Garcia de la Puente Transcript OY: Olya Yordanyan IGP: Ines Garcia de la Puente OY: Welcome to the EU Futures Podcast, exploring the emerging future in Europe. I am Olya Yordanyan, the EU Futures Podcast Coordinator at the BU Center for the Study of Europe. Today is May 5th, and I talk to Ines Garcia de la Puente, a visiting Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Boston University. IGP: Yes, hi, hello. My name is Ines Garcia de la Puente. OY: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your connection to Europe? IGP: Well I'm European, I'm Spanish. I was born, raised, and educated in Spain, and I left my home country a few years ago. I lived in different European countries, I ve also lived in in Russia you might consider that European or not and I ve been in the U.S. for 2 years now. OY: What is the future emerging now in Europe? IGP: What is the future emerging now in Europe? It's a completely different continent. Judging by what I saw in Spain growing up, and what you see now. It's changed a lot. It's a much more diverse space, but again, it is difficult to talk about Europe in general, like I can tell you about what I saw in Spain growing up and what I see now when I go back, but that wouldn't compare to what you see or what you used to see, I don't know, in Germany or in Poland or in a Scandinavian country. When I was growing up in Spain, everybody was similar, we all were Spanish. But I remember if we happened to have a girl or a boy in school who came from a different country, I remember once we had a young student who came from Argentina, and that was something exotic like someone you would look at and that would be interesting and then we would be excited about the new girl. Nowadays it's very different. Immigration is very important, especially from South American countries, from Latin American Spanish speaking countries. It has changed the landscape of the country. It has decreased lately because of the economic crisis definitely that is something that you see in your daily life. I'm not an expert in politics, I'm not a sociologist, but just by going to the street and doing the grocery shopping, talking to the people, you just come across people who tell you well I was here with my family we came from, whatever from Ecuador from Peru and we were all here for whatever 16 years and well now my children are back with my grandmother in Peru and I'm actually moving back because of the crisis. It's been changing a lot in the last 30 years I would say. OY: Building on the insight of American essayist Rebecca Solnit who thought that the ideas originating on the periphery of society. What do you think what is the role of literature in general in Society, especially the European society in terms of picking up these ideas and launching a discourse over them?
IGP: Again, a very difficult question. Especially, we talk about terms such as European society, who are we talking about, what is Europe, who in Europe are we talking about, what country, right? Regretfully I think the role of literature is not as important as it should be, as we know in every in every country and this is a discourse that I've heard everywhere. Like people complain that people now read less than they used to read like 20 30 40 years ago, but again, this is something that I've heard in Russia, this is something that I ve heard in Spain, this is something that I ve heard in England. So, yeah, young people seem to read less. Older people, I don't know, it's very ironic right you hear them complain that young people don't read and then I know that for example in Spain the best seller newspaper are the sports newspapers. That's what people actually read on the T or in the subway, or on the bus in the morning. I wouldn t count that necessarily as literature, it s reading, but it is not literature. I mean, I personally think that literature plays a huge role. I think that good literature shapes you, shapes the person you are, shapes the person you become. Especially if you start reading at a younger age it gives you the possibility of entering the lives of different people. It gives you the possibility of experiencing things that you might or might not experience in your life, but the experience of the characters of your books is going to, I would say, help you deal with maybe difficult situations when you actually have to go through that kind of experience. It s going to open your mind it s going to make you I think a person who is open to different experiences. It's just so important for me to read. I cannot think of the person I would be if I hadn't read when I was growing up and still nowadays when I teach literature here at BU and elsewhere, I always hope that my students are going to learn something else other than just literature. And just literature is of course I m just using that in an ironic way. I think that it s literature it s of course arts, but it's also I eye opening, mind opening, and I hope that's what literature is doing. And even if people read less it s also helping them in that way. OY: What do you think is the role of artists and writers in terms of preserving national identities, but also kind of giving a space for a common European identity? IGP: I'm in talking about national identity and arts. It's so difficult. On the one hand, I think that if you can see their work of art and literature arts, of any kind, to create a national identity I think you're getting into a very tricky soil a very tricky terrain. That's that sounds to me. I cannot avoid to relate that to the literature of totalitarianism, the literature that was closer to propaganda, and then what literature should be so, I might have a very negative view about that. I hope that literature teaches, shows the opposite. Or if it shows us, if it tries to teach us some kind of identity is not an exclusive identity it s something where, yeah, it's inclusive, where many people can identify with that but beyond borderlands or national borderlands. I want to think that literature is not creating more barriers more borders than there already exist. OY: Tell us a little bit about your interest in Eastern Slavic Literature Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian. Why is that? IGP: Why? Because it s exotic! When I you know when I started university, I didn't have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, what I wanted become but I knew I wanted to do literature,
