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Alexander Pope is considered one of England’s greatest poets of the eighteenth century, known for satirical poems as The Rape Of The Lock and the Dunciad. He was a member of the Scriblerus club, along with names like Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, a circle of writers that combined in the mocking of contemporary mediocrity in science and the arts. Works borne of this group were sometimes attributed to their fictional founder, Martinus Scriblerus.

Amongst the recognised output of Scriblerus’ was Peri Bathous, or The Art Of Sinking In Poetry (1727), Pope’s satirical attack on the poets of his day. Where criticism and disdain may be best put upon inferior works of literature, appreciation of this essay comes in its alternative approach: to praise bathetic instances in poetry.

Pope opens with an explanation of why it is necessary to study the poets of his day:

It hath been long — my dear countrymen — the subject of my concern and surprise that whereas numberless poets, critics and orators have compiled and digested the art of ancient poesy, there hath not arisen among us one person so public-spirited as to perform the like for the modern. Although it is universally known that our every-way industrious moderns, both in the weight of their writings and in the velocity of their judgements, do so infinitely excel the said ancients.

His essay is to be treated as an instructional piece for any poet, “to lead them as it were by the hand and, step by step, the gentle downhill way to the bathos — the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra of true modern poesy.” The first few chapters outline the reasons behind such a stance, noting that profit and gain should take precedence over the fruitless undertaking of writing for “men of a nice and foppish gusto”, not that writing for such men should be dismissed out of hand, for it would be a “great cruelty and injustice if all such authors as cannot write in the other way were prohibited from writing at all.”

In order to make it easier to understand how one may begin to ’sink’, Pope proposes to collect “the scattered rules of our art into regular institutes” and presents us with his first maxim -

…that whoever would excel therein must studiously avoid, detest and turn his head from all the ideas, ways and workings of that pestilent foe to wit and destroyer of fine figures, which is known by the name of common sense. His business must be to contract the true goût de travers and to acquire a most happy, uncommon, unaccountable way of thinking.

– which requires the application of ideas infinitely below the object approached. In addition, he generously offers up a couple of examples from his contemporaries demonstrating how sinking may be achieved. (”Would it not be a shame if he who is smit with the love of the bathos should not sacrifice to it all other transitory regards?”)

As the lessons continue, The Art Of Sinking In Poetry calls to mind, tangentially, a book that would come some two hundred years later, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises In Style, for Pope provides a catalogue of literary terms — catachresis, synecdoche, metonymy — and works his way through them, citing ‘effective’ examples of their use. However, where Queneau would use such devices as a conscious challenge, Pope, in praising those poets who make use of them unconsciously, documents their sinking.

While there are occasions that it seems Pope is nitpicking, such as jargon, many of the poems Pope excerpts for his comical purposes are truly awful and rightly deserve a bit of a lashing. In some cases he explains why the approach is bad, while some cases speak for themselves, like the anticlimax of a couplet on the extent of British arms –

Under the tropics is our language spoke,

And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.

– or the cumbrous phrasing demanding a fire be lit:

Bring forth some remnant of Promethean theft,

Quick to expand the’inclement air congealed

By Boreas’s rude breath…

Poetry may be the focus of the essay, but its a work thay may be of interest to those who would seek to improve their writing in any literary medium, as the underlying call is for those who would write to consider what they are putting to paper. At times, Pope’s prose can feel a little confusing, a side-effect of its age, but the wit transcends the years to ensure that the book has its funny moments while getting its point across — namely, less sinking, more thinking.

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the novel that helped usher in a new wave of African literature. Until that point literature concerning African had been written by European colonials, and was rife with derogatory depictions of African people and their varied cultures. With the contributions of Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe, amongst others, there came a rebellion of sorts - the African novel, going against “an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another.”

African literature is the subject of Home And Exile (2001),  a gathering of three lectures Achebe gave to an audience at Harvard University in 1998. Across these he uses his podium to to discuss the effect of colonialism on African letters and the need for balance. Of particular interest are the autobiographical elements peppered throughout, which give insights into Achebe’s early life in Nigeria and the beginnings of his adult life as a writer.

