The Frankfurt Book Fair looks at Spain and Ukraine

The Spanish pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair is a kind of giant immersive installation.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 October 2022 Wednesday 22:57
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The Frankfurt Book Fair looks at Spain and Ukraine

The Spanish pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair is a kind of giant immersive installation. Upon entering, some soft and colored foam tubes are offered as an informal seat to the visitor, who, lounging there, observes the entirety of an open space of 2,000 square meters and decides where to go. From that point, as before a screen with various options, many possibilities are offered: interact with the tablets that rest on the lecterns, play at being an editor or any other agent of the book process, attend talks, visit exhibitions, go to concerts. of music, listen to or write poems, stop by the bar, print or read in braille, or even enter a labyrinth of white cloth and words where a mysterious cherry tree shines and even monkey around on a giant screen whose colors change shape and tone according to body movements.

In an authentic literary marathon, only yesterday, a large number of authors paraded through the Turquesa and Cereza auditoriums of the pavilion, including Javier Cercas, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Irene Vallejo, Marta Orriols, Kiko Amat, Najat El Hachmi, Sara Mesa, Patricio Pron, Lara Moreno, Marta Sanz, Daniel Gascón or Clara Obligado. In another building, Fernando Aramburu defended on his behalf, in perfect German, the recent translation of Los vencejos.

But, if Spain is the guest country in Frankfurt, it has a clear competitor in the interest of the international press: Ukraine, which, with a modest stand, has set up a stage in the area common to all the countries to host its crowded round tables. The body of the artist Maria Kulikovska lay yesterday, covered with the Ukrainian flag, in the outer courtyard of the fair, as if it had been hit by a bullet. It was a performance that powerfully drew attention to the situation in the country invaded by Russia. Today President Zelensky will intervene by videoconference, and the Ukrainian publishers – more than 40 stamps have come to Frankfurt – yesterday explained to this newspaper how the war has affected their activity. Alexander Krasovitsky, from the Folio publishing house, one of the most important, says that "we, like most, were in Kharkiv, the country's publishing capital, which prints 80% of the books and hosts 60% of publishers... but we had to go." "Many writers, editors, translators, poets, publishing house employees... have joined the armed forces and left their posts," explains Yulia Kozlovets, director of the Ukrainian program. "Some have died, others have disappeared, others have been taken prisoner." The bombings "totally suspended activity for a few months," says Irina Kyzomenska, from the Ranok publishing house, also from Kharkiv, because "there are buildings that have been totally destroyed, there was no office to return to, no electricity, it was chaos." But now "we have already found other printers in other places and we have rebuilt work teams, with people installed in various cities in the country, or abroad, working online." The book trade is maintained, because "people support the local industry and, on the other hand, as happened with the pandemic, reading is one of the few leisure alternatives that remains as is."

In this Ukrainian line, The Last Penguin of Kyiv is one of the most requested books at the fair. Subtitled An Epistemological Journey from the Birth of Modern Man to the Present, it is a series of essays by 17 great thinkers (including Yuval Noah Harari, Slavoj Zizek, Tim Parks, Paul B.Preciado and Elif Shafak) who, from of some epistemes of Michel Foucault (the border, identity, freedom and truth), draw how modern life and identity have been built. The title refers to the novel Death of a Penguin by Andrei Kurkov, in which the collapse of the communist system forces the closure of the Kyiv zoo and the relocation of one of its penguins as a pet.

Very close to the Ukrainian area, the Iranian Sahar Tarhandeh, from Tuti Books, a label specialized in children's and youth literature chosen as the best Asian publisher of 2021, laments, along with its beautiful publications, that, on the one hand, “ it is difficult to sell rights to our books because of international sanctions” and, on the other, that your government does not help by “not joining the international copyright laws”.

Jesús Badenes, director of the Bookstore division of the Planeta group, carried out an analysis of the publishing sector in which he confirmed its good health, with a growth of 20% compared to 2019, before the pandemic.

Returning to the Spanish pavilion, an installation of transparent plates makes it possible to follow the verses of Vida de José Hierro while walking (which light up in German if you go in one direction and in Spanish if you go in the opposite direction). In The Translator, different untranslatable words are seen on a tablet: the Germans cannot understand the concept of tabletop (they are not in the habit of prolonging meals with long charas) and we do not understand sitzfleisch, which is the meat on which the meat rests. butt, but which they use as a symbol of effort. Some shelves house the Books on Spain exhibition, with more than 600 titles published in 50 countries. And, in the background, another about illustrators who have won the national award for this discipline.

In the afternoon, the writers Isaac Rosa, José Ovejero and Rosa Ribas attended a crowded event at the headquarters of IG Metall, the powerful German metallurgical union, the largest in the world –with 3.6 million members– and whose labor agreements then dictate the pattern of the rest of the country. Before an audience of well-read trade unionists, the authors represented one of the most fashionable trends in Spanish narrative that has been translated lately: the reflection of the crisis and its dysfunctions. Rosa (who began her speech with a "comrades and companions") rejected "that the social or political issue supposes a decrease in literary quality, they are very different issues".

Between hugs and hugs in the corridors, the editor of Asteroid, Luis Solano, managed to express an emotion, in this first fair without covid restrictions: “We have missed Frankfurt. This is like a summer camp where, every year, you meet up with friends. We missed it a lot." In the background, Fraskito's guitar could be heard on the stage of the Spanish pavilion, where the parties begin at five in the afternoon. In European time.