Venice is so full of surprises. We were there during the Biennale, but had no plans to visit any of the exhibitions. We were there for Titian, after all. So, I had no idea that Edmund de Waal had been invited. We stumbled on his exhibit, sharing campo space with the La Fenice. I am a huge fan--I have longed to see his pottery in person. And there it was, just through that door.
Words by de Waal.
I have made a library. During the Biennale it will be housed in the Ateneo, the beautiful 16th-century building near the Fenice opera house which has acted as a meeting place for two centuries. I’m taking over the Aula Magna room on the ground floor. Working here in Venice I realised that this whole project was a reflection on the power of translation. That the ghetto was a place of voices, of language in flux and that this was, in itself, a manifestation of Venice as the powerhouse of printing in Renaissance Europe. This was the city where Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer from Antwerp, created the great edition of the Bablyonian Talmud in 1520-23. He worked with Jewish scholars and copyists to make books that hold the Hebrew text, an Aramaic translation and commentary within a single page. These beautiful books were ordered by distant Jewish communities from Aleppo to Frankfurt.
So this is a new library of exile, a place that contains 2,000 books written by those who have been forced to leave their own country, or exiled within it. This is a history from Ovid and Tacitus, through Dante to Voltaire and Victor Hugo. It is the history of the 20th century, the century of Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth, of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. It is dissidents. It is poets and novelists forced from their homes, Ai Qing in China and Czeslaw Milosz in Poland, Ismael Kadare in Albania. I think of the recent decades of extraordinary writers from Lebanon and Syria, the literature of exile of Iran, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey.
The external wall of the library is covered in porcelain, painted in liquid form over sheets of gold on which I have written a new text, a listing of the lost and erased libraries of the world, from Nineveh and Alexandria to the recent destruction of Timbuktu, Aleppo and Mosul. Inside this library is a quartet of new vitrines whose structure echoes Bomberg’s great Talmudic page.
This new library will be open for all readers from early May. There are books in 32 languages. There will be readings and conversations about literature, about history and translation, a new dance work, storytelling for children, and music. It will celebrate the idea that all languages are diasporic, that we need other people’s words, self-definitions and re-definitions in translation.
It honours the words of André Aciman, himself an exile from Alexandria, that he understands himself “not as a person from a place, but as a person from a place across from that place. You are – and always are – from somewhere else.”
Everything is plural here, one history reaching out to another, a palimpsest of voices. And this is where this project finds its core. I thought of how the psalms work as songs of exile from the city, the ever-present absence of Jerusalem. Of how much the psalms work as songs that move between the singular and the plural, the solitary voice and the tribal, anger and despair, lament and joy. And how the psalms are cornerstones of all three Abrahamic traditions.
This place is embedded in metaphor. It is on the edge of the world, it is a place of concentration, a place of powerlessness.
There is another history, other metaphors. Sitting here I think of the great sweep of languages of this place, the mingling of high and low argot and slang, of the dialects and cultures of the German, Flemish, Persian, Ottoman, Spanish and Portuguese Jews alongside Italians, an almost unimaginable array of clothing, food and music. It was a place of constant translation, a testing ground for comprehension and nuance. It was noisy with learning, education, debate, poetry and music, liturgy and exegesis, with Hebrew as the only common denominator. I think of the great 17th-century Rabbi Leon da Modena, who wrote in his autobiography that he had practised 26 professions in his life, from teacher to cantor to judge, to composing poetry for gravestones, translating, printing and arranging marriages.
The place was noisy with learning, education, debate, poetry and music … Hebrew the only common denominator
++
Comments