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| Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws Britain's reputation for "libel tourism" is driving American and foreign publishers to consider abandoning the sale of newspaper and magazines in Britain and may lead to them blocking access to websites, MPs have been warned.Publishers, human rights groups and campaigners have expressed "substantial and increasing concern" because comments that would be protected under the freedom of speech in the US constitution are actionable in London courts once published here, no matter how small the readership.A memorandum submitted to a Commons select committee, ahead of a meeting with US publishers, states: "Leading US newspapers are actively considering abandoning the supply of the 200-odd copies they make available for sale in London – mainly to Americans who want full details of their local news and sport. They do not make profits out of these minimal and casual sales and they can no longer risk losing millions of dollars in a libel action which they would never face under US law. Does the UK really want to be seen as the only country in Europe – indeed in the world – where important US papers cannot be obtained in print form?"The submission, on behalf of a number of US media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and MacMillan (US), as well as Human Rights Watch, Global Witness US and Greenpeace International, added: "The consequences of making media organisations liable for putting articles – perfectly lawful by the law of their own domicile – on websites which are occasionally accessed in England should be obvious. The cost of fighting libel actions may lead internet publishers to build 'fire walls' against access from the UK, in order to avoid such actions."Media lawNewspapersPublishingMagazinesNew York TimesKaren McVeighguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Herta Müller 'has a psychosis', claims Romanian agent who spied on her Former head of Securitate claims Nobel prize-winning author 'has no contact with external reality'A former member of the Romanian secret police has launched a blistering attack on the Nobel prize winning writer Herta Müller.Radu Tinu, who has admitted to spying on Müller as head of the secret police (or Securitate) in the Romanian city of Timisoara, where the Romanian-born German-speaking writer lived until 1987, told a newspaper she was suffering from mental delusion. "She has a psychosis, and has no contact with external reality," Tinu, formerly known as Major Tinu, told the Bucharest daily Adevarul this week. "She wasn't interrogated nearly as often as she has claimed."Tinu admitted in the interview to having installed a bugging system in Müller's Timisoara home, but said it was a "one-off" incident, and was not, as Müller has claimed, a repeated event.In his attack, Tinu – who after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stood accused of repressing opposition figures and spent 700 days in detention awaiting trial before being released without charge – also sought to undermine Müller's claim that she was dismissed from her job as a teacher because of her refusal to work with the Securitate, saying it was instead "because she smoked in the classroom".Müller, who has talked repeatedly about her treatment at the hands of the Securitate – which she refers to as the "abstract monster" of the Ceausescu regime – has yet to react to the accusations. But in an essay "The Securitate is Still in Service," which attracted widespread attention when it was published recently in Die Zeit, she detailed how the Securitate terrorised her over years. In the same essay, she also wrote that despite the end of the Ceaucescu regime, following his execution on Christmas day, 1989, it remains largely intact, with agents still operating at home and abroad, mainly under the guise of the post-communist secret services, the SRI, or Romanian Information Service.She described how agents or "securists" bugged her house, hounded her from her job, turned friends against her, interrogated her, threatened to kill her and even continued to follow her once she had left Romania – incidents that are dealt with in detail in her novels. "According to their own figures, 40% of the staff [of the SRI] was taken on from the Securitate ... the rest are retired ... or the architects of the market economy," she wrote.Müller also detailed the "psychological terror" she endured over years. "The secret service came and went as it liked when we weren't at home. Often they left deliberate signs that they'd been there such as planting cigarette butts, taking pictures off the wall, turning chairs upside down. The creepiest thing was stretched over weeks, when a fox fur that was on the floor was bit by bit taken apart – the tail, the feet and finally the head was cut off," she wrote.Much of her maltreatment is documented in her Securitate file, which runs to 914 pages.Tinu, who is now the Timisoara branch manager of the Romanian insurance company Asirom, claimed that Müller was "treated with kid gloves", because she was "surrounded by German secret service", and for the sake of diplomatic relations with Germany it was considered too great a risk to handle her otherwise.Tinu's attack is the latest in a wave of hostile reactions towards Müller in her native Romania since the announcement last month that the writer had secured the world's top literary prize. While she has been celebrated in her adopted Germany (she emigrated in 1987 and is now living in Berlin), Müller's achievement has attracted mixed reactions in her homeland, including accusations that she has deliberately sought to denigrate Romania.In one outspoken attack, Cristian Tudor Popescu, one of Romania's most prominent