Yesterday Barnaby attended a lovely tribute to the great writer and reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski in the equally lovely Celeste Bartos Room in the New York Public Library. (The one sour point was when the writers toasted Kapuscinski with vodka on stage. At the Believer event, too, participants drank on stage, and the audience laughed delightedly, as if at a charming transgression, and Barnaby, himself no teetotaller, squirmed—he cannot help thinking it augurs badly for the Republic when people are willing to applaud other people drinking.) Salman Rushdie talked of being forced by Sonny Mehta to concede the excellence of Kapuscinski's book The Emperor; and he recounted that he had once asked Kapuscinski how he had escaped from so many life-threatening situations, how he had waded into innumerable violent, murderous anarchies and walked out again. "I made myself unimportant," was Kapuscinski's reply—he conducted himself in such an unprepossessing manner that it would not have seemed worth anyone's time to shoot him. Later Philip Gourevitch expanded on this point, or rather recast it: in the violent anarchies into which Mr. Kapuscinski went, as a writer, he was unimportant, Gourevitch said—life was cheap; but being unimportant did not bother Kapuscinski.

Barnaby did not know Kapuscinski, although he, like many of the panelists, was greatly impressed and influenced by his book The Emperor, which he came to through a friend's recommendation and an unrelated interest in Ethiopia. But judging from the recollections of his friends and from the brief video clips shown, he seemed to have been, indeed, a charming and wonderful man—a good and humble man. Polish newspaper editor Adam Michnik told another story: He was going to Mexico, and Kapuscinski asked him to say hello to another Polish journalist who worked there. But when Michnik did so, this reporter replied, "Oh! Kapuscinski! I'd love to meet him." Michnik said, "But Kapuscinski says you have met!" The reporter denied it and denied it, but finally remembered that he had once met a skinny young Communist reporter named Riszek. "But he was not yet Kapuscinski then!"

It seemed to Barnaby that this humility was important not only because, as Rushdie said, it allowed Kapuscinski to survive the dangerous places that his work took him to; it was important also because it was only his humility that allowed him to really see those places. He may have been terrified, but he was not preoccupied with his own fear—and so because he had no distracting idea of his own importance, of the significance of his fear or the importance of his safety, he was able, even when afraid, to look with interest and attention at what was going on around him. Such humility, moreover, enabled him to find beauty even in what terrified, disgusted, and appalled—only the addition of a humble and disinterested faculty of wonder could have made something beautiful of Haile Selassie's corruption.

Barnaby, as it happens, spent all of the PEN World Voices festival wrestling with the question of humility and self-importance. He has listened to writers from a dozen nations boast and preen; and he has watched other writers, on the same panels, tacitly allow the boasting and preening because they did not like to combat it with boasting or preening of their own. No one likes to listen to boasting; but at the same time, writing does not take place in a vacuum, and it is no one else's responsibility to investigate whether you might be doing something wonderful—you must tell them. How to go about it? Over the course of the week, Barnaby observed several approaches. There is the Bugs Bunny Defense—tell the audience how many hundreds of thousands of books you have sold in France, but say it with a smile, as when Bugs Bunny turns to the camera and says, "Ain't I a stinker?" (This one works quite well; only the more sophisticated listeners will shudder at the artifice.) There is the Modest Screenwriter Defense—mention a successful movie you have written and modestly suggest that the audience may or may not have heard of it. (This one works perfectly; but it breaks down if you casually but not-quite-apropos-of-anything mention half a dozen famous actors who appeared in the movie.) There is the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Defense, which Barnaby practices, like so:

Pretty Danish woman: "Are you a writer, also?"
Barnaby: "Yes."
Pretty Danish woman: "What do you write?"
Barnaby: "Novels."
Pretty Danish woman: "What kind of novels?"
Barnaby: "Good ones."
(Barnaby looks at his watch and turns away.)

