imagination. He says, "We we know how to make the world a better place. At least we know how to make it better than it is, but we lack the imagination to act on what we know." And that's his defense for poetry. H and I was thinking about this also coming back to to Italy this week with the Tal Calvino uh a great favorite of mine that I've written about is Leita and Visibly and in one of he has a present tation about it from the 80s in which he says well he he thinking back he thinks his his book was a kind of a love letter to to the city at just a point when the city is becoming completely unlivable. He says something like inviv one letter difference but it's all the difference and he says his job is to find those places in the inferno that are not the inferno and give them space >> by the way good Italian and we we will learn how many languages professor dammer doesn't know >> doesn't know maybe somewhat >> so for people who feel their attention pulled constantly um toward devices what is your argument for turning to a book instead. What do books give us that screens can never give us?

[00:05:04]>> Yeah, I think um I think it's a lot like um organic food as opposed to processed food. Okay.

[00:05:11]>> Uh it's food that you spend time cooking. Uh I'm a fan of the slow food movement. I have cousins who are organic gardeners.

[00:05:19]>> Uh and you know, it takes time to think.

[00:05:22]It takes time to pause. One of the things that's the most fun about teaching, I just was talking to a a a freshman of mine. Uh over the course of the semester, you see at first she's just reacting. Oh, she likes this story.

[00:05:34]She likes this character. By the end of the semester, she's thinking, well, that's what I thought when I first read it. But now I wonder about what I'm thinking. Why has this author not resisted more? What's she doing? And this uh this kid is now planning a a senior essay uh using statistics to try to understand ecological metaphors in a bunch of writers. So she's and and she's going to be a joint major in in statistics and in comparative literature.

[00:05:58]>> So for her this the two things each is needed for the other.

[00:06:02]>> Yeah. Well, this is a an outstanding student certainly. Uh do you see in general um lower capacity for attention in students?

[00:06:13]>> Absolutely. Um you know I I was born before there were social media before there was electricity. practically you couldn't use a screen. There were no computers. You had a book. Uh so I also think the challenge for that is for those of us who love literature to think about how it works in this new ecosystem. Uh and I think that uh one things that happens is that old forms rarely die but they have to adapt. uh and and a new system uh some things will fall by the wayside and and some things will will thrive and it's figuring out as as Melopo says make those things thrive that that can and should. So a lot of the challenge uh for anyone interested is to think right of the many writers you know which are the ones who still should survive now and why. Uh so we find at least at Harvard for example um great books are still very popular and students will sit down and read entire great books uh if they know what it's giving them that they don't get otherwise.

[00:07:13]>> Huh? So what does literature tell us about us humans today?

[00:07:21]The interesting thing to me for studying world literature particularly across periods is is we're I think it's a prime place for for testing our place in the world. Uh any great work of literature brings you into another world that gives you a sort of inongruous perspective on your own world which is why Calbino's invisible cities are telling the Kublacan so much about his empire but really telling Italians about postwar Italy is really what it's about.

[00:07:47]>> Yeah that's absolutely true. You've said that in ninth grade you discovered the 18th century comic novel Tristram Shandi and it cracked open your sense of what literature could be. What exactly shifted you in that moment?

[00:08:02]>> Yes. Well, this is the first book I had ever read that was really for grown-ups.

[00:08:06]I've been reading well I've been reading the Lord of the Rings 10 times which I love and I in fact I still teach it. Uh but it's a kind of adolescent grown-up grown-up book. So then this teacher gives me Tristan Shand. I love this comic quality, this metaphictional, this parotic quality.

[00:08:21]>> Uh, and uh, you know, one of the things that's interesting, especially with the vast range of world literature, >> where do you go from here? How do you decide what to read? So often my best guide is my favorite author. So he, in this case, when I was 16, says he speaks of his dear uh, cervantes, his dear, and his dear cervantes. So I didn't know who those gentlemen were, but I thought if Tristram likes them, I should like them.

