Contact us

Ordkalotten – Tromsø International Literature Festival

Postal Address

Post box 539
N-9256 Tromsø
Norway
 

E-mail

festival{a}ordkalotten.no
 

Festival phone

+ 47 95 83 48 63
 

Visit us

Skansen Festival Centre
Søndre Tollbodgate 8
Tromsø

ORDKALOTTEN 2010: CARAVAN
Project Description

The word caravan specifically describes a large group, journeying with pack animals and goods through hard-traveled areas. By naming this year’s festival Caravan, we want to focus on divergence, travel and arrival. Travel between locations, but also between languages and within languages while writing. We have organized work on the program around several focal points:

1. Translation

One of the focal points of Ordkalotten10:Caravan is translation. Translating literature is a way of meeting other cultures, societies and landscapes. One could look at translation as a caravan of words between languages; a caravan that initiates discourse shared across borders both abstract and physical. In an increasingly globalized world, the translation becomes important as a tool to understand the encounters we face. During Ordkalotten10:Caravan, Laila Stien will be a central figure. In her body of work, Stien has focused on meetings between cultures, such as in her novel Vekselsang. In addition, she is quite possibly the most important translator of Sami literature into Norwegian. During Ordkalotten, Laila Stien will speak about both her own authorship and about working with translation; she will also translate Rauni Magga Lukkari’s prologue from Sami to Norwegian and participate in the reading of said prologue during the opening of the festival.
We will also meet authors and translators Liv Lundberg and Thomas Lundbo. Lundberg has spent a long career translating poetry into Norwegian from a wide variety of languages; in 2008, Lundbo won a national award for his translation of Faïza Guènes’ novel Kiffe kiffe demain (Kiffe kiffe i morgen). The talk will be lead by Cathrine Strøm from the publishing company TransFe:r, which specializes in translated literature.

2. Preparation

Before setting out for long journeys, preparation is pivotal. With this in mind, we think of writing as a journey. We want to focus on the writing process, and ask our visiting authors how they prepare new projects, and how they decide what to include and what to leave behind. In order to discuss this question we envision conversations between two pairs of authors. With his megalomaniac, six-volume book project, Karl Ove Knausgård has been writing with the notion that everything should be included. For the first conversation, we plan for him to speak with poet, critic and essayist Espen Stueland. Poetry is concentration; Knausgård’s prose takes disclosure to the extreme.
The second pair is Thomas Espedal and Ursula Andkjær Olsen. In his book Gå, Espedal focused on the journey, and in his most recent book Imot kunsten the writing process and writing as work are important themes. We would like him to speak with the Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen, who was nominated for the Nordic Council’s literary award for her fifth poetry collection Havet er en scene. Olson's poetic writing is both unabashedly blurring and conscientiously examining.
We also want to invite sisters Guri and Sigrid Botheim, who have co-written the collage-style novel Ramstein pensionat. What is the writing process like when the notion of a sovereign author is replaced by a small, familial collective? Maybe one could speak of an edited novel, more so than a written one.
We also want to examine distinguishing spaces in language, as well as the borders between national languages, and as such we will invite the American poet and critic Charles Bernstein and Finnish poet Leevi Lehto to a conversation about the language in between, lead by Paal Bjelke Andreson. Bernstein and Lehto both work with conceptual, language-critical approaches to the writing process.

3. Divergence and Arrival

Within the focus of”Divergence and Arrival” Ordkalotten10:Caravan wants to look at the journey itself, with attention to both the transfer between locations, and on coming and going. This theme is unavoidable when speaking of Caravan and opens a wealth of possibilities on the subject of travel and transfer in literature. Travel is a way of understanding; travel is learning and experiencing, but it can also be about escape or exile. In the festival program several entrances to travel are explored.

By inviting people like Yann Martel, Erlend Loe, Arto Paasilinna and Carsten Jensen, Ordkalotten10:Caravan wants to focus on a variation of renowned travelogues. These are established authors whose literary works have concentrated on the journey, as in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Erlend Loe’s L, Arto Paasilinna's Jäniksen vuosi (The Year of the Hare) and Carsten Jensen’s Nordic Council’s literary award-winning travelogues.

Other connections and entry points to travel are: Anne Oterholm and Ingrid Z. Aanestad, both of whom have a train ride as a starting point for two very different stories in their most recent novels, respectively, Toget fra Ajaccio and Eg kjem med toget. Karin Sveen and Per Petterson’s bodies of work deal with journeys between socio-economic classes, and the relationships within these. Through their novels, Lars Wilhelm Svonni, Britt Karin Larsen and Alf Nilsen Børskog deal with the migration and suppression of three minority populations in Scandinavia: the Sami, the Romany, and the Kvens. The genre-defying performance “Smihtaskasat – En FlyttsameJazzPoesiForestilling” deals with women’s role in a reindeer husbandry-based society, where author Inga Ravdna Eira’s texts are augmented with yoik, images and music. By involving the research project ArkDisk at the University of Tromsø as well as Tromsøs Arktiske Forening, we will also focus on Tromsø’s history as a starting point for polar expeditions. One part of this will be a meeting with Peter Davidson, who writes about arctic discourses, most recently in his book The Idea of North.

4. Locality (locus)

The Latin word locus means “locality.” In genetics, locus describes the chromosomal position of a gene. In medicine, locus is the point of the body where a pathogen enters. In mathematics, locus is the set of all points that satisfy a given condition.
From a caravan perspective, it is important to note that the locality is the known, the domestic, the exit point, and the unknown, the destination, whether it’s planned or incidental. From an Ordkalotten perspective, it is important to have sections in the program which deal especially with the northern aspects of locality, be it expeditions to the Arctic Ocean or polar heroes on their way into the unknown. The tundra is an important place, so too is the ocean, the water element.