Achebe starts with his own people, the Igbo. He dismisses the notion that, in numbering over ten million, they can be a tribe by dictionary definition. He finds nation fits better, acknowledging that it’s not a perfect fit. In describing the Igbo culture, a culture of stories, he finds room to open up the differences wrought by colonialism, impressing upon the reader a little tale about a meeting of animals where the chicken, instead attending to a personal matter, is voted man’s primary sacrificial animal in his absence. It’s a fitting parallel with the native in colonial African literature whereby a portrait of the continent has been drawn up by outsiders, at least as far back as 1561, when John Lok, writing of his voyage to West Africa, describes Africans as:

…a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion … whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie … whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speach, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.

Compound that with centuries of unfair writing and you get to a moment in a Nigerian school when, having read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, about a young Nigerian, it strikes as being superficial:

It was a landmark rebellion. Here was a whole class of young Nigerian students, among the brightest of their generation, united in their view of a book of English fiction in complete opposition to their English teacher, who was moreover backed by the authority of metropolitan critical judgment.

In talking of colonial literature, Achebe understands the treatment of African people as a way of justifying colonialism and the slave trade it produced, citing works by the likes of the aforementioned Cary, Joseph Conrad, and, especially, Elspeth Huxley. V.S. Naipaul, for whom much was made of his nastiness in Patrick French’s authorised biography earlier in the year, is also lambasted for his ignorant portrayal of Africa in A Bend In The River.

Although she’s not named, Buchi Emecheta, also gets a notable mention: not for her portrayal of Africa, but for going in the opposite direction. Having moved to London to pursue her writing career, she is quoted on the subject of African fiction and the dilution of her Africanness. (”After reading the first page you tell yourself you are plodding. But when you are reading the same thing written by an English person who lives here you find you are enjoying it because the language is so academic, so perfect.”) This notion of going in the opposite directon echoes an account opening the book of Achebe’s first ride in a car, in which he was seated so as to watch the road behind. It’s something he returns to in the third lecture, given that he, like Emecheta, no longer lives in Nigeria:

People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America since I have now been living here for some years. My answer has always been “No, I don’t think so.” Actually, living in America for some years is not the only reason for writing a novel on it. Kafka wrote such a novel without leaving Prague. No, my reason is that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.

Achebe’s focus now, unlike the child looking back, is squarely on the road ahead for Africa and its literature, noting his anxiety over “what remains to be done, in Africa and in the world at large”. From his podium he calls for writers to remain at home and write about it, to post their manuscripts rather than go overseas and risk dilution. Only with the right people contributing their own stories can literature find the necessary balance be made that will lead to a universal civilisation.

On literature he calls for a fair appraisal of writers’ work, comparing Dylan Thomas’ review of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard to Huxley’s, wherein Thomas praises it for its language, Huxley uses the opportunity to take a broad swipe at African art (”It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign.”) Regardless of unfair treatments, Achebe notes that to read them:

…is the strongest vote of confidence we can give our writers and their work - to put them on notice that we will go to their offering for wholesome pleasure and insight, and not a rehash of old stereotypes which gained currency long ago in the slave trade and poisoned, perhaps forever, the wellsprings of our common humanity.

That Achebe covers so much ground in just over a hundred pages shows a highly concentrated approach to African literature. Those seeking a true autobiography will not find it here, given that it only touches on his early years, but what it does provide is an interesting insight into Achebe’s mind, with him pointing out the little details that have made him the influential writer that he is today, home and away.

Open Letter Books, based in the University of Rochester, have been blogging away at Three Percent for over a year now, and last month they finally launched their first title: Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugrešić (2005). What makes Open Letter special is that they will explicitly only publish works in translation. I’ve been interested in their forthcoming output for a while now and have deliberately held off buying Nobody’s Home, published last year in the United Kingdom by Telegram Books, because I never really liked the cover.

So, first a few words on this edition. It’s a hardback, the image and text printed straight on as there’s no dust jacket. It’s always good to see a bit of cover kudos for the translator - Ellen Elias-Bursac, translating from the Croatian - and the book doesn’t let us down here. Being someone who likes a bit of uniformity to their books, I’ll be looking forward to seeing how other titles from Open Letter stand together.