[00:08:42]So I read these books. I think these are hilarious. I think these are wonderful.

[00:08:45]I like these rollicking sexy satires.

[00:08:48]What else can I read? So I look in the back of my Penguin Classics book, The Divine Comedy. Ah, this should be a real laugh riot. So I bought that, the three volume edition, the head, translated by Dorothy Seers, who is a great detective story writer.

[00:09:02]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:09:02]>> And then I found it was not quite the sort of laugh riot I had expected, but I loved it. So thanks to Tristram Shandandy, I read Dante and then go on from there.

[00:09:12]>> Wow. So not not exactly a comedy but still divine. Divine divine well comedia technically speaking. Yes. And even with funny moments.

[00:09:20]>> Absolutely. Absolutely. I didn't know that Dorothy Sawyers translated the first edition. Well, the one that you read.

[00:09:26]>> Yeah, exactly. She translated in Toronto herself which was a bold idea to do with long commentaries. It's quite interesting.

[00:09:32]>> Interesting. So, what role do publishing houses um and markets play in shaping what gets labeled as literature these days?

[00:09:40]>> Oh, that's absolutely critical. as this example I just gave. Thanks to the Penguin Classics, I find Dante in the in my local store and then I find Bashau and then I find Ramayana things that they're willing Gilgamesh I first read thanks to Penguin Classics in a pros translation. I grew out of that. Penguin itself has grown out of it. But crucial uh there there's a lot of interest these days in what in literature studies we call gatekeepers.

[00:10:05]>> Uh and and there the multiple actors who keep the gates who open them or keep them closed or selective. It can be agents, it can be podcasters, it'll be translators, it'll publishers. Uh it it takes an entire village to to make a novel really.

[00:10:22]>> Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:10:22]>> Or a poet.

[00:10:23]>> Or a poet. Yes. When we see for example lists like the 100 best books of the century, big prize winners, university curricula, it is impossible not to notice how heavily uh they skew toward English language works, how much imperialism is still absolutely baked into the world of books.

[00:10:45]>> Yep. Yes. And one of my uh challenges and the pleasure for me is is pressing against that as someone particularly because the United States where I come from has always been relatively uh ignorant of the rest of the world and seems to be priding itself on this right now more than ever. I feel this evangelical need to explain to people the rest of the world. I wrote a a trade book for general readers on the epic of Gilgamesh uh a little a few years after the 911 attacks because I got so annoyed at this stupid discourse about the clash of civilizations that was going on in the United States. I thought what do I know about to say if you go back far enough it's actually one civilization.

[00:11:24]So I thought Gilgamsh is great because it has offshoots that comes into the thousand nights into Homer into the Bible. So I thought of the general public should have a book about the Gilgamesh. Now the general public did not know it needed a book about Gilgamish, right? So then it's a question how do you reach people? So I decided to tell this as a kind of Victorian adventure story using the analogy of a archaeological dig. You start at the president dig down. So we start with what do you know more the discovery of the epic the imperial situation and then go back back back to uh to Gilgamesh himself in in the Sumerian world. So the imperialism of English is something that I we have to use as well as we fight against it. I've talked to my friend Orhan Pamak about this. um he's been translated to 60 languages or so. Half of his translations come through English. Uh and instead of being upset about that, he said, "Right, that's good. He'd rather have it translated well by a good translator from English into, you know, Vietnamese than badly translated or never translated."

[00:12:20]>> So I think English increasingly is not just an imperial language. We can fight against that. It's a kind of a transit language >> for the world to connect itself. The people that never otherwise would connect.

[00:12:30]>> Yeah.

[00:12:32]Um and how do we break out of the cycle if there is a possibility of doing it practically how can ordinary readers not academics like you uh find their way into the wider 98% we were talking about before of literature that usually gets overlooked. What should we do? What can we do?

