Finding the words to battle for freedom of speech
The suppression of Belarusian, the language of two thirds of Belarus, prompted Jean Findlay, founder of Scotland Street Press, to bring the work of award-winning author Alhierd Bacharevic to the attention of British readers with an English/scots translation of his dark fairytale for adults, Alindarka’s Children
Belarus has had more international news spotlight in the last month than ever in its history, however very little coverage looks at the factor of linguistic oppression. Edinburgh-based Scotland Street Press is the only UK publisher to translate books from the suppressed Belarusian language. In Belarus the ruling language is Russian, it is the language of government, media, education and social mobility, even though two thirds of the population speak Belarusian. It is for this reason that the Press undertook in 2018 to translate and publish Tania Skarynkina’s selection of essays, and she spoke at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The next year Scotland Street Press won a Pen Award to translate Alindarka’s Children, which is written in a mix of Russian and Belarusian; now translated into English and Scots.
Alhierd Bacharevic, the author, has a history of musical and literary protest against the ruling forces in Belarus. In the 1990s he was the founder and vocalist of the first Belarusianlanguage punk band Pravakacyja (Provocation). He is now an award-winning author and his works have been translated into French, German, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. This is his first novel to be made available to the Englishspeaking world.
The publisher really wants to give him some air space at this important time in his country’s history, and he was originally invited to the cancelled Edinburgh International Book Festival, and his play was due to be performed at the London Barbican in May, also cancelled. They are trying to arrange a digital platform for him on the Frankfurt Bookfair – but guess what?– the Belarusian state has now interfered with the internet, cut it off, so a Zoom interview is not possible. The subtitle of the book is, ironically, ‘Things Will Be Bad’ – and there is much other black humour in this adult Hansel and Gretel story of two children running away from a camp where they are taught to forget Belarusian and speak Russian.
The high-minded Doctor in the novel believes that ‘the general inability to read, or speak, with propriety or grace in public, runs through the natives...’ and so he sets up a camp where children are taken away from their uncouth parents and taught to speak good Russian. This is done with the use of drugs and the removal of a small bone in the larynx. It is an effective brainwashing, and he believes he is elevating them socially, just as was done to the Native American and Aboriginal children in the last two centuries in the US and Australia.
However, Alicia and Avi have a Faither who is dedicated to his mother tongue and comes to the camp with wire cutters. The children escape into the woods, but then they also lose their Faither, who has taken up with a woman they do not know and are left to wander alone in the vast Belarusian forests. Starving and living on blueberries, they come across a hideous auld wifie who has a house made of old pizza and doughnut boxes, but empty ones. She throws them into a pit, and it takes all their ingenuity to escape, only to come across a cruel troop of faceless border guards who try to take them back to camp. Escaping again, they find an author living in a hut in the woods who reads them his manuscript which warns them of a fearful trail of starvation in the snow. Although children are the protagonists, this is not a book for children, there is too much casual violence and oppressive terror. Nonetheless there is still an innocence preserved through the eyes with which we view it all.
The fact that it is written in two distinct languages, but ones that are mutually understandable with a bit of effort, lent it to translation into English and Scots. This was the inspiration of the English translator Jim Dingley who noticed that Scots and Belarusian are both on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages. The poet Petra Reid has provided the Scots
The subtitle of the book is, ironically, ‘Things Will Be Bad’ – and there is much other black humour in this adult Hansel and Gretel story
translation, which is felicitous and inspired, although she writes apologetically in her introduction, ‘It’s made up of things my Granny used to say, Scots Law, Rab C Nesbitt, Gavin Douglas, Stanley Baxter, Irvine Welsh… Macdiarmid Lite.’ Along with a grateful bow to Gerda Stevenson whose poem ‘Half-hingit Maggie’, is used as a leitmotif through the last chapter. There are Scots songs scattered throughout the book as repetitions and riffs where appropriate and echoes of themes in the story. These are all referenced and explained in end notes, as are the Belarusian equivalents. There is also a Scots glossary at the back, if you miss the glosses at the foot of the page. Jim Dingley’s introduction is a good background to the situation in Belarus and the cultural bed from which the book springs, and ends on an interesting note: ‘The whole of what is now Belarus fell within the Jewish Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The frontiers shifted several times between the world wars, but many of the small towns of the area retained a majority Jewish population. The Nazi occupation of 1941-44 changed all that. Belarus is haunted by ghosts; the far-flung suburb of Minsk in which Bacharevic was brought up, Sabany, is built close to the site of one of the Nazi death camps.’
Let’s hope that these ghosts can take sides, like the Dead in Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Ring, and help swell the army of peaceful protesters who now take to the streets daily in Belarus asking for a normal democracy. Many of the thousands of detained, imprisoned and tortured during the last month were journalists, writers and critics who spoke out against the state.
As Neal Ascherson is quoted as saying, ‘In parts of Belarus, language, religion and custom vary from village to village, and the only common cultural experience is of brutality at the hands of invaders.’ This explains the common thread of state imposed cruelty in the novel, but there is also great beauty of description of the vast and untouched wilderness of the forests, and astonishing flights of imagination in places where a type of strange eastern European magic realism takes over. You can take this book on many levels, from the philosophical and psychological analysis of what it does to a nation and a people to remove, control and suppress its mother tongue, to an exciting tale of two runaway children in a forest trying to survive on blueberries and avoid the threatening adults along their way. Not to mention the inner anguish of a Faither who is about to lose his daughter,
‘Ah wis wakened bi somebody ringin the front door bell. Whit a wis maist feart o at such maument wis fur Alicia tae disobey me an open yon herself. Still a wee bit oot o it, still stottin’ aboot I ma sunlicht reveries, a fuffled tae the door just as ah wis, hauf-asleep sportin ma trackie trews fur tae see wha wis thare.’
● Alindarka’s Children by Alhierd Bacharevic is published on 30 September and can be bought in advance from scotland streetpress. com for £11.99 or from all good bookshops