Benjamin Rosenbaum

Q-1.

What country/ethnicity/culture do you identify yourself with?

 

A-1.

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I was born and raised in the USA; my native language is English. I am a naturalized citizen of Switzerland, and I live much of the time in German and in Swiss-German――at my day job, with my children when their friends are around, at synagogue, etc.

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Although I am a typically American mixture of ethnicities, with documented ancestors who lived in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Belarus, and Palestine, and some family legends and hints of Native American and Melungeon ancestry, I’m also a Jew; and the thing about being Jewish is that it tends to trump everything else, ethnicity-wise, so much so that “Jewish” was my very first thought in answer to this question.

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Q-2.
 

SF/F/Horror/Slipstream genre has always been dominated by Anglo-American language. Is Anglo-American genre fiction is your major influence?
 

A-2.

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It’s one of several major influences. In early formative influence, I’d say it’s equaled by the irreal fiction I devoured in the 1980s, and which was pretty global in provenance (Abe, Barthelme, Brautigan, Borges, Calvino, Kundera, Lem); in some ways I was actually a more global reader in my teens than I am now. I felt I had tapped into a current of fascinating stuff which was largely going on outside of the U.S.

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Another major influence is, if you will, “canon” literature: 18th and 19thcentury English (and some French and Russian)――Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Dostoyevsky――the modernists, particularly Woolf and Kafka… (and modernist poets maybe even more so――e. e. cummings, say). Another is Jewish literature from the Bible through the medieval period…

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Q-3.
 

Give us the ratio of your reading of Anglo-American fiction against your own or non-English literature. Currently.
 

A-3.

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As I say, I feel like I’m more parochial in my reading――at least of contemporary fiction――now than I used to be. I never expected being an author to be so intensely social, but it’s hard work just keeping up with the fiction my friends publish, and most of them are writing in English, and most (though not all) are Anglo-American(-Canadian-Australian). A lot of my reading in translation is not contemporary SF/F, but classics of various kinds.

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Q-4.
 

To our dismay, a lot of so called World things are actually American ones. From Baseball's World series to our genre's Worldcon (almost) or World Fantasy Awards. How can we correct it to its real structure, into the real chaotic world?
 

A-4.

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Well, you’ve stacked the deck a bit by picking baseball and genre SF/F, two emblematically (Anglo-)American institutions. I loved the introduction you sent with this questionnaire, but I found it intriguing how you seemed to almost slight manga and anime, as if association with them was somehow disqualifying (“They have never been genuinely interested in Japan or Japanese fiction, except some manga and anime…[a few authors but] again that’s about it, although a quite significant numbers of our novels are now translated and published by manga oriented publishers.”) This seems to me rather like an Italian musician, in love with hip-hop, who complains that Americans ask him about Italian hip-hop only out of politeness and would really much rather hear about opera and cantautori. Which is not to slight the quality of Japanese prose SF; but the fact of the matter commercially is that to my knowledge manga sales――and manga-oriented convention attendance――even in the US dwarf the sales of traditional adult prose SF (YA is of course another matter since Twilight and Harry Potter). When Worldcons have roughly 3000 attendees; San Diego Comic-Con has 130,000, to consider Worldcon as the centrality to which manga is a periphery seems cockeyed (a quick google for “relative importance of manga at Comic-con” nets me the phrase “Japanese manga outsell American comics by something like four to one in the U.S. market.”)

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Like you, I’ve fallen in love with cultural productions from beyond my original sphere. I was 29 when I came to Basel and started playing Rugby Union; before then, I had, I suspect, never even seen a rugby ball. Rugby Union, in my view, as a sport to play (as opposed to watch) knocks the stuffing out of both American football and world football (aka soccer), and in both the U.S. and Switzerland I get the bittersweet pleasure of bonding with other freak aficionados of a non-national game. In Basel there were so few rugby players available that I got to take the field with fellows who had been on the national rugby teams of Switzerland and the Czech Republic, or who’d played at a very high level in the UK and South Africa. I would never be on a team with guys like that in an actual rugby-playing country! But in Basel there was only one club, which could just barely muster a second-string team.

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None of this is to say that science fiction should remain static and inward-looking and parochially US; to stay vibrant and alive, the genre should open itself to the world, and much of the most exciting SF being written today draws from a broader cultural context. A lot of the most interesting voices in SF are people at one or another cultural border――immigrants and children of immigrants to the Anglo-American sphere, like Amal El-Mohtar and Nnedi Okorafor; polyglots like Ken Liu and Aliette de Bodard. Of course this was always true, with SF refreshed by various waves of voyagers, wanderers, and people who had been excluded; Asimov’s first language wasn’t English, and much of the energy of SF since the 70s has been from women and (Anglo-American) people of color claiming their place in it.

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But in opening SF, I think we have to expect SF to change, and perhaps we need to look for SF that doesn’t necessarily look like the SF we’re used to. Certainly one approach is to embrace xenophiles, those willing to transform themselves and adopt alien forms, like Japanese rock-and-roll kids who want to sing in English or Americans who want to play Rugby Union. But another thing might be to see what other people in other places are already doing. It may be less that Worldcon really manages to grasp the entirety of what’s going on in World SF――I have difficulty imagining a time when the Hugo voters really peruse the pages of the biggest SF magazine in the world, China’s Science Fiction World. Maybe it’s more that “Worldcon” is, increasingly, simply one small parochial club, a small piece of everything that’s going on, and that we accept that (and smile with affectionate indulgence at its name).

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Q-5.