[00:12:50]>> No, I think uh this is this is a good thing about uh prizes and about listicles of the hundred best. I mean you can look at that list and see what catches your eye. The Nobel Prize sometimes comes out with really really good uh people particularly if they're not writing English or French. The Nobel committee is still you know okay writers in English or French will get the prize much sooner than the best writer in Albania who did not get it or just died uh is Kad. Uh so at the same time um I think for those of us who are kind of the activists is thinking what's the book at this moment I can say this has a reason uh why you want to read it and sort of uh show that to people.

[00:13:31]>> Do you have a an outlet where you share your aside from the academic word I mean an outlet where you share your visions or your what you were saying right now this is a book we should all read. Well, the the most recent thing I did was this uh if it was first a a a podcast or a webcast um called around the world on 80 books. Yeah, of course. And I a a a an editor asked if I'd like to write a book for the general public about world literature. I thought ah enough of the world literature. But then I thought, well, the pandemic came and and I had the idea I was going to go around to different places and talk about the literature. But then I couldn't go anywhere. But then I felt I really needed to do this because I was in my book. I was in my study and and sirens around outside I can't can't get out so then I can go around the world and I thought 80 books so I have a hook Jules Vern but now he's going to go the much more of the world than his hero Phyious fog does and the 80 books is a strategic way of saying if you're interested I I group them five books each in different city or region so if you're interested sort of uh you know in Istanbul read about that if you're interested in Paris read about about that and I always mix some great classics because people like classics And I like with some things they they've never heard of. And so ideally, you know, reading one chapter, there's a couple you be drawn. Oh, I'm interested in Florence or I'm interested in Tokyo, but now I'm finding also something I've heard about, but oh, something I never heard about. So, that's how I I my strategy.

[00:14:58]>> That's a good strategy. It works. Yes.

[00:14:59]Do you have a favorite book? Um, one that you think everyone should read?

[00:15:05]>> Oh, there's I have so many favorites in different ways. Uh if I tell when I teach P I I tell my my students, you know, you you should all read this. Um uh but unless you you're you're struggling with a bad relationship, you should not read it now. It's going to make it much worse. So there's a certain moment in your life when you should all have read Puce, but not now.

[00:15:28]>> Not now when you feel like that. Yes. I >> I should tell you the other book that changed my life apart from Tristram Shandi really and P and Joyce and Gilgamsh uh was uh Plato's Republic uh and not that I read it but that I had read it. So when I teach Plato in a course on the fostering the tyrant, I tell my students, well, you may think the Republic is the most a little bit dry, a little bit theoretical, uh, but I can I have visual proof that it can change your life, not reading it, but having read it. And this is because when I was a freshman in college, uh, I I saw a sign advertising asking people to to to uh, try out for for for an opera uh, Gilbert and Sullivan Trial by Jury to be in the chorus. I thought, well, this was going to be that night. But I had to read Plato's Republic for the next day.

[00:16:11]Hey, what was I going to do? Well, I had actually read Praise Republic for fun before. That's the kind of kid I was.

[00:16:17]So, I thought, all right, I didn't understand it, but I I can go to the to the audition. And there I met the girl who became my wife. Uh, and so when I teach the course, I show our older daughter graduating from college. I said, having made having read I made the non-Platonic decision uh with this result. So, having read Plato's Republic actually not only changed my life, but several others.

[00:16:37]>> Yeah, absolutely.

[00:16:40]Your first book, The Narrative Covenant, 1987, traced out, as you were saying, ancient Mesopotamian works like Gilgamesh influence the Hebrew Bible.

[00:16:51]>> That's extraordinary. One civilization shaping the structure of another sacred text. What did that teach you about how stories migrate across cultures?

[00:17:02]>> It's very very interesting uh process. I gradually learned that there is no such thing as a national literature that's separate from the others around it that impinge on it. Uh no one ever just read their own work with the possible exception of uh the ancient Sumerianss because no one else could write at that time.