And then, we suppose, there is the Kapuscinski Defense, which can be learned either from the man, or from his books. In The Emperor we see, by a sort of reductio ad nauseam, what is the necessary, horrifying end of the elevation of human personality; in the author's life, as eulogized by his friends, and as highlighted by the interviews shown in the Bartos Room yesterday, we see the contrary, what can be achieved by diligence and self effacement. The Kapuscinski Defense works like this: Respect the interests of the person you are talking to enough to answer his questions, even when they are about your work—but not if they are about your person; respect your work enough to recognize that its merits are not your merits, so that you can talk about its virtues without becoming self important or self satisfied; and recognize, finally, that no man is his own judge, and that the best course is simply to pursue your work quietly and honestly, and let the question of its value, excellence, and importance be indefinitely deferred. Perhaps they will drink to you after your death, or perhaps they will forget you, but you were already immortal, because you lived not in yourself, but in the world.

Barnaby Sandwich has been kept up several nights running by what sounds like an orgy of rats in his sheet rock; and he recently learned the hard way that sauerkraut and sour cream do not mix; but despite sleeplessness and a stomach amok, he has pressed his way through half a dozen more PEN events, among them “Every Day in Africa,” “Voices from Today’s Iran,” “Humor Out of Context,” and “A Believer Nighttime Event.” The good people of PEN have worked hard to assemble a massive and impressive festival of dozens of events and hundreds of people, that must necessarily bridge a variety of tastes and sensibilities; and the same good people have been known, not incidentally, to stand Barnaby to a bowl of Ukrainian borscht when winter’s glistening teeth were piercing him to the bone; but unshaven, haggard, and clutching his belly in both hands, Barnaby was in a mood to stir up trouble.

It began at “Every Day in Africa,” which promised to “offer a glimpse into the richness of the literary voices of Africa.” The writers who were assembled for this glimpse were an Algerian, Yasmina Khadra, who made very strongly the point that Algeria is a Mediterranean—an Arab or Berber—country, not an African one (and who lives in France); an Ivoirienne, Marguerite Abouet, who wrote a graphic novel about everyday life in Côte d’Ivoire—and who also lives in France; a writer from Zanzibar, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who has lived for four decades in England; and a very young man from Harvard who, growing up, spent alternate summers in Nigeria. No doubt this is a problem of logistics: European governments and publishers must surely have more money to spend on sending writers to New York than do, for example, the government of Côte d’Ivoire or publishers in Zanzibar; nevertheless, it made Barnaby grumpy. (Mr. Khadra, the Algerian, did question the premise of the panel—“I was raised by writers,” he said, “and writers have no nationality, they have only talent”—but it was only in the nature of an aside.)

At the next panel, “Travel as Metaphor,” he tried to make a chart of percentages: what percentage of each answer supplied by a writer represented a personal anecdote or boasting, what percentage self promotion, and what percentage an honest attempt to achieve some mutuality and communication. He could not keep up. He grew frustrated with his limited arithmetical skills, and his stubby pencil, and began ripping his note paper, and finally he shot up out of his seat and announced to the auditorium in a loud, unmistakable voice, “My very favorite kind of pasta is spaghetti puttanesca!”

“Sir,” said the moderator, a poetry accountant from Marsh & McLennan, “no one cares what kind of pasta you like—you are not a novelist!”

“In point of fact,” Barnaby replied nasally, “I am—but you’re right, no one cares what kind of spaghetti I like, and I, for my part, don’t care what kind of spaghetti the panelists like. They’re not soap opera stars, and we are not at a cocktail party. For the love of Christ ask them a substantial question, or let them read from their work—I couldn’t give a fuck about their lives or feelings!”

You might like to hear that Barnaby was thrown out on his ear; but of course he wasn’t—he simply sat down again and the panel continued on as before. Five minutes from the end, Barnaby burst from the auditorium, rattled down the stairs, and tumbled into the men’s room for another sauerkraut-induced duel with his lower self.

At “Voices from Today’s Iran,” in the CUNY Graduate Center, Barnaby was interested to note that the panelists wore almost entirely black and white—the dark blue blazer on Robert Silvers, the moderator, was the most colorful touch. Barnaby listened as one writer after another talked about the alternately demoralizing and terrifying situation in Iran—noting, as he listened, that Farsi sounded to his anglophone ears less foreign than, for example, Catalan—and gradually felt his sleepy, dyspeptic grumpiness subside in the face of other people’s genuine problems. But then Mr. Silvers remarked, in his introduction of a writer named Shahriar Mandanipour, that the man was forced to make his living as a librarian because writing “is not lucrative in Iran.”