journalists, said Müller's reputation was based purely on her ability to attack the Ceausescu regime, rather than on any literary merit. "When she got the prize she spoke about the dictatorship, but not about literature, as if she were Nelson Mandela. The Nobel Peace prize would have suited her better," he said.But Beatrice Unger, editor of the Sibiu weekly Hermannstadter Zeitung, said accusations that Müller had "profited" from the Ceausescu regime were driven by envy over her success."The only people to profit from the regime were Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Herta Müller? Only in so much as she was able to leave the country at a time when others could only dream of a passport. These attacks are driven by envy," she said.Müller's latest novel, Atemschaukel, is due to be published in the UK next year as Everything I Possess I Carry With Me. She was praised by the Nobel prize committee for depicting "the landscape of the dispossessed", with the "concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose".Herta MüllerNobel prize for literatureNobel prize for literature 2009RomaniaKate Connollyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson This Swedish gem has the translation it deserves, says Ursula K Le GuinAfter the enduring international success of her Moomintroll fantasies, the Swedish author-artist Tove Jansson, in her 60s, began to write adult fiction. It has taken a while for these books to get much attention outside Sweden. On the patronising assumption that books for children are nice, ie morally bland and stylistically infantile, critics, reviewers and prize juries often dismiss those who write them as incapable of writing seriously for adults – a prejudice which, transferred to painting, plays a part in the plot of The True Deceiver.Anyone familiar with Jansson knows it would be unwise to dismiss her or patronise her work on any grounds. Her books for children are complex, subtle, psychologically tricky, funny and unnerving; their morality, though never compromised, is never simple. Thus her transition to adult fiction involved no great change. Her everyday Swedes are quite as strange as trolls, and her Swedish village in winter is as beautiful and dangerous as any forest of fantasy.If a transformation has taken place, it is in the nature of her writing. The language is more than ever spare, lean, taut, minimalist. These adjectives describe a good deal of modern narrative prose – the modishly anorectic style, well suited to thrillers, police procedurals and the existential noir, but very limited in range. Jansson's range, though effortlessly controlled, is great. Her spare exactness can express not only tension and stress but deeply felt emotion, expansion, relaxation and peace. Her description is unhurried, accurate and vivid, an artist's vision. Her style is not at all "poetic" – quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures. The sentences are beautiful in structure, movement and cadence. They have inevitable rightness. And this is a translation! Thomas Teal deserves to have his name on the title page with Jansson's: he has worked the true translator's miracle.I wish I could quote whole pages, but a paragraph must do:If it got really cold, it didn't make sense to go on working. The shed wasn't insulated, and the stove was barely able to warm it enough to keep their hands from stiffening. They locked it up and went home. But on the seaward side where the boats were launched, the doors had a latch that was easy to open. Mats would go out on the ice with his cod hook and when no one was in sight he'd go into the boat shed. Sometimes he'd go on with his work, usually details so trivial that no one noticed they'd been done. But most times he just sat quietly in the peaceful snowlight. He never felt cold.The main characters are Anna Aemalin, a successful illustrator of children's books, and Katri, whose only love and ambition is for the younger brother left in her care, Mats, a shy, slow, gentle fellow. Then there are honest Liljeberg the boat-builder, the wise Madame Nygard, the malicious storekeeper, a little horde of village children, and Katri's dog. Nameless, silent and yellow-eyed, the dog is yellow-eyed Katri's creature. And she flatters herself on her own wolfish superiority to other people: "My dog and I despise them. We're hidden in our own secret life, concealed in our innermost wildness."No one in the village seems to be married, and the relationship that will form between the two solitary women, Katri and Anna, is not sexual, though it is intensely passionate, fiercely unstable, destructive and transformative. Anna, far wealthier than Katri, keeps her parents' house piously unchanged, and illustrates little books for which the publisher provides the words. Her paintings are marvellously truthful depictions of the forest floor, patterns of leaf, twig, moss, lichen . . . to which she adds the cute bunnies of the publisher's texts. She spends much time answering letters from her child readers, and none in looking after her business interests. She sleeps, sleeps all winter until spring comes and she can see the living ground and paint it.Wolfish young Katri, determined to provide security for her brother, and also the fishing boat that is his one heart's desire, fakes a robbery of Anna's house in order to make her afraid to live alone, and pushes her way into Anna's service and confidence. Before long she appears to be in full control and has thrown out all the old furniture and the comfortable lies that let Anna sleep. But Anna, awake now, is not the bunny-rabbit she seemed, any more than Katri is truly the wolf. The unfolding of their story through vivid contrast and interplay of truthfulness and deceit, purity and complexity, ice and thaw, winter and spring, makes the most beautiful and satisfying novel I have read this year.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Letter From London: My American Friends Like many Europeans, I always feel good about myself in America; I feel appreciated, liked. feeds.nytimes.com |