[00:17:20]>> Uh but even King Schuli of Ur the first known patron of literature 4,000 years ago spoke about he was fluent in the five languages in his court. uh and he envisions a he'll be come world literature as his hymn 2100 BC in which he is in distant days in places where people don't have paved roads meaning like Europe though he doesn't know Europe exists they will hear my songs they will bow down to me so literature has always wanted to move and it always has so there there's always something before one of one of the points I made I wrote an essay on antiquity which I point out I began saying no one ever lived in antiquity people live in the present and they always have an antiquity which comes from to them from somewhere else.

[00:17:58]>> Yes. By the way, I'm interesting. What was the reaction about your book on Gilgamesh discovering that there was so many influences between the cultures as you were saying in a in a moment where talk about clash of civilization was the first thing.

[00:18:15]>> This this realization had been made early on. I mean, when the epic of Gilgamesh was dug up and and people found there was this flood story in it, they oh my god, here it is. Uh, and this is in the 1870s in the front page of the New York Times, this is reported. Does this prove the truth of the Bible or does it prove it's just stories like everything else? So, this is already ambiguous, you know, 150 years ago.

[00:18:36]>> Uh, and to me, a lot of my emphasis, people in biblical studies tended to look at these connections just to say how much better the Bible is. You get a kind of ethnationalism and you see it in French comparatists.

[00:18:48]Puce, you see that Puce is so much better than Sir Walter Scott or something like that. Uh so to me it's more showing this interaction is much more complicated and and it's not that one is better. Exactly. But they're solving different problems for their culture.

[00:19:05]>> Yeah. But it's always so difficult to show uh to the general public how everything is connected. I think is so not black and white.

[00:19:15]So >> I mean so interconnected as we said >> and they forget you know because you said gig mesh was discovered >> more than a century ago but then you find out again this is the fact and >> it probably is not what you want to hear >> and it's also we now know a lot more about Gomesh have a much deeper understanding we can do more with it I'm I'm thinking about doing a book I'd next for a general public I'll call Babylon's Bible >> and show how much of the biblical texts come out of the experience of exile and actually written in Babylon, things like the book of Job, a lot of the Psalms and how they're actually infused with cultural values that they learn there.

[00:19:56]It's not just we monotheists and those degenerate pagans or something like that. They come when they when they're the Hebrews are brought into exile. It's like being exiled from Kansas to Paris.

[00:20:07]Suddenly they're at the center of world culture and it's a revelation to them.

[00:20:12]you were mentioning around the world in 80 books. Yeah.

[00:20:15]>> Uh which was a success also for a general public.

[00:20:19]>> Uh what drew you um as you were saying the moment the historical moment the covid pandemic etc. But uh how did you approach this big task of choosing what leave out what >> take in?

[00:20:33]>> Yeah. So it's it's partly a structural decision first. How many books do I want?

[00:20:38]uh my old uh colleague uh from Harold Bloom uh has a book called The Western Cannon and he has like two dozen books and that's all he needs. Uh and that was to me not enough. I wanted to open up but I didn't have time and if you start to do 500 books then you're not really saying anything. So I thought 80 that's kind of nice. So the around the world in 80 days think oh well that's a nice number. And then I thought well I could divide it up. I could have, you know, 16 weeks, uh, five 16 chapters, five books, so like five days a week for 16 weeks. I could do it taking the weekends off. Uh, that that's that's how that's how I did that. So then once I got that, then um, thinking a mixture of books that are old favorites of mine now and then books I'd never read, I thought, oh, I it's about time I did, but I couldn't do that very much because I only every day I had to go on to another book. But I managed to managed to do that that, too.