Once again Barnaby shot up from his seat; this time he raised one hand high up in the air, and the startled Mr. Silvers pointed to him.

“Yes?” said Silvers.

“Thank you,” Barnaby said. “I would like to know what city you live in, Mr. Silvers.”

Mr. Silvers—editor of the New York Review of Books—furrowed his brow.

“This one,” he said. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Barnaby repeated, and sat down.

Of course these writers had been brought here to talk about the situation in their own country, not the situation here; but Barnaby would have liked to hear some comparison of government versus economic censorship.

“You see,” he said later to the nice man behind the counter at Café Rakka, a falafel restaurant on St. Mark’s Place, “people get very excited about the power of the internet, about how anyone can blog about anything, but the fact is that the culture in general, and therefore most people’s mental landscapes—the room they have for new ideas—is still to a very large extent determined by enormous media corporations whose control is concentrated in a very small number of hands. I can put whatever I want on a blog, but no one will read it; or a few people will read it; but I’m shouting into a hurricane compared to the New York Post—or to whichever chick lit novel the Times best seller list thinks is hot this week. In this country you’re free to say whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean that anyone will listen. It doesn’t mean that anyone can hear you. Try going into a noisy dance club and talking to someone you don’t know about human papillomavirus—no one will stop you. We’re so fixated on the right to free speech in this country that we rarely talk about other distortions of the culture—we rarely consider what free speech is worth in the face of controlled and limited attention. Don’t get me wrong—free speech is worth fighting and dying for, and God bless those that do, and I would certainly rather wither in the face of benign or indifferent or even malign neglect than actually go to jail, or see books pulped; but we do our free culture no service by pretending that it is not deeply troubled and in danger itself. Two men stood outside the Graduate Center today handing out cards for a bookstore called ‘Revolution,’ and even I threw their card away.”

“Yes, my friend,” said the man behind the counter, with a smile that radiated pure humanitarian benevolence. “Hot sauce? Onions?”

“Just a little,” Barnaby replied. He had a Turkish coffee as well, and he wondered why he had seen so many dressed-up Sikh families walking north through Madison Square Park that afternoon.

Barnaby, if you’ll recall, himself attended Columbia College but was kicked out five hours before commencement; and though his better sense tells him that everyone who, in the course of his exuberant senior-year prank, was covered with chicken blood or otherwise molested, must by now have forgiven, or forgotten, or at least satisfied his vengeance by contemplating the state of Barnaby’s life; still, Barnaby took no chances—he walked into Columbia’s Faculty House in a false mustache, fedora, and trench coat, and in a thick coat of a cologne that he normally doesn’t wear. (To throw them off the scent, if you will.)

The name of the talk he attended was “English: An Invasive Species?” It was moderated by David Damrosch. After a series of introductory remarks by various personages and the usual listing of prizes, Catalan writer Francesc Parcerisas began. He read a speech that mentioned briefly his own introduction to translation—being asked to translate a book from French into Spanish—and talked, among other things, about the danger of English translations squeezing out other translations, which is a danger Barnaby had not thought of before. If a Hungarian novel has already been translated into English, who will bother translating it into Dutch? It is a fair point. He also said, “We must be careful translation does not become a mark of submission,” also a fair point. (Barnaby would like to mention that the Catalan cultural ministry seems to be doing a hell of a job.)

Then Chinese writer Ma Jian spoke, through a visibly nervous translator sitting beside him, without notes. He made the fascinating point that the Chinese Communist decision to reform the written language—to abandon, that is, instruction in Classical Chinese, and to write in the vernacular instead—put the body of China’s own traditional literature beyond the reach of the average reader, and so the examples that he and other novelists of his generation looked to were translations of European books. This is quite in accord with Barnaby’s experience: on a visit to a Chinese elementary school, he found that none of the children had any but the most banal views of the ancient Taoist classics; he also noted that the two most commonly displayed books in train station bookstores in northern China were Who Moved My Cheese? and former GE CEO Jack Welch’s volume of autobiographical braggadocio. (Of course, Barnaby only noticed these books in particular because he cannot read Chinese.)