But to the book, and as is clearly stated on the cover, Nobody’s Home is a collection of essays, split into five sections. The first, each no more than two or three pages, are, as Ugrešić says in the afterword, a series of feuilletons written between 1998 and 2000 for a column for the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche. Others, longer in scope, are taken from commissioned works, appearing in the likes of Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza and British quarterly The Drawbridge

Ugrešić’s main topics are identity, nationality, and the global marketplace. It should make sense - her lifestyle is peripatetic, her nationality polymorphous:

Ten years ago I held a Yugoslav passport, with its soft, pliable, dark red cover. I was a Yugoslav writer. Then the war came, and the Croats, without so much as a by your leave, shoved a blue Croation passport at me…Again I hold a passport with a soft, pliable, dark red cover, a Dutch passport. Will this new passport make me a Dutch writer? I doubt it.

The fueilletons that open the book provide a suitable introduction to the author’s style. Warm with humour, they are filled with anecdotes and, with permissable license, overstatements on all manner of topics, typically leading into wider consideration. While talking about an expensive suitcase she leads into a quick discussion on exile (”The only way exiles are able to leave trauma behind is not to leave it behind at all, but to live it as a permanent state…”) and nostalgic for the days when people were famous for, you know, doing something, she laments the rise of the celeb (”A celeb is an empty screen onto which the rest of the world projects its meaning. The celeb is a cultural text, an artifact of mass culture.”) .

In the longer pieces,  Ugrešić finds space to set out her stall and explore her observations of Amsterdam, her adopted home, or reflecting on her experiences on the Literature Express in 2000, a train journey taken by many writers throughout Europe. Amongst these longer considerations are Opium, a piece on how celebrities, with their (ghostwritten) memoirs are the prophets of the day, and one of the more memorable essays in Nobody’s Home: What is European About European Literature? In this the author’s passion is evident at her dislike of national tags:

When my first novel was published in England, a critic finished his review with the question: But still, is this what we need? Only later did I realize what the critic’s sentence had meant. I hadn’t noticed there was a label trailing along behind me as I traveled: Made in the Balkans.

In fact, it really annoys her:

The label is a fundamental assumption of the outdated institutions of national literatures, but also for the modern literary marketplace. Because ethnic identity is a tried and true sales formula which has propelled many writers from the periphery - for the right literary reasons or the wrong ones - into the global literary marketplace. The market always needs a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Croat, an Albanian. But only one. Two max. A surfeit is, naturally, confusing.

It’s an understandable ire, especially given some of the examples she cites about authors born here, living there, speaking this, that, and the other. How can you truly pin them down when even the literary marketplace has gone global? Transnational literature, she concedes, may be the way forward - a catch-all term for those writers, like her, are everywhere and nowhere.

The notion of writers flowing this way is only a small part of a wider picture, too. In other essays Ugrešić tackles the East meets West nature of Europe, with westerners buying up cheap property in Croatia and Bulgaria, with those going the other way, in search of employment, be it migrant works by free will or women, trafficked. While it all may seem serious, there are many moments of humour to be had, such as this one in reference to the new European bogeyman:

I propose that a statue be raised to the Polish plumber in many European cities. Why? Because the Polish plumber is the first victim of European unification, and, particularly of European expansion. Since everyone speaks of the Polish plumber  with such fear and loathing - outstripping even the legendary hatred of the Roma - the statue should consist only of a pedestal. And on that pedestal should be the words: Statue to the Unknown Polish Plumber.

From an image of Vladimir Putin kissing a fish in another essay, Ugrešić notes the difference between a totalitarian Moscow (”…the less you said about yourself, the thinner the police files would be.”) and the world of today, where everyone is rushing to fill their files, chasing that Warholian fifteen minutes. You’d think we’d know the Polish plumber to see. But as she notes, it’s a media paradox:

The paradox is: the more we eat, the hungrier we are. The more opportunities we have to inscribe our name on the map of the world, the greater the fear of disappearing. The more traces we leave behind us, the faster these traces are erased. The more books we publish, the quicker they are forgotten; the more movies we watch, the less able we are to remember what they were called.

Perhaps that’s why Open Letter are only publishing twelve books a year. That they may not be forgotten so fast. As the inaugural title, Nobody’s Home is an interesting choice for the American publisher, not least because it’s a collection of essays. But in that it introduces a whole other continent and the changes it’s currently undergoing to an American audience, and is written, for the most part, in a witty, easygoing style, it may just prove an ideal grounding for those who subscribe to later releases.