How you say it

This past week started 3 weeks of the Shanghai International Literary Festival. The weather has been absolutely perfect for the event, pouring rain and cold. It is at M-on the Bund which looks over the river and the high rise towers across the water. So far I have seen Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad who has stories of war on Chechnya, Kabul, and Iraq. She spoke of her experience in Russia as a foreign student during University and one day was introduced as a reporter and that is what got her writing and researching stories of children of war. David Grossman started his lecture reading a passage in Hebrew from one of his books, and then later spoke of his own experiences politically, as a writer and as an Israeli trying to understand both sides of the conflict. On Wednesday evening myself and a colleague faced Shanghai traffic and made our way down to hear two Scandinavian poets read avant-garde poetry with the back drops of the skyscrapers with electronic adverts and pink rain and designs on them. It was an interesting juxtaposition to Sjon talking about fox hunters in Iceland writing the most Icelandic book for the 300 000 readers in Iceland. Also, for Lars Bukdahl to read about his different alphabets address concerns of what he says his only reader… himself. This afternoon I just got out of a session on Gandhi and the impact on the world and continued impact. Ramachandra Guha started quoting Einstein, on his 131st birthday that gave homage to Gandhi for his political stance and peaceful demonstrations. David Grossman’s structure of his sentences and phraseology put interesting twist and visuals to his stories and thoughts. My personal favorite was “that was too many quantities of time”.
All of the sessions I have enjoyed what the authors said and the comments brought new light to their work as well as issues around their writing as well as how they said it. I heard pieces of places I have been and people that have been important to me in the reflection of their mother tongues onto English. Åsne delivered some of Oslo to me, while Lars Bukdahl reminded me of Danish friends while reading his Jensen alphabet from his book on alphabets (it is funnier than you can imagine), and Ramachandra Guha’s head bob brought me flavors of India and dear friends that have come and gone from there.