Ma Jian also noted that Shakespeare’s plays were first translated into Chinese as novels, and remarked that the history of translation in China was only one hundred years old—that before that the languages of foreigners were held to be like the language of birds. Barnaby suspected that Mr. Ma’s remark about translation had itself been simplified in translation—there were Chinese monks, after all, translating sutras from the Sanskrit in the first millennium, not to mention all the translating into and out of Manchu that must have gone on under the Qing—but he could not stay to ask a question about it, nor even to hear more than three words from the third speaker, Siri Hustvedt, because he had to run out to pursue his own exercise in translation by taking his visiting Japanese friend Mr. Ogura to a Yankees game.

Several years ago, due to an unlikely and implausible set of circumstances, Barnaby spent more than six weeks sleeping on the floor with the Ogura family above their restaurant in a suburb of Tokyo. They graciously took him in and made him at home. This week, Mr. and Mrs. Ogura had come to New York to visit their daughter, who lives here, and Mr. Ogura, a great fan of New York Yankee Hideki Matsui, had asked Barnaby to accompany him to a game. So Barnaby ran out of Faculty House at five-thirty, stripping off his trench coat and false mustache (but not, unfortunately, his terrible cologne), and hurried down to pick up his friend on 44th street and then ride back up to the stadium. Suddenly he was forced to make use of his rusty and desiccated Japanese.

They rode up on a crowded 4 train and poured out—with all the other white people—at 161st street in the Bronx. They filtered through security; when the security guard asked Mr. Ogura if he had a cell phone, and if so, to open it, he turned around to look at Barnaby, and Barnaby said, “Keitai—keitai denwa o misete.” They wondered why this was required, and Barnaby laboriously constructed a sentence about building a bomb from separate pieces. They stopped at the information booth to ask where their seats were, and the woman behind the counter—who seemed to speak perfect English—slowly read aloud to Barnaby the numbers on his ticket. “Yes,” Barnaby, “I can read the numbers; my question is—” “Zis ticket,” Mr. Ogura said, “whear?” and the woman pointed.

As they watched the Yankees get slaughtered by the Blue Jays, they explained things to each other: Mr. Ogura explained to Barnaby that Derek Jeter had hurt his elbow, and Barnaby—by the third inning covered like a baby duck with a fine down of cotton candy—explained what Crackerjack is. “You know the song,” Barnaby said, singing, “Take me out to the ball game,” and Mr. Ogura assented—they play it in the seventh inning; “buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack,” Barnaby said, and a glorious light of comprehension lit up Mr. Ogura’s face. “Aaah!” he said. “Sore wa Crackerjack?” That’s Crackerjack? Then he wanted to know whether they sold it elsewhere, or only at Yankee Stadium.

It was a beautiful moment, and it set Barnaby thinking. (The game certainly was not very interesting—it would be hard to describe the Yankees’ performance without resorting to violent sexual metaphors.) Certainly if he had not studied Japanese, it would have been difficult for him to become friends with a Japanese man who spoke nearly no English; and more directly, if he had not studied Japanese, he would not have traveled to Japan and found himself without anywhere to sleep, and forced to take advantage of a brief acquaintance. This is the obvious virtue of translation: it expands our experience, it broadens our world, it renders more complex and beautiful our notions of humanity. But more than this, it occurred to him, there was a benefit precisely in the imperfection of his Japanese. Mr. Ogura, nearly 59 years old, runs a small restaurant in the suburbs, and has three children; Barnaby is not yet thirty, pretends to be a bohemian, and has no real responsibilities apart from a dead goldfish in his room at his parents’ house. It occurred to him that in the normal course of events, two such men might find some awkwardness in talking or spending time together; but they are preserved from this by the constraints of their linguistic situation. Mr. Ogura speaks slowly and carefully, repeating each phrase until he sees Barnaby nod; and Barnaby, freed for the time from the tyranny of his all-too-conscious English-language mind, falls into no dreamy, deadly complexities; and their shared project of communicating offers a broad and fertile scope for the expression of their friendship. Barnaby was gratefully reminded that such ideas and sentiments as “where is our section,” “do I have to tip the beer guy,” and “the Yankees certainly suck tonight” really are the fundamental building blocks of human life; he was reminded that without empathy and imagination, there can be no communication, but just as certainly, perfect understanding would be not communication but communion—that it is the shared struggle towards mutual understanding that itself constitutes the magnificent human project.