[00:21:30]>> Wow. Imagine you know having >> I mean your job is reading books it's yeah >> quite quite fantastic thing >> u you studied um you studied and helped define word literature why should people who don't study literature care about this definition >> so in 1960 there was a an early collection for this period on on teaching world literature and one one uh scholar American German American scholar says well we talk about world literature courses, but we should really call them NATO courses because that's all we teach. And in fact, we only teach one quarter of NATO nations. And so the point of world literature now is saying get beyond that number of NATO nations and and think >> uh really about the um the complexities and imbalances of our world and different kinds of ways of perceiving the world. Uh so one of the I done a collection with a a friend um a who was then a a um graduate student who came to our institute of world literature and he gave a presentation he's from the pharaoh islands and he gave a presentation which he said well major authors minor authors it doesn't work for the pharaoh islands because we have a it's a tiny country with this a real literature it's so he has concept of ultra minor literatures I thought well this is really interesting how do you think about tiny countries and how they relate to the biggest countries so I think to me it's a wonderful window into understanding the the wider world. So my my book has been just come out in in Chinese for example. Um and to me it's really important especially for these large countries that want to be hegemonic.

[00:23:04]Give give people a little way out a little opening beyond the political discourse that is that is being raining down on them.

[00:23:11]>> Yes. You get to travel a lot.

[00:23:13]>> Yeah.

[00:23:14]>> Too much.

[00:23:15]>> Too much.

[00:23:17]Is it having you? Uh I'm trying to well I'm I seem to be I' I've lectured in about 50 countries so it adds up over over time.

[00:23:24]>> Yeah.

[00:23:25]>> But you travel to present your books but also to do research and to to find >> Yeah.

[00:23:30]>> books that you cannot find somewhere else.

[00:23:32]>> Yes. Uh so I I get to know often you know um there's an Omani writer Jokarte who won the Booker Prize for her translation. I didn't know her work till I till I went to Muscat. Mhm.

[00:23:44]>> So, you know, you find things and you find people who say, "Oh, you got to read this." Many of the books I I love are handed to me by a student, Rebecca, what you haven't read this. It's time.

[00:23:53]>> Wow. That's nice. Absolutely. What do you think of the role of artificial intelligence in in translating, for example, books today? Uh, could AI translation be a way to open up neglected literatures or rather strip away in the human creativity that makes translations meaningful?

[00:24:14]>> I think the AI is doing quite well for translating scholarship. I think it's it's uh very very helpful that way. I have used that myself. If I'm going to want to read a review of my book in Slovenian or some lit some scholarship on a Russian author I'm looking in, I don't read Russian. It's extremely helpful. I don't find it at all yet satisfactory for literary translation. I actually am quite skeptical it will be because a literary translation is an interpretation involving nuance and about choices that haven't been made and and it's particularly with a major work of literature and I believe in great works even if they're yet not yet well known.

[00:24:52]>> Uh those are the they're great because they're not fitting a formula.

[00:24:57]>> They don't match the statistics. So AI by its nature is missing what makes P or what makes the tale of Genji so distinct from the thousands of other things. My friend Franco Morete, a town comparist, um now a retired um has a wonderful article called the slaughterhouse of literature and he says that most of what you read is just a small fraction of a percent that survived all that slaughter. But the AI is built around what's been slaughtered. It's the whole database. So you're missing the uniqueness by by definition. So it's fine for scholarship was not got that quality but I think for literature it's it's a long way and might never be very useful.

[00:25:33]>> Might never be.

[00:25:34]>> Yeah.

[00:25:35]>> Absolutely.

[00:25:36]>> Well I was very impressed to read that uh as we were saying before you you work in 12 languages.

[00:25:43]>> What does that do to your mind? Um how does carrying so many languages inside inside you shape the way you think, the way you read, the way you see the world?

[00:25:54]I think that um I'm a preachers's kid and my parents were Anglican missionaries who met in the Philippines and I grew up hearing about this mountain language, the egarot language that they speak and that oh there's there's another way of seeing the world.

[00:26:08]So what I what I really love about a different language especially from a different language family is oh they think about verbs differently. Uh they just the world is shaped differently. So it's partly that my problem is that I I I like too many things and I have studied you know to modering levels of incompetence uh too many languages rather than two or three really well.

