Linguistic Rights: An Interview with Carles Torner, July 2018 This interview forms part of the AHRC-funded ‘Writers and Free Expression’ project (see https://writersandfreeexpression.com/). Please do not reproduce all or any part of it without permission. If you wish to use this for academic purposes, be sure to cite this PDF and the project blog. Peter McDonald: I couldn’t help noticing that 2018 is an auspicious anniversary year in which to talk about PEN and the question of language rights and linguistic diversity. It is 70 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and 40 years after the formation of PEN’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee in 1978. There are also some less decimally perfect dates worth recalling at the outset too: 22 years have passed since the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights in 1996, 17 years since the UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001, nine years since PEN’s Girona Manifesto on Language Rights in 2011, three years since its Quebec Declaration on Literary Translation and Translators in 2015 and two years since the Donostia Protocol of 2016. All these initiatives and documents are interrelated but I’d like to focus mainly on the 1996 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights and its consequences. Before I do so, however, could I ask you to give us a sense of your own personal interest in these issues and some background on why it is you came to play such a key part as a champion of linguistic rights? Carles Torner: There’s another important date: it’s the 90th anniversary of the PEN International Congress in Oslo in 1928, where, from what I have read, it was decided that PEN Centres would be recognised not according to states but according to literatures. For me, this is very important, and helps explain my involvement, because this creates another world map. Our main poet Carles Riba of the time participated in those debates when PEN created a vision of the world in which, people like us, the Catalans, could feel at home in PEN as Catalans. Though this seems normal from the outside, for us it’s a privilege because we can be acknowledged as Catalans in very few international forums. This is different to the debate about independence, which for me is an important one, even more so today, but it’s not central to that issue. PEN made it possible for cultures that do not have the support of a state, cultures that as I would say that have no embassy—when we travel we have no embassy acknowledging us, supporting us—to participate in the debate with full rights. In the Catalan context, my biography is very peculiar because, by chance or by personal commitment, I have been involved in international life since I was very young, from the age of nineteen. My first full-time work was international. I was based in Paris, travelling round the world with UN consultative status and participating actively in UNESCO and the Human Rights Council and the UN. I’ve been working in international structures all my life, non-stop, sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time. But the reality is that I have a completely exceptional experience of international life because all these 1 organisations, all three in which I have worked, acknowledge Catalan identity at an international level, alongside Spanish. So I have always been an international worker, an international representative. I’ve had different offices: I’ve been President, I’ve been International Secretary, I’ve been Director, but I have never represented Spain, never. This again makes me quite peculiar because I feel at home in a kind of internationality that for 99% of my friends and for the citizens of Catalonia does not exist. For them international life always goes through Madrid and always with a lot of obstacles that I simply have never felt. It has been a real privilege for me and when I explain this in Barcelona, my friends say ‘you’re really making it up’. They say I am exaggerating but I’m not! I have never found myself having to confront Spain at an international level; also I have never been supported by Spain at an international level. So that is very peculiar and that explains why, as a Catalan writer, I have felt at home in PEN from the first day and able to participate fully in its singular international life. PMcD: Can you just remind us of the date? When did you start working for PEN? CT: I became a member of PEN – and I’ve never checked but I have the card so I could check – I became a member of PEN when I published my first two books of poetry, aged twenty-one. They were written in different periods but they were published in that year, 1984. For me and my literary friends, it was a given that as soon as you publish a book you become a member of the Catalan Writers Association and Catalan PEN. It was about becoming part of the literary community. I don’t really remember why, I just remember that our elders were part of it, it was our tradition. You could dig and I could work it out but frankly it was quite automatic. PMcD: Catalan PEN was one of the earliest Centres, not so? CT: Yes, it was the third. You have London in October 1921, and then you have Paris, I think January/February 1922, and then the Catalan Centre. We have the records of a meeting in February where they were already debating it, and a letter from one of the founders of Catalan PEN to English PEN on 28 February announcing the creation of the centre. There are many ways of explaining it: there was a generation of young Catalan poets and essayists who were connected internationally, reading the English press, and who probably read there that English PEN had been created. There is a nice story, the poet John Langdon-Davies was in London in 1921 when PEN was created, and his sister owned a small hotel in the Costa Brava. He then travelled to see her there in spring when he was also translating an anthology of Catalan poetry with one of the main translators of English poetry at the time, Marià Manent. So Langdon-Davies and Manent met together with Carles Riba and that’s where the idea of creating the centre came from. Then on 19 April there was a dinner in the Ritz and we know everyone who was at the table—very fascinating—including John Langdon Davies. In fact, it was a young generation of authors who wanted to have international connections and PEN was a friend and became a platform. This is why we have the funny set up at the first Congress in London 1923 with a table for Barcelona and a table for Madrid. 2 PMcD: A good test to show PEN was not a national or a state body from the start. CT: There is another side to my personal story. When I was young, in fact still now, I was a member of a religious movement, the International Movement of Catholic Students (IMCS). This is a movement created in 1921, acknowledged by the Vatican, very active during the Vatican II years, the years when the Church completely reformed itself. But to me what is more relevant is the Liberation Theology in Latin America was born of that movement. The 1971 book Liberation Theology by the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, comprising the speeches he gave to the Catholic students in Peru when he was the Chaplain, is especially important because it made the connection between theology and social issues which had a huge impact and we were the channel for that impact at a student level. PMcD: This was in the mid-80s? CT: Well I started when I was sixteen or seventeen so that means in 1980. I had the personal fortune of going to a school where I ended more or less mastering four languages—English, French, Catalan, Spanish—and this opened many doors for me. In the first meeting of that Catholic student international movement, which was in Slovenia in 83/84, at the time still under Communist rule, they proposed me as international President and I said yes. So my first work when I was 23 entailed living in Paris for five years, working non-stop as President of that movement. I travelled a lot, more than with PEN, always staying with students in student dorms and families, never in hotels, sharing their lives and struggles. The trips were really long, and I was also moving between Paris and Geneva for the Human Rights Council and UNESCO - so it was really this International experience. On the Human Rights Commission (the name of the council at the time), I represented IMCS in many issues. Our movement in Guatemala had been a target and some student leaders were killed. Also Bishop Gerardi had started to keep a record of all the human rights violations against the indigenous communities Guatemala. And when, finally, the military dictatorship ended, he chaired the National Reconciliation Commission that drafted a report about the killings during the years of the war against the guerrillas. We had a consultative status on the Human Rights Commission, exactly like PEN. I took the floor, saying that a woman student, one of our leaders, had been killed in very troubled circumstances, probably under police interrogation, and reporting on the human rights situation and how it affected students in Guatemala.