THE ADVENTURE of being a creative writer is linked socially to the struggle of all forms of human labour to provide a material livelihood. The creative artist whose product comes from his or her non-material, idealistic intellectual power expects society to value such work. But creative literature as a vocation and profession only makes sense in societies which recognise the practical and educational value of such work. This recognition will extend to both the business of book publishing and book selling.

The creative writer, however, unlike the book seller who decides to cut-back or shut down because no one seems to be reading these days, does not stop writing, because such work is linked to solutions provided by human thought, and also because manuscripts are personal and portable linguistic products in search of publishers, societies, and readers that will bring them to public life.

Is it necessary to have a specific reading audience in mind? Such an attitude can both restrict and trivialize the creative scope and potential human importance of literary works. So, it is interesting to find out how foreign creative literature, produced anywhere, can reveal its relevance to anyone’s personal human experience in their specific nation or society.

We will never discover the potential of such relevance to ourselves and our society by defining culture as a value produced only by one’s ethnicity and nation. Neither will we discover such relevance by confining our tastes to Anglo-literary products from the UK, Canada, the USA, the Caribbean, or any of the Anglo Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, English translations of non-Anglo literature should be embraced for the dedication, linguistic and writing skill of most translators, whose artistry is a vital educational function of the language departments in progressive universities.

Indeed, most translators are skillful writers themselves; they have to be, and the best can even make a piece of literature better through translation.

Cesare Pavesse
The beauty and excitement of 1950s, 60s and 70s Georgetown book departments at Bookers, Fogarty’s, Michael Forde’s, Graphic, etc, was the amount of new paperback international literature translated into English.

One such work (and there were dozens from various languages) was the 1967 Penguin edition of the stunningly written Italian novel, ‘The Devil In The Hills’, (a perfect translation by D D Paige from its original Italian title, ‘Il Diavolo Sulle Colline’) by Cesare Pavesse, who, in his short heroic life, left behind some of the best 20th Century Italian fiction, poetry, and writer’s diaries.

This little Pavesse novel of 154 pages (the exact Penguin edition illustrated here), appeared at the Bookers Book Department in 1967, and some of us 18-year-olds who had first heard of Pavesse from an essay in Susan Sontag’s collection, ‘Against Interpretation’, in its recent hard-cover edition a stone’s throw away in the Public Library, immediately seized our chance to sample Pavesse’s novel at a mere 95 cents per copy.

We were excited and interested from its opening paragraph: “We were very young. I believe I never slept that year. But I had a friend who slept even less than I did, and certain mornings, you would see him strolling about in front of the station during the hour in which the first trains arrive and depart.

“We used to leave him late at night on his doorstep; Pierreto would take another walk, and even see the dawn in, and then drink his coffee. Now, he was studying the sleepy faces of street sweepers and cyclists. Even he could not remember the discussions of the previous night; but having stayed awake on them, he had digested them, and he said calmly: ‘It’s late. I’m going to bed’.”

It was a novel about us; our lives, our habits, our families; and it was written by an Italian. There was no similar novel by a Guyanese, a West Indian, or Englishman available.

Yet, here were lives like ours, sometimes youthfully exploring the rural countryside; staying out until the wee hours of the morning after fetes, the cinemas, joking around; having long conversations and intellectual arguments; meeting daring girls, loose older women, flirting, seducing, and being seduced; mixing with others who had the money to enjoy the excesses; losing friends to despair, immigration, even suicide, etc.

It was all there in ‘The Devil in the Hills’. It was the novel we would have liked to write. But could we? It was skillfully done; look at the change of tense in the first paragraph.

Living the novel
Two decades passed and I had forgotten this novel by Pavesse. But, chasing after the works of great Baroque Italian architects like Guarini and Juvarra, I spent a month in Turin, Pavesse’s hometown where the novel also takes place, and amazingly ended up sharing the novel’s same excited lifestyle with young Italians, diverse Africans and Europeans.

Was it that life that had inspired this Pavesse novel so long ago? Or was it this very novel that had inspired a now traditional bohemianism we shared in lovely Turin?

What prevents many Guyanese creative writers from writing of similarly perceived local lifestyles is a preconceived and stereotypical notion of a novel’s topic, characters, and writing style.

This attitude comes from viewing creative fiction (also poems, plays, or essays) as products of convention, rather than a sensitive radar in touch with raw, undiluted, unpackaged everyday reality.

Another famous Italian writer whose numerous Penguin paperback novels and short stories grew popular among us was Alberto Moravia. His realism felt local, not foreign, because he looked closely at the everyday lives of all sorts of people, of all classes and races and their occupations, and we recognised the same basic structure and human calibre to everyday local life.

Moravia’s influence
Moravia’s novels and prolific short-story collections in Penguin editions like: ‘The Wayward Wife’, ‘Bitter Honeymoon’, ‘Roman Tales’, ‘The Fetish & Other Short Stories’, make reading a joy, a thrill, not a bore.

Described as “unsentimental, clear-sighted, and dispassionately observant,” they are uncompromisingly frank, mature, fair, and often sensual: The adolescent boy, Agostino, whose young, separated mother has a gorgeous body, is jealous of every man she seems close with; the lover tired of his mistress, despite her physical beauty; the neurotic housewife who spends most of the day chattering to similar housewives on the phone; the burly, lonely, black American soldier who takes advantage of a young Italian girl’s curiosity about black males; the rich adolescent in depression with a mysterious illness, who gradually and secretly receives his first sexual experience from his mature working class governess, and restores his health…Moravia drives home the universal lesson of impartial and objective, but tender civilised creative writing.

Later writings
In the mid 60s, Penguin paperbacks created one of its greatest series on contemporary international creative writing. These were larger paperbacks with abstract designs on their covers; the size of a hardcover novel, and about 300 pages of the most advanced contemporary fiction and poetry from Africa, Australia, Latin America, England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, South Africa, and the USA. I never saw one on the Caribbean.

But all the editions of these anthologies, which sold at Bookers and Fogarty’s, set standards for local young writers that would either have to be matched, or ignored with a retreat into tame, trivial, local dilettantism.

One of this series, ‘French Writing Today’, contained brilliant advanced prose and poetry from names like Prevert, Ponge, Sollers, Vian, Butor, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Le Clezio, du Bouchet, Guillevec, Bonnefoy, etc.

Here is the descriptive opening of an included short story, ‘Recall’, by Le Clezio, the most recent Noble Prize winner for creative writing.

The story is from his collection, ‘Fever’, translated and published in English in 1966: “I took a good look at the room before shutting my eyes. The four walls, the door, the windows; I looked at the electric bulb dangling from its wire in the middle of the ceiling.

The dark grey wall paper, and the things concealed in darkness. I saw the table, and not far from it a sinister profile with a sort of beak open in sneering laughter – the chair with my clothes heaped on it, no doubt. The light coming in streaks through the closed shutters, and the headlights of cars which make moving haloes along the ceiling. I saw all that. Then I closed my eyes.”