One of the downsides to carrying around everything you need to live on your own back is the fact there's not really very much room for fitting in a nice, big fat hardback of your latest favourite author's work. Carting a poetry library around too, alongside these banal life accoutrements (which include socks, a sleeping bag, and the indispensable goose feather stuffed booties, amongst many other things) does little to negate this fact, as no matter how much of a poetry fan you are, there are just some times when you want to slip in to something a little more, well, substantial - and even the best beast of a poetry anthology behemoth just won't do. So when the wonderful world of fiction strikes, and I need to find a worthy tome to idle my hours away, it is, of course, wherever my 'local' library is that I inevitably find myself wandering down to. A quick stroke of the shelves, a perusal of the 'new fiction / just in' section and after a mere five minutes often my arms are full of affable, amusing, and downright tasty nuggets of nutritious, creative works ready for me to dive in to. But what happens when I'm in a non-English speaking country, as I found myself in 2006?
Hopping from Amsterdam to Berlin, thence to Dresden, Prague, Vienna and Budapest, operating my travelling poetry library in each of these cities, there were some nights, after a good, long hard day slaving away at my own library, when I just wanted to switch off and jump in to a good book. Of course, many libraries in capital, or metropolitan cities, have a 'foreign language' section, but it's never as good as the main collections of the library overall: so often, when out wandering the vast plains of Europe, I have found myself making use of the British Council Libraries. In particular, I made distinctive use of the BC's Berlin headquarters and library back in June 2006, not only borrowing some enticing reads from their collection for myself, but also installing my library itself too. A week based in their library's space saw me signing up new members to my library within the environs of their own, providing my first (and soon to be favourite) shot at operating perhaps the quintessence of library service itself: two libraries in one!
What also always astounded me about the countries and cities I visited was the extent to which the English Language had permeated beyond borders, boundaries and well, books. It was a welcoming surprise to find the English language reaching the parts other tongues might not dare speak (so to speak) and a number of independently published English Language Literary magazines stand out as championing poetry and literature in translation.
'Blatt' in Prague, 'sub dream' (Vienna's English Language Literary Journal) and 'Pilvax' (Budapest-based) are three great reads for the English reading and writing connoisseur, specializing in publishing writing in English and translations from or to the original language alongside (which might include Czech, Austrian-German, Hungarian and indeed any other European tongue that makes it through the editorial process). Similarly, many poets I met - and especially in Budapest - were keen to emphasize their multi-lingual skills, and from speaking to two Hungarian poets living there it was clear that writing in both Hungarian and English was, for them, an obvious choice - so it seems that English as a global language may well indeed have got a glottal stop or two ahead of the game.
The British Council's longstanding and exemplary teaching of English programmes, as well as the wonderful resource that is their many and manifold English Language Libraries, have, no doubt, played a huge part in this process. Reading recently of another British Council Library closure in Europe however, reminded me of the first story I read last year about the BC's new 'development' programme: reallocating funding from their EU, India and Africa based Libraries to a new priority of, yes you guessed it, the Middle East. While I can't argue that providing an English Language Library service in such places as Iraq, Afghanistan and Bangladesh is anything but an illustrious idea, what is incongruous about it is the perceived need to give with one hand on one side of the world, while taking away with the other, on the other.
I'll leave it to ole Aristotle to have the last words: "One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day."
Posted by: Sara Wingate Gray