- on intimate editing, EU mythologies, polyglot Brussels & a Valencian tale

Dear reader,

The first print issue of the ERB hit the stands in June 2022, and within two weeks our own webshop sold out of copies. Now, three months in, our distributor Ra & Olly estimates that the shops are selling 70% of the ERBs they receive, a figure they describe as??astonishing for a magazine’s first issue.??Heartening!

(Snag that Issue One in print from?various shops online?or?subscribe?and Issue Two will greet you at your door in December.)

And now a particularly ?European? ensemble of articles, from the intimacies of editing, to the mythologies and unintelligibilities of the EU, to the corners of Valencian literature.

How Americans edit sex out of my writing - by Francesco Pacifico

?An early essay from Issue Two: What, Francesco Pacifico asks, is editing? ?In the editing process, two people who both lead a literary life—an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily—converge on the text one of the two has written, and wage sensual war on each other for the soul of the page.? There follows a confession in which dubious generalizations (Americans? Europeans?) give way to poignant incisions into vulnerability, work, sex and literary creation. Read the essay →

?Cretan Europa's second coming - by Kalypso Nicola?dis

?The European Union goes to Church. Two hundred ?normal? citizens convened for a Citizen’s Assembly in Florence, ?in the ancient cathedral of Fiesole?, to contemplate the future of Europe. Kalypso Nicolaidis takes stock of this ?experiment in continental democracy?. Or is it ?a therapy weekend at the bedside of our aging European project?? And isn’t the Christian setting a little… on the nose? A dispatch from Florence becomes an inquiry into the EU’s symbols and myths. ?Christian Europe is around us in a quantum superposition, both here and not here?, Nicola?dis notes, before charting an alternative mythology in the figure of Cretan Europa. ?And so I imagined starting a conversation with these random citizens about another Europa, my Europa, to make Europa say what I, the so-called expert, was not allowed to say.? Read the essay →

Who will speak European? A puzzle - by Arman Basurto

A pearl on the riddle of language in the history of European integration and disintegration. Perhaps English unites cosmopolitan Europeans and excludes the rest. It spreads in international and corporate environments and through highly qualified jobs; the would-be lingua franca becomes the language of globalization’s winners, of those who have the means and capabilities to face the future with optimism, but casts a menacing shadow over globalization’s losers, who now speak languages reduced to mere?vernaculars?(or elevated to ?secret languages?). Arman Basurto Barrio ranges from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (who hated polyglot Paris in the 12th century), to Don Quixote (who said, in effect:?whatever), to the military-linguistic disaster of the Battle of Caransebe? in 1788, to the common aristocratic tongues of War and Peace, and finally to a soccer field in modern-day Brussels, where the languages are countless.

?Is a hierarchical diglossia the price to pay for a common language? I hope not. It doesn’t have to be.?

Read the pearl →

A Madman’s Tale?- by Enric Valor

translated by Paul Scott Derrick & Maria-Llu?sa Gea-Valor

A story from the Valencian writer Enric Valor, available in English for the first time. Valor (1911-2000) championed Valencian and Catalan as a writer and as a lexicographer. (He also taught Valencian to fellow inmates when he was imprisoned by the Franco regime for his cultural activities).?In 1936, the train carrying the only copy of the manuscript of his first novel (El misteri del Canadian, or?The mystery of the Canadian) was bombed, and the manuscript was never recovered. But he went on to write, among other novels, a trilogy depicting the life and landscape of Castalla, in Alicante. He also gathered tales from locals in the towns and villages of Alicante, and collected them into the?Rondalles Valencianes?(Valencian Folktales), a translated selection of which is forthcoming from Routledge, introducing Valor to English readers.m ?A Madman’s Tale?, written around 1950, is not one of those folktales. It is a story, told from an asylum, about fathers, sons, psychology and sin.

?I guess it all began,? he said, ?because of that weak-headedness my father sometimes had. It just rubbed me the wrong way.?

????Read the story →

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PS: Our special mentions for this newsletter go to... European University Institute , Association of European University Presses (AEUP) , European Student Think Tank ??