Since 2014, the University of Bern has been awarding the Friedrich Dürrenmatt visiting professorship for world literature twice a year, the purpose of which is broadly stated that it serves “to mediate between science and literature, theory and practice, university and the public”. The Burmese author Wendy Law-Yone took up this visiting professorship in the 2015 fall semester. The author, born in 1947, has not seen her country of birth, which is now called Myanmar and has been in the most depressing headlines for months, since 1967. At that time she was arrested by the military regime after an unsuccessful escape attempt, but later flown to Thailand as a stateless person and from there came to the United States.
As an adolescent, Wendy Law-Yone was the victim of the clan confinement customary in dictatorships.
Her father was the editor of the influential English-language newspaper The Nation, which he founded himself, until the military coup in 1962, and had been in "protective custody" since March 1963.
Law-Yone impressively describes the scene when he was picked up at three o'clock in the morning - also a popular time in dictatorships of all stripes.
With the necessary self-irony
Her personal relationship with Friedrich Dürrenmatt dates from this time, as she stated in the first sentence of her inaugural lecture in Bern: "I met Friedrich Dürrenmatt for the first time in my teenage years - at the age of 17, to be precise." in the fact that “as the daughter of a prominent political prisoner, she was not only not allowed to leave the country, but also not allowed to enroll me at a university”. Instead, through the agency of her older brother's German friend, she begins to learn German at an institute run by the government, surrounded by all male civil servants.
Of course, the institute's program director, a Dr.
Lechner, to whom Law-Yone erected a monument in her lecture, they are not allowed to include them.
She is a guest auditor there and now comes across German literature, Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine, translates the latter (“Das Fräulein stood by the sea”) on a trial basis into English and finally writes German poetry herself or whatever she thinks it is.
She doesn't talk about it without the necessary self-irony.
The same Dr.
After the course is over, Lechner takes it with him to tidy up and pack up the library of the Goethe-Institut, which, like other cultural institutes before him, is no longer wanted in Myanmar.
Unfamiliar and soothing tones
“While I was eagerly sniffing through the pile of books, I came across a narrow volume, an English title in the German-speaking section. The visit of the old lady. ”That it was precisely this piece that Law-Yone came across at the time forms the center of her inaugural speech in Bern half a century later and culminates in a reflection on the leitmotif of revenge: not only in the well-known story of Dürrenmatts Claire Zachanassian, but also in relation to Law-Yone's second novel, "Irrawaddy Tango" (1993).
Vengeance is one of the oldest stories in the world, she cites examples from world literature and cannot agree with George Orwell's argument, who in the essay "Vengeance is angry" asserts that as soon as the feeling of powerlessness disappears, vengeance also disappears. Law-Yone, on the other hand, said: “Pissed off for whom, I ask myself. Perhaps for the uninvolved observer. Does the desire to take revenge really evaporate when the opportunity to take revenge arises? I'm not so sure about that. ”At a time when reconciliation of whatever kind is invoked everywhere and the“ division of society ”is lamented, these are sounds that are as unfamiliar as they are beneficial.
Incidentally, “Dürrenmatt and Me - A Passage from Burma to Bern” is a didactic piece on the fact that literature can still be an instrument to open up the world and to relate to it. Regarding the experience of strangeness and permanent exile (Wendy Law-Yone has lived in London with her British husband for two decades), the author quotes Roberto Bolaño: “Every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature. “The fact that the author's farewell lecture ends in a Bernese cemetery in front of Bakunin's grave has nothing to do with the worst turn that Dürrenmatt has defined as a characteristic of a story that has been thought through to the end, because from there the speech goes straight to Ithaca .
Wendy Law-Yone: "Dürrenmatt and Me". A passage from Burma to Bern.
English German. Translated from the English by Johanna von Koppenfels. With an afterword by Marijke Denger. Edited by Oliver Lubrich. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2021. 172 pp., Br., 18, - €.