Poem of the week: La Gioconda by Michael Field An intriguing bit of ekphrastic poetry from a very intriguing pseudonymous pairLeonardo Da Vinci's portrait of La Gioconda, more familiarly known as the Mona Lisa has fascinated many writers, her famously inscrutable half-smile a powerful stimulus for imaginative interpretation, ranging from the lyrical to the licentious. Almost as well-known as the mischievous re-touchings of the surrealist painters, the heady prose description by Walter Pater was considered by WB Yeats to be so original and poetic that he lineated it himself so as to form the opening "poem" of his 1936 anthology, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits;/ Like the Vampire/ She has been dead many times …""Only by printing it in vers libre can one show its revolutionary importance," Yeats claimed, rather suggesting that Pater's splendid phrase-making was better poetry than art criticism: better, perhaps, though possibly not quite good enough.This week's poem, "La Gioconda", is also, I think, a mixed success, but interesting enough to whet the appetite for reading more of its authors' work. They called themselves "Michael Field": in real life they were Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913), an aunt and niece who lived together in a lesbian relationship from 1878 until the death of Edith in 1913. lThe couple, known to friends as "the Michael Fields", kept the details of their collaboration to themselves. Whether this was always as total as they claimed it to be seems questionable. There are richly sensuous, seductive love poems that might suggest the authorship of a single individual: others, such as the translations and the ekphrastic poems, of which "La Gioconda" is an example, may well be fully shared projects – although exactly how the division of labour worked out remains a mystery."La Gioconda" is from their second published collection Sight and Song(1892). All the poems are about pictures, the stated purpose of the authors being "to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate". The use of "song" and "sing" is suggestive of a synaesthetic approach, and there are poems in the volume whose lineation seems to attempt rhythmic reflections of visual effects. "La Gioconda" is not one of these: like its subject, it is focused and formal. It might almost have been a sonnet.Its freedom lies in its syntax, an impressionistic list that picks out the picture's attributes over the 11 lines of a single sentence – a single sighting, as it were. It begins powerfully with the portrait's eyes, the three adjectives combining to announce a period ("historic" suggests both antiquity and historical significance) and a manner. At once we are conscious of a certain treachery, partly personal, but also part of the cloak-and-dagger rivalries of Renaissance Florence. The woman is both vividly depicted and brilliantly placed in her society.The poem, like the portrait, is cleverly lit. Words such as "lustre" and "glowing" leave us in no doubt of the subject's beauty, but at the same time her character is pervaded by darkness and mystery. The "patience" detected in the woman's hand results from the fact that it is at rest after "cruelty", a sado-masochistic kind of cruelty, it seems, since the victim will make the necessary first move.In Leonardo's portrait, the landscape stretching behind the sitter is somehow in harmony with her. More than the retreating backdrop that emphasises the intimacy of her presence, it is complicated with the curving lines of rivers, paths and valleys, which might symbolise landed wealth as part of the complexity and fullness of the sitter's married life. For the poets, this exquisite, rather ethereal landscape hides a potentially malignant force although, like the sitter, it temporarily withholds its energies.After the crystalline consonants of lines eight and nince, the repeated hissing sibilance of the last two lines brings to mind the snake in the Garden of Eden and the moments leading up to Eve's temptation. The notion that the landscape itself has a "zest" for "the vicissitudes by which men die" is curious. It's as if the poem has shifted to a less realistic register: the evocation of malignant capability in mere scenery verges on the surreal. Does that odd word "zest" earn its place or is it a convenient rhyme-word?Convenient or not, it intensifies the suggestion of pleasurable cruelty. The Mona Lisa herself might be the source of one such vicissitude, a woman of tricks and treachery whose grand house should be avoided and for whom unwary men might certainly die. Today, we know her likely identity: she was Lisa del Giocondo, a rich silk-merchant's wife, and the portrait had been commissioned to celebrate the birth of her second child. But in the Michael Fields poem she becomes even more menacing a figure than the Paterian Femme Fatale who has "trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants". This Gioconda is a smiling spider: her web awaits you.    La Gioconda(Leonardo da Vinci, The Louvre) Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that liesGlowing and soft, the patience in its restOf cruelty that waits and does not seekFor prey; a dusky forehead and a breastWhere twilight touches ripeness amorously:Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skiesOf evanescent blue on cloud and creek;Landscape that shines suppressive of its zestFor those vicissitudes by which men die.PoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |