For twenty years the annual writing residency at Randell Cottage in Wellington has been shared between a New Zealand writer and a French one. Thirty-nine of the writers have contributed something to this collection. Sometimes it is a piece they wrote in the cottage, sometimes a story or a poem, or in some cases a piece specially written to recall their experiences living in Wellington. Each author’s works are translated, so that every piece has a version in both French and English.
One of the things that strikes you is just how refreshing it is to read the views of visitors to our capital and our country. Their wonder and amazement is lovely to share. Through them, we see with fresh eyes just how special a place we live in. The brightness in the quality of our light receives quite a few mentions.
A good selection of the great and the good of New Zealand writing can be found amongst these pages; Owen Marshall, Witi Ihimaera, Stephanie Johnson, Tina Makereti, Peter Wells, Kirsty Gunn and Whiti Hereaka, to name but a few. Sadly for the equally sized French contingent I cannot say how well-known or successful they are in their native land. All I can observe is that many have multiple prizes and awards listed in their short biographies.
I am not a confident French speaker. I learnt the language for five years at school, and it allowed me only enough skill to order food and know what to ask for in shops when I travelled in France, but my knowledge is certainly not on the level of nuance needed for reading literature. Nevertheless, I saw words in the French translations which made me curious enough to look for them in the English version. ‘Brusquement’ was a word that caught my eye – I think it means ‘suddenly’, but it has a nice roll to it when trying to pronounce it in French.
One of the poem translations describes itself as ‘free translation’. This being Wellington, it is all about the wind – vent in French – and there is lots of alliteration around that ‘v’ sound, such as ‘au vent vivant’. None of this wordplay works when you translate it into the English word wind. So the translator has riffed on the ‘w’ sound instead, finding words that are not an exact translation of the original but which still convey the idea, like ‘waxeyes in the whipping wind’.
The beauty of a collection such as this is the diversity of voice and point of view. The editors, in their introduction, pay tribute to this, saying:
‘Each writer has brought something of themselves to the cottage, where there is an accumulation of voices over twenty years that blend and sprout like the garden on St Mary Street. The stories they have submitted not only speak to one another across distance and time, but sing in their new translations.’
One of the passages that I found very moving was from the French author Dominique Mainard. Called Leur histoire, it describes a man, a grandparent, who had fled his European homeland and then in his new home made a long trip by bicycle. He hides his bike in a ditch under corn husks that he found lying on the frozen ground. Then he walks, carrying an empty suitcase until he comes to a farm where he removes a roll of banknotes from his shoe and buys three kilos of potatoes, a pound of butter and two live hens. He is stopped on his bicycle as he tries to enter the city he came from. He is arrested and never seen again. Mainard sums up this moment with stunningly simple language:
‘They stopped him as he was entering the city. After that, the stories differ, and who is right, who is wrong, since he never came back to tell us himself? Some people say they asked what his name was, others say they asked him to write it down. But he couldn’t do either because his language wasn’t their language, or perhaps his accent, or his handwriting gave him away. The men arrested him, no one knows what became of the red hens that he’d tucked under his overcoat, against his chest, as he pedalled on his bicycle through the cold. Or what became of him, either. No one knows with any certainty what happened, except that his words or his hand betrayed him and he never came back.’
Another piece of stunning writing was by the New Zealand poet Jennifer Compton. This is called The dead woman’s button box:
‘This is an anecdote, which is a kind of singing, from the Greek, anekdota –
unpublished items. These are the hitherto undivulged particulars of her history.
This is a button box, although it is a cake tin, it is a tin in spite of being plastic.
It has an orange and brown floral trim, so it has to be from plump in the fifties.
I take off the lid and release the gamy smell of kitchen grease, wet dog, old age.
I can see straight off that she didn’t favour blue but preferred the peach spectrum.
A family member in the military, all the embossed buttons with metal shanks.
And they did have a dog at some stage, I find the registration tag, kept as a token.
There was a husband in the picture, with a fly he buttoned up and unbuttoned.
The sombre fixing, the doings and undoings, rattle around at a complete loss.
And the dross, the pins, tacks and washers, a dresser handle, and tiddlywinks.
Which I toss as I sift, the mostly buttons falling like water through my fingers.
I never met her. All I can know of her is what I can infer from this psychometry.
Some buttons are so old and crazed I think she inherited the from her mother.
A nail clipping, just one. The moment when she snipped and it pinged off, gone.
This is a precious relic, containing all her secrets, her lineage and her character.
I sluice and scrub the buttons, set them to dry and winnow in the afternoon sun.
They begin to shine and speak to me, soon I will own them, they will be mine.’
Estelle Nollet, born in the Central African Republic, sets her story in a retirement home, where her subject has little memory of what has gone before or even what happened yesterday. It is called Intoxication of memory.
‘These days he lives inside his soul like a mole, refusing the light of day in spite of himself, blind to his moments of happiness or torment, or whatever the planet might bear because of his family, because of him…
It’s a good thing he can’t remember anything. Each moment is short. He goes back to his armchair, wondering each time who has covered it with a tartan blanket that doesn’t suit.’
I love the variation that you find in the stories. One is four pages of sensations; colours, sounds, textures, smells, light, books, creatures, objects, flavours, travels and plants. Another is called Old-dog ghost-dog and tells about the smell Karin Serres woke to each morning: ‘As soon as I wake up, I can smell wet dog. The smell is strong in the morning and fades during the day, but in the evening, as night falls, it comes back ten times stronger.’
‘Where is he lurking in the cottage we share, this very smelly, invisible, silent dog? I never hear him breathing, or growling, never hear the clicking of his claws on the floor between the rugs. Where is he lurking, day and night, this wet and very smelly dog, who may even be dead?’
Wonderful stories and poems, evocative, full of texture and depth. At times even the novelists turn into poets, such as in this piece from Amélie Lucas-Gary:
‘As I turn over, the springs and the wire-wove supports of my bed squeak under the weight of sleep: the mattress heaves as metal drawn from the entrails of the earth awakens.’
Rich with little details, even the name of each of the writers can be found in soft grey print in the footer of each right-hand page. It is rare to find such diversity within one collection and so it is a testament to the whole endeavour of bringing all these voices together, that each complements the other and brings us a little closer to a small cottage clinging to a steep hillside, high above Wellington.
Reviewer: Marcus Hobson
The Cuba Press