In sum, they had several beers at the game, and then went to the East Village to introduce Mr. Ogura to borscht and have some more beer, and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will not be attending any more PEN events until this evening.

Barnaby Sandwich rolled out of bed this morning at the crack of dawn—not literally, but for him—and traveled uptown to speak to some high school students about a book he had written. These dozen teenagers, up, like Barnaby, since before any merciful God could have intended, and in receipt of their college acceptance letters, nevertheless managed to keep their eyes open, which is one eye more than Barnaby managed. One of the young men asked Barnaby what year he had graduated from their shared high school, and then noted that he had been in kindergarten in the year named. So do the young flowers dislodge the corpses of their forebears—before falling from the stalk in their turn.

In the afternoon, fortified by an omelet, a brisk walk, and one gill of wheatgrass juice, Barnaby wandered quite by accident into “History and the Truth of Fiction,” a panel in NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall. Colum McCann began the discussion with several quotations on the fictionality of truth—and Brecht’s remark that “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” and which Barnaby wheezily shouted, “Hear, hear!”—and then the participants were off and running. Arthur Japin read from his novel about an African prince raised in Holland, leaning back his head at one point to shout “Kwame Bobo,” the prince’s name. (We think the “Bobo” is for “Boachi,” his second name, but that is only a guess.) Imma Monsó, a Catalan writer who described herself as having moved in her own work from fantasy to autobiography, said—in reference to her most recent and most autobiographical book—“If I changed a little detail, all the story could be false.” But she nonetheless called the book a novel, because it was the product of “a very intensive choice among real facts,” an “interpretation of real facts,” and suggested that it is “an effort with the language” which distinguishes fiction.

Michael Wallner, a German writer, mentioned the German word for literature, dichtung, and defined it literally as a “making dense,” and suggested that a writer who has made his subject dense enough—perhaps a better translation would be “compressed” or “compact” enough—has done well, whether it is truth or fiction. Barnaby, who has not been to the gym in several cosmic cycles, leaned over to the woman next to him and said, “My suit is making a dichtung of me!” She shushed him. Mr. Wallner also remarked that Thomas Mann had not shrunk from killing his beloved grandchild in Doctor Faustus, because it was artistically necessary. Mr. Japin professed himself uninterested in the difference between truth and fiction, while Laila Lalami, a journalist as well as a novelist, exclaimed that it was very important, indeed. “But what,” Barnaby exclaimed to the woman next to him, “do they mean by these terms, exactly? How can we have this conversation without a rigorous definition of terms?” Now the woman beside him poked Barnaby sharply in the belly with a nail file, and that certainly shut him up. Colum McCann mentioned “fatwas” at 2:12 pm, by Barnaby’s watch—in fear of the nail file, Barnaby forbore from pointing out that “fatwa” is a broad category of religious judgment, not only a death threat—and Arthur Japin countered with a reference to Auschwitz at 2:15. The afternoon was a success!

Barnaby hurried up, then, to the event he had meant to attend, a reading at 192 Books called “The World is a Book.” He arrived forty-five minutes early, more or less as Carlo Lucarelli, one of the readers, arrived. The small, shelf-lined, beautiful bookstore was filled with folding chairs arranged in concentric circles around a table with a microphone. Barnaby carefully chose a chair that had a direct sight line to the microphone and was also near the door, so that he could slip out for a very important dermatologist’s appointment without causing a disruption. But as Francine Prose read a list of the readers’ prizes, and then the readers read, more and more people came in, and the bookstore’s owner thoughtfully unfolded more and more chairs, until Barnaby was trapped, with no sight line, and no exit path. He tried to ignore his impending embarrassment and listen.

