Lost in Lille 3000

Rue Faidherbe, the main drag in Lille running from the station into the old town has taken on a royal Indian look with its colossal majestic distinctly South Indian elephants. The train station is lit up, the illuminations making the shape of Mumbai’s Victoria Station. The opera house announces an Asha Bhosle concert and the central square announces a Christmas market. Lille is celebrating India and welcoming all hues of artists from the sub-continent: writers, singers, musicians, painters. It is also continuing with its own Christmas time celebrations with a gigantesque wheel that offers rides at night.

Yesterday the Villa Mont Noir some 30 kms from Lille hosted an evening L’Inde plus vaste que le monde (India, bigger than the world), the title originating form a work of Borges. The villa was the home of the writer Marguerite Yourcenar when she was a child and now serves as a resident for European writers. It is also active in the cultural and literary life of the region. Just 500 meters from the Belgian border it also happens to offer visitors an amusing view of border commerce: the French side is almost rural while the Belgian side is choc-a-bloc with tabacs selling cigarette-rolling machines, chocolate shops hawking edible Santas, and colorful Indian bags at low prices. Bailleul the nearest small town, almost entirely destroyed in the First World War and reconstructed since boasts a gorgeous monument in a modest location off the town square: a magnificent woman with arms open to the sky, a monument dedicated to peace.

Yesterday evening, the French writer Sébastien Ortiz (a nom-de-plume) engaged in a debat with me (in French of course). The debat littéraire is a rather French thing somewhat in-between an interview and a discussion. I received the first hundred pages of the French translation of my novel a fortnight back and the experience of reading myself in French has been truly novel (no pun intended). It has been an opportunity to see my own work afresh with new eyes. The book, in a sense, is no longer my work because all translations appropriate and reshape texts. There are many peripheral questions that I have been asking myself since this happened. If I were writing in French would my style resemble that of the translation? And if not, then what is gained and what is lost? Is style largely untranslatable, in which case what is really left of Mallarmé’s poetry in English?

A small extract from Babyji was read by Hélène, a local actress. Hélène’s rendition of the first chapter of Babyji was different than my own reading in my mind of the French version. As an actress she knew how to interpret the text to an audience. What had sounded like a competent but prosaic translation in my own hands now came to life with Hélène’s voice. Strangely enough someone else interpreting my work aloud to an audience in her own language was more authentic to the spirit of the original English version than my interpretation of my own work in a foreign language. It is easy to shrug this aside by attributing it to my less than perfect French but my own view is rather more poetic: the reader takes the book and turns it into something else and by transforming it is able to remain loyal to the potency of the original version. What I am saying about translation of course holds even for texts that are not translated. When we read (or see art) we constantly apply our own experiences and vision to the work we are consuming.

Seeing India in Lille is akin to these issues of translation, at least for someone like me who speaks languages from both places. When cultures (or texts) are transposed they are eventually touched and changed by this new contact. Do the Indians who have come to Lille for the festival these past months see their own heritage differently? And do I, as an expatriate, see India with a variety of different filters both American and French? The answer to most of these questions is, simply put: Yes. For someone like me, already familiar, with elephants in royal robes sporting gilded ivory tusks, the ones in Lille have transformed the rue Faidherbe into Mysore.
The grand majesty of the main road in Mysore that cuts its market into two (I don’t remember the name) has somehow magically appeared in Lille. I have never seen the road in Mysore with elephants but something about the distribution of matter and weight between the road and the Lillois rooftops and the volume of the elephants that have been erected creates an impression of Mysore. No surprise then that these pachyderms along with the immense Diwali lights that are interspersed between the elephants don’t seem kitschy to my eyes.

Art (and the urban environment which itself is a sort of created art) contains the potential for transcendence and also the potential for intense subjective interpretation; moreover these two aspects are not mutually exclusive. There is thus, always, an implicit dialog between the creator and the consumer. Today in Lille, I decided to reverse the roles being played and exchanged my writer’s hat for that of a tourist. I was richly rewarded even after accounting for the incessant rain and the labor of hauling suitcases across the vast Place de la République to access Le Palais des Beaux-Arts.

L’Homme Paysage is an exceptionally broad exhibition around the theme of anthropomorphized nature spanning several centuries and over one hundred works in all media ranging from sea-sponges enforced with copper to delicate xylography. John Isaacs’ sculpture features a large sagging man infiltrated with urban structures. A Coca Cola sign floats around his heart, small scale models of buildings and trees and skyscrapers merge into his flesh. If this piece is too large or too obvious there are smaller older pieces by Arcimboldo and Joos De Momper. Javier Perez has taken white horsehair and dyed it red to create a sculpture of animal capillaries. A charming wall with small covered screens hides over a dozen interpretations photographic and graphic of different versions of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. And a Japanese work pre-dating Klimt that might easily have served as his inspiration for his Danaë.

L’Homme Paysage cast in a different light something I myself said a few times yesterday in response to questions both from Sébastien (pictured here)
and from the audience. When pressed on what gives a diverse population like India’s a sense of unity I stressed that it is important not to lose the idea of the actual geographic entity that is India. The notion of her sacred geography transcends a mere religious interpretation, and the corners of the country, its mountain and river valleys are inherently connected to the Indian consciousness in both historic and cultural terms. The dialog between creator and consumer has a parallel in the dialog between body and landscape.