[00:26:30]The older mode of comparative literature was you had you used to have a really good accent in French and German that's what mattered a really good accent and anything else was fine but that's the first thing you did. So, so now you know I have kind of uh I in some cases I only know enough uh that I at least I'm not the prisoner of the translation. I can go back and look at the passage. That to me is the qualitative difference. Beyond that it's quantitative so much the better. But that that's the fundamental thing.

[00:26:58]>> How do you go about learning a new language when you know already 12?

[00:27:02]>> Well, a little bit you know it's uh if I uh once I decided I should get some reading ability in Italian. I had studied Spanish and though you know it's it's pretty straightforward but also I mean learning grammar once you've done a certain amount of time you know how a recipe book works and oh here's a declenion it it sort of it sort of helps and then but a lot of what's interesting is how different it is.

[00:27:23]>> Do you have any any suggestion to give to people watching us how to go about uh starting an approach to reading something outside of the language >> well >> if they don't know exactly >> very well the language. Well, you know, to me, more than once I've felt I needed to learn a language because I fell in love with some poetry and translation. I thought, well, I need to get closer to this. So, when I was a freshman in college, I I took an art history course where I did a little section on Mesoamerican art. Uh, and and during a term paper on a on a statue, but I come upon this book on Aztec thought and culture. There's a lot of translations of Aztec poetry. It's incredibly moving.

[00:28:03]This is an English translation of the Spanish translation of the original novel. I thought someday if I get the chance, I'm going to learn this language. So then in graduate school, I find a course. I take I take the the course. But then I find I I really need to know Spanish because you can't work on the Aztec text. So I study Spanish.

[00:28:19]So now thanks to Nawat, I can, you know, uh teach Donote with the Spanish text beside me thanks to Nawat. So but I mean to me it's only I have to fall in love with something first and then I have to pursue it. I think there's there's no better way than that. I would never do it out of sense of duty or filling in a blank.

[00:28:37]>> No. No. You have to be passionate.

[00:28:38]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:39]>> Absolutely. You've studied uh literatures across civilizations, many of which didn't even use the word novel form.

[00:28:47]>> Uh how much is your fixation on the novel limiting the way we think about what literature our fixation I mean not your what about literature can be? Oh, this is a plamic of mine which is uh too much literary studies these days is all about novels.

[00:29:04]A generation ago, there was too much emphasis on romatic poetry, I would say.

[00:29:07]But the dial has shifted. The novel, the novel, the novel. Il Romano about to have the five volume edition that Franco Morete uh did. It's it's it's that um like in the 80 books, I have a lot of poetry. I have uh epics. I have novels.

[00:29:23]I have short stories. Uh all of that. So I think uh absolutely um writers do all kinds of things uh and and we need a varied diet. Totally.

[00:29:35]Absolutely.

[00:29:36]>> Yeah.

[00:29:38]On the other hand, are you seeing emerging trends or voices in the world literature right now that excite you?

[00:29:46]>> Oh, in a number of of cases.

[00:29:49]>> Um and I should also say excited to to find writers I didn't know before. So I'm working on a book now on writing systems and cultural memory and doing a chapter right now on on writing in in India and it's causing me to read these bakti poets from the 16th century Kabir and others they're amazing poets. So and they're now one of the things that's exciting about emerging is there's so much translation now of works that were neglected or were never well translated.

[00:30:13]So you get brilliant translators of medieval Persian poetry for example that just in the last few years. So you can you can find that and then and then I mean let's say uh um in Romania Mitch Carteresco who's won several international prizes absolutely fantastic guy he deserves the Nobel Prize he knows he deserves the Nobel Prize we'll see how soon he gets the prize he so much deserves but you know Yan Foster who just won that Nobel Prize um from Norway any number of people are coming in in in into view. Yeah, absolutely. Is is there someone that you think is still not into view but you say this this is the next uh big >> the next big thing.