Yet, it's true that we're culturally much influenced by American pop culture. Haruki Murakami cannot write like he does now without his American literature and Jazz influence. Is it the same for your case? Can you imagine you write without that influence at all?
 

A-5.

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As an American, I think the most profitable thing for me in response to this question is to shut up for a minute and spend that minute imagining precisely such a world, without that influence.

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Q-6.
 

But these days a lot of young writers and editors work in English language and for American market. Do you hold any grudge against working like this? Or is it a natural reaction to that influence?
 

A-6.

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Again, since I am an Anglophone USer, I am going to flip your question around and answer a different one, which is, do I feel any guilt because of this situation? And the answer is yes, yes I do. It’s an accident of history, of happening to be born in a world shaped by successive British and American Empires, which vastly amplifies the audience for my work compared to that of other equally talented and deserving people. It is yet another way in which my way is smoothed by undeserved luck and history.

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Addendum to question 6:
(Rationally, of course, I realize that "guilt" is a nonsensical and ultimately counterproductive reaction to the recognition of privilege, and that our task is to move beyond it and into cheerfully taking responsibility; but your question was about feelings, so I'm reporting where I am at the moment).

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Q-7.
 

If and when you have to write in English, do you do that to English-American readers, or to the global readers?
 

A-7.
 

It’s an interesting question, and one that I have never really distinguished in my mind; I have the luxury of shrugging and saying “both, I guess?” Which is another hallmark of privilege.

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Q-8.

Is there any works or writers from your local scene you can sincerely recommend to the world readers? And why do you recommend them? Is it because they have no equivalent works or writers in Anglo-American scene? Or is it because they perfectly fit there and have many things in common that we should share? Which do you think is important, originality, or affinity?
 

A-8.
 

I feel like I should really be following Swiss SF more, but honestly, I hardly have come across any. (Swiss mysteries, yes; Hansjörg Schneider’s Hunkeler series is particularly entertaining if you know Basel). I can definitely plug Swiss cabaret theater and folk-rock-poetics; Endo Anaconda’s band Stiller Has is a favorite of mine, as is the rock band Züri West, and the classic, whimsical singer-songwriter Mani Matter, a sort of Bernese Barry Louis Polisar with the import in Swiss musical history of a Bob Dylan. Not to mention the Schnitzelbänkli of Fasnacht――satirical Carneval street-theater poetics. But these works are all, for good or ill, in Swiss-German, and probably cannot be extracted from that language without irreperable mutilation.

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The inhabitants of my town, Basel, you know, have the issue you describe, only doubled. Like all non-Anglophones, they live in an Anglophone-dominated world, one in which the language in which they read newspapers, attend college lectures, and fill out official government forms――German――is marginalized. But then they have an additional marginalization, because that language――the official formal/written language of the city――is not actually the language of their hearts. For raising children, for arguing with friends, and, yes, for songs and poetry, they have another language, a well-nigh secret language, Baseldütsch. So they have actually three choices, not just the two you were confronted with. Write in English――maximum audience, something like a billion? Write in German――maximum audience, maybe 60 million? Or write in Baseldütsch――maximum audience, maybe 4 million? And particularly their bands, rock, folk, cabaret, hip-hop, tend to sing in Swiss-German. It’s tiny, but it’s theirs.

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I suspect their psychological situation is somewhat different than that of the Japanese. Japan is, as countries go, a large country. I gather it’s pretty linguistically homogenous. It was isolated from most of the rest of the world for centuries, during which it produced an enormous and basically independent high culture. It’s something of a shock to go from being a world unto yourself, to finding yourself a somewhat marginalized culture in a bigger world. The Swiss, however, were always in the middle of a mess of overlapping, and warring languages, religious tendencies, and nations. They were, for most of history, usually dominated from the outside. Their vaunted isolation is hard-won, and pretty provisional and illusory――never as real as Japan’s. They practiced isolation as a kind of resistance. They speak good German, and good French, and good English, but they also keep their own secret language. They keep it for themselves, and that’s where their hearts are, and so that’s where they make their art. That’s my impression.

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Q-9.
 

Have you ever read and liked any Japanese works, in and out of our genre? What aspect of it attracted you?
 

A-9.
 

Sadly, I am pretty much exactly the person you described in your introductory letter. Kobo Abe, particularly The Box Man, was a huge influence on me ever since I read it high school――its otherworldliness, its byzantine metafictional grip, its slipstream ability to unsettle, to destroy certainties (it’s sort of the fundamental text I think of when people talk about that Sterlingesque definition of slipstream as literature that makes you “feel very strange”). I like Murakami too, particularly The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, though I don’t think he’s as deep as Abe, or anyway, not in the ways I’m interested in. And that almost exhausts my knowledge of modern Japanese prose fiction. My next stop is going to be either the Tale of Genji, or Momotaro, or else the movies――Miyazaki, Kurosawa, etc.

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And clarifiying the answer to question 9, which I realize is ambiguous――"my next stop" meaning where my mind goes next, to works I do know, because I've run out of fiction. Better phrasing: "and after that, all I know is..."

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Q-10.
 

Could you please explain what you do to promote foreign literature to your readers or your own works to foreign readers?
 

A-10.

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As far as my own work goes, I am frankly quite passive in this regard; people come asking if they can translate things, and I very gratefully take advantage of their interest. I do feel that I should be doing more to balance the flow, which is one reason I think I’m going to try to seek out more SF/F in German, possibly with an eye to doing some translation. And I’ll be very interested to see suggestions emerging from this conversation, of what authors to look for. This is a good prod to widen my focus.