Lluís-Anton Baulenas began, in slow but steady English first and then in fluid and distinctly beautiful Catalan, a passage about a character’s leaving fascist Spain. It seemed all too relevant—Barnaby broke out in hives, which he began to scratch. Baulenas called Franco’s a “dictatorship run by the meek and irresolute,” a very perceptive remark—what can better explain the fetishizing of violence and dogmatic decisiveness than inner softness and turmoil? He also said, “the dictatorship is hypocritical, and this hypocrisy infects every aspect of life.”

Then Moses Isegawa, whom Barnaby had noticed in his red Yankees cap fending off well-wishers with a reflexive hand before his face, read from his novel Abyssinian Chronicles. He read a section in which his narrator, like him a Ugandan relocated to Holland, described the mostly black ghetto that he first moved into; Isegawa looked attentively at the book that he read from, as if he the words might change if he looked away. (The book was published first in Dutch; Isegawa read in English.) One good line: “The only lesson my landlady seemed to have learned from life was never to turn anyone away.” Barnaby noted this down with the intention of reading it to his own landlady, as dramatically as possible.

Carlo Lucarelli read a short passage of a book in Italian, and then sat beside an American friend who read a longer passage in English. Barnaby enjoyed the Italian, but so far it is Catalan that has caught his fancy: he had never heard it before. Ms. Monsó at NYU had a fascinating accent that Barnaby could not quite make out; and as Mr. Baulenas read, he tried to decide whether Catalan sounded more like Italian or Portuguese—it certainly sounded to his ears more like either of these than like Spanish.

Per Petterson read a passage in which a ten-year-old named Lars accidentally shoots his twin brother Od in the heart; it was careful but strong and very affecting. Barnaby cleared his throat and raised his hand. “Od,” he said. “Wasn’t that the name of the Norse god of skiing, who married the Vanir goddess, what’s-her-name—no, I’m sorry, I mean, whom she wanted to marry, but they told her she could only choose by looking at their legs, and so they all stood behind a curtain—”

“Sir,” Mr. Petterson said politely, “your face seems to be covered with custard,” and this disarmed Barnaby altogether. Mr. Petterson had also bobbed his head with good nature when a woman’s cell phone had rung.

Finally, as Francine Prose was reading an imaginary love letter from Kafka’s fiancée, Barnaby looked at his watch, gritted his teeth, scratched the hives that were still broken out from hearing about fascism, and stood up. “Excuse me,” he muttered, “I’m sorry, pardon me—this guy’s really hard to get an appointment with—pardon me, excuse me.” As he knocked and tripped and tiptoed his way between, through, and around, he knocked over two old women, knocked a beautiful Danish girl in the head with his backpack, pulled off a man’s jacket, and stepped on a small dog, all while Ms. Prose’s voice got louder and louder. Finally when he reached the door he broke the handle, and he may have to attend subsequent events in a false mustache.

The PEN World Voices Festival begins today, and, as Barnaby understands it, Paul Auster will be receiving a wet, rosy kiss from the ghost of Charles de Gaulle at precisely 8 pm, on top of the Chrysler Building. Also in the works, a reenactment of the Confusion of Tongues at Katz's Delicatessen, where delegates from one hundred and sixty seven countries, autonomous provinces, and crown colonies will all, at the sharp sound of a referee's whistle blown by a fully-qualified Viennese psychoanalyst, begin speaking as loudly as they can at the tops of their voices. Highlights are expected to include an argument about whether Chinese consists of "languages" or "dialects," conducted without translation in Fukkienese, Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese, and Taiwanese; a debate about the historical effects on literature of the development of Norwegian Bokmal, conducted in Swedish by three Finns; and a lecture on the historical influences on and of the English language delivered by a Cambridge professor in Anglo-Saxon, and rebutted in Afrikaans. Barnaby Sandwich, however, your intrepid correspondent and pastrami devoté, will not attend. His corduroy suit is at the cleaners, he is suffering from an outbreak of athlete's foot, his Western and Chinese horoscopes for the day contradict each other in an extremely frightening and confusing fashion, and he thinks he may have stepped on a ladybug over the weekend. He will begin throwing his corpulent bulk into the festival on Wednesday.