that was very clear to me. I knew I wanted to learn languages, and I knew I wanted to live in different places. And I saw there was a possibility of getting this degree in Slavic literatures, and I thought wow let s do that and that s how it all started by chance. And, of course, that decision taken in in 5 minutes while I was standing in a line of the secretary of my university at age 17 has decided who I am and what I do. To me, studying literature Slavic literature, I also did German has opened so many doors. It has given me the possibility of having so many experiences with so many different people that I would have never have met if I had stayed back in Spain when I was 18 when I was seventeen. I thought it was exotic, I thought it was beautiful. Even, you know, beautiful and exotic at the same time because I didn't know what I was getting myself into of course if you had mentioned the name Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, I would have thought oh, so exciting so interesting, but those were names that I knew from hearing from maybe having read summaries of their novels when I was at high school. But then I got into reading things and I realized how interesting that was, so, yeah, I just thought it was a wonderful field of research, and it opened doors to a different culture a different part of Europe. Let's not forget that I'm talking about the 90s. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, the Berlin wall had also just collapsed, so it was a different time in history and I would say contrasts back then were still much, I mean, you could see them very, very easily when you just landed in the airport wherever you were. OY: Do you think literature helps Europeans who live in Western Europe or in Southern Europe better understand their Eastern neighbors? IGP: I think it should, only if people read the literature that is written about the other part of Europe. Of course, it should but of course we also have a problem there of translation. Many books are not translated so we have the language barrier there, so not everybody's able to access the latest novel seen in Russian or Polish or in any other Slavic language. But of course, just reading it makes it so much easier to understand what is going on. It gives you a first-hand picture of what's going on in the street, what's going on in an average family in a country, it s raining in a city in an Eastern European or Slavic country. So yes, of course it would help in the other way around. It's not only from the West toward the East but also from the East toward the West. Of course, the West infiltrated much quicker, much earlier in the in the former Soviet Union, there was TV, there was magic attracted to certain people who had always lived behind the Iron Curtain. But yeah of course, they would have understood each other much better, but I think there's a lot of work there for translators and for publishing houses to invest money there, and we have the problem that we know that publishing is not the best business nowadays, so maybe we would need some involvement from, I don t know, from governments from some kind of encouragement cultural encouragement to get things translated. OY: There is an idea that you know declining general levels of education among people across the world and also this would be right about Europe makes the quality of the scores at all levels, you know at political, at more social around more social questions be at a less higher quality. What do you think, what can, as I said, writers, artists, people who do creative work, make this improve?
IGP: They can improve a lot, but again I think the problem is the same problem I mentioned earlier on, right? That in order for a writer to reach a readership that readership has to actually hold his or her booking in their arms in their hands and read, and I think that s the problem getting people to actually start reading the book and if people won t start reading the book it doesn t matter how many wonderful books you have on the shelves, at home, or at the library, at the bookstore. People don't seem to be encouraged to read that because there are so many digression, there are so many easier ways, you know, you go online, and you get informed about things, and then you don't have to, you know, go through the hard work of, you know, reading page by page until you get to page 250 of a novel. So yeah, the problem is getting motivating people to read and I think that it s also part of that the scores that I mentioned before that we tend to, you know, it was always better earlier. Like whatever happened 4 years ago it was better, people were better educated, people were more polite, but I think it s also a fact definitely. I think the high school level at least from what I can tell in Spain where I have a little bit of first-hand experience going back to you know the high school where I used to be where I used to go when I was 15-16 years, I went back when I was in my late twenties, and definitely the curriculum is different there. I mean, there's a positive side to that. It's more diverse in terms of the subjects that students that kids have to learn but it's not as challenging and students are not reading the amount of books that they used to read 4 years ago, that I would agree. What I hear in other countries, for example in Russia, I've also heard that yeah students used to have to read more in the 80s even in the beginning of the 90s than they read now. So that seems to be as you said like something that's happening universally in the planet. OY: In what kind of Europe would you like to live in a future? IGP: In a Europe where of course where everybody feels comfortable where everybody respects each other and I guess the kind of ideal United States the ideal Europe that we all have in mind or many of us have in mind. Where everybody would feel welcome where everybody would have the feeling that they can reach their potential that there is they are some kind of support network where they can you know reach, achieve, what they want to achieve. I would love to see a multilingual Europe where communication we re not limited to your national language. I don't know how good or how bad that is going, but we have some work to do there. It's really difficult to communicate with a newcomer if you don't share a common language, and languages just open the door to so many things. They open the door to literature in different languages, for example, they open to the door to talking to each other, interacting with other people. So yeah, a multilingual a true multilingual Europe where every single kid has access of learning another language from childhood would, I think, make things easier, nicer, better. OY: We talked about literature, about the role of artists and writers is there anything else you would like to talk about? IGP: I think you mentioned that the most important aspects. Well maybe we should keep in mind or consider not as much the role of artists of writers as the role of teachers of those who actually introduce children introduce the potential readership to reading, right? We were talking about how difficult it is, there are wonderful books out there, but people just don't read
them. They don't borrow them from their library they don't buy them. So yeah, it ll be good to invest in our teachers in, you know, in motivating them to go to work every day. Teachers at middle schools, high schools, they face a very difficult challenge nowadays, especially with you know with the arrival of immigrants from different countries. We have seen that in the U.S. for many years too, right? Where you have in the same classroom children who barely speak whatever language it is. English if it's in the U.S. or Spanish if it s in Spain. And very often teachers don t have any support to deal with that and it s so important to get the children from day one to feel happy, to feel comfortable, to feel they are going to be able to thrive to, you know, to learn the language and to interact with the other children with you know everybody in the class. I mean it's such a wonderful opportunity, but I think yeah education is very, very important and regretfully not every government considers that a priority, but hopefully things will get better on that front. OY: Thank you so much for this interesting conversation. IGP: Thank you so much for interviewing me.