[00:30:53]>> Yeah.

[00:30:54]>> Um that's an interesting question just in my own case I'll give you one small example. Uh when I wrote this book on what is royal literature I I has some pages on a congalles a franco found congalles no less name uh angal jungal and he has a book called jambatista viko Africa and viko is not the the Italian philosopher you might think but it's a but a self-promoting African intellectual the name sounds like viko but it's spelled differently but he says we need a sensova now for African literature he's going to write the great African novel by stealing the secrets of African orality uh so he's looking onian aspect, but it's it's an academic satire. It was never translated ever.

[00:31:35]This is published in 1975. It didn't suit anyone's agenda. It was making fun of nationalists and making fun of cosmopolitans. And I had said, well, world literature will come into its own when this book gets translated. So, finally, a couple years ago, I said, I should put my own money where my my time where my mouth is. So, I've translated it. It's come out now from in English.

[00:31:53]In America, there's a dual language edition. So, you have the French original and you have my translation. So you know I think uh it's a matter of finding those ones right let's get into people's hands >> and well and talking about novelty you were a recipient of the Balsan award may I ask you what project you have decided to invest your half of the sum in >> the single best thing about the Bzan is that half of it must go to junior researchers I think that's absolutely so creative so I did found uh this institute for world literature 15 years ago we meet for a month every summer in different places about 150 or so participants, graduate students, young faculty coming to learn about world literature, share their work, but it's largely kind of self-generated and self-funded and we we have about four dozen university affiliates, but they're pretty much all in the global north places in the south that don't have the budgets. The individual students don't.

[00:32:45]So, the Balsen Award is giving us the ability now to bring for five years every year 10 people from different parts of the global south to share their work to do uh to learn. They then uh will were publishing their essays. It's a special issue in the journal of world literature. Uh so this past summer the theme was climate change uh literary responses to ecological crisis and and we get people from all around uh from from Thailand and from the Philippines and from Nigeria one of whom is presenting tomorrow and from India one of whom is presenting tomorrow uh and Mexico uh and Hungary and really thinking globally outside the the North European circuit Euroamerican circuit that too much dominates including in ecoiticism >> and and you bring them to Harvard as well. We brought them this summer to Harvard. Uh so each year it's a different group. So we had we have 11 people, three of whom did not get visas uh by this godforsaken uh administration. Two coincidentally for black Africans and one from India. So two of the three I'm bringing here this week uh for the for the Bzan group which is which is great.

[00:33:49]>> So yeah, this is the was the question I was going to ask. Is this going to be an impact on your work and the work of every researcher?

[00:33:58]>> Absolutely. We see the impact it has on the on the people themselves. It's bringing them into network they haven't necessarily always been at. I mean our speakers are at small colleges in rural India and in southern Nigeria. Here now they're with this with this group. It affects my work enormously. Um when I was starting to work on this this Congolese novel, one of our participants the institute was a congalles guy uh fluent in French and English and he helped me with the translation uh to to think about that. Uh with this current ecological topic, it's making me actually now write about ecological themes. It hasn't been for myself, but I learned so much from the group and think, oh, here's how I can do that.

[00:34:37]>> Yeah.

[00:34:38]>> So, I'm curious. Um you spent some time writing speeches for Jimmy Carter, the president of the United States. um the the the drugs are as >> for his health adviser.

[00:34:48]>> His health advisor. What did that experience teach you?

[00:34:51]>> It it taught me that I'm not a guy to work in a huge bureaucracy, I would say.

[00:34:57]Uh I thought very highly of Jimmy Carter. Uh but it was very very interesting to see because he'd come in from Georgia from outside. He brought in >> these advisers who were in the mid30s from Georgia. they brought in as their helpers people in their late 20s and and that's where things get done is two levels down and those people didn't know anything about Washington. So that's what I really learned like wow uh this is problematic.

[00:35:20]>> Uh I enjoyed working uh for the guy named Peter Bourne. He lost a job when he forged a prescription for quaudes for one of my co-workers. Oh, >> really?

[00:35:29]>> Yes. Uh he got a whole week in the Dunesbury comic strip where the the drug adult character becomes an ex health adviser. It was pretty funny. Uh so the job ended and then at the point I get a dissertation fellowship and decided well this is this is the thing. At the time I I started on the job market though I wasn't sure if I'd get hired an academic job. I had all these weird interests and I also applied to the foreign service and had an offer from them.

[00:35:55]>> Um and that would have been an alternative if I hadn't gotten academic job as really right. Um I would have been happy to be in the foreign service although as it turns out not anymore.

[00:36:05]>> Not anymore probably. Yes. And what pulled you back into literature in staying there?

[00:36:11]>> I mean, it was partly practical things.

[00:36:13]My wife is a lawyer and she was working at the State Department, but the State Department was not uh set up for dual careers. You had to be either like have a wife who didn't work or be a gay guy.

[00:36:23]That most of the diplomats wanted. So, and I only applied for for place for jobs where my wife could practice international law. So, New York locked out for us both. So, there it really worked all around.

[00:36:34]>> Absolutely. Um there is a before I ask you the the last question, there is a you mentioned before some of your um references that works that influenced you a lot. But was there any book like Bloom for example or some some book that uh gave you an overview of literature instead of specific uh books uh >> when I was in college >> that you can suggest to the readers?

[00:37:00]>> Well, I still >> an entry point let's say.

[00:37:02]>> Yeah. Yeah. Um the two classics that influenced me a lot when I was a student. Eric Arabach has a book called Mimmesis the representation of reality in western literature and absolutely amazing starts with the Bible and Homer and goes out to Virginia Wolf and P.

[00:37:16]Incredibly eloquent beautiful book um recommended very highly. I also thought all right it's it's all almost it's all Western Europe there's a wider world out there. So I could do that at a different a different scale. Northrup Fry, The Anatomy of Criticism, also from that period, thinking theoretically about how literature works. Um, that's a really great book. I mean, Harold Blooms, the Western can for what it goes is is good.

[00:37:41]Uh, and and his publisher forced him to put in a list of about 2,000 other works at the end. He thought that the readers may want to know more than your favorite 24. So, you know, but I al I also am a great believer in just following your nose and and something that really excites you. see see who who else is being published by uh the same publisher, you know, and and who who do those writers seem to to love. It's a good a good suggestion following who you like and what they like.

[00:38:09]>> Yeah.

[00:38:10]>> So, before uh we get to the end of this wonderful conversation. This is a mystery box.

[00:38:16]>> So, I see. As it says, there's no mystery about what the box is. It's strangely deconstructing titles.

[00:38:22]>> It's a it's it's closed. We don't know what's inside. Uh-huh.

[00:38:25]>> So that's a problem. But interesting thing is that uh if you have a a question, an enigma um something that you pondered about and you wondered what is the solution? What is the answer to this? What answer could it be inside this box? This box holds the answer to the mystery that you have been wondering about.

[00:38:47]>> So what is the question to which that book is the answer?

[00:38:49]>> Yeah. uh the uh when the Kennedys were young, they used to have this game when they'd be driving along going up to uh Hyannasport uh and and what is what is the question to which this road sign is the answer? And and one of the roads signs was was a route uh like uh route 9 west 9W and and so one of the immediate like Bobby H the question is hervagner do you spell your name with a V and the answer is 9 W. So maybe this will this will be this will be that um uh the the question that I would love that to answer is how soon will we be free of Trump >> at this moment? So the second question is if the answer is really in here would you open the box or wait for the answer to arrive?

[00:39:38]>> I you know I think we have to wait.

[00:39:40]That's why I love literature because we can always imagine the future. It's so much better than just sitting around waiting for it.

[00:39:47]>> Thank you for being with us.

[00:39:49]>> My pleasure.