The aim:
Octavio Paz, in his introduction to A Centenary Pessoa writes: “Poets don’t have biographies, their work is their biography”. Flying in the face of that assertion, this website is a collection of little biographies of poets and other writers. Yet, these biographies don’t pretend to be a way of knowing or explaining away the life of any of the writers (which is presumably the gravamen of Paz’s denial) and still less their works. They are not that ambitious. They are more in the way of short introductions - miniatures of the artist’s life. [In any case, most of the writers included in this website already have at least one book, sometimes many, devoted to them individually.] Put another way, these are orientation notes describing the writers situation on a map and the website is the map. The intention is provide an aerial view of the world’s writers, to allow them to be seen, if not altogether, then not just as individuals or small groups. As such, this site also hopes, a little presumptuously, to point to those works that are there to be read. For example, Pessoa, whose poetry prompted Paz’s remark, is considered by some to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century but in Britain, as well as in most other countries, he is quite extensively unknown. This sort of ‘blind-spot’ seems like a needless shame and it is the objective of this website to bring such writers into view.
Why? The fundamental premise of this website is that, for the most part, if the work of any writer has survived more than a generation or two, there must be a good reason to explain that endurance. It is hard not to reason that, if it survives, that is because a sufficient number of people believe it is too good to wither into oblivion. A great number of the works of the writers in this website have survived for hundreds of years, some for thousands. It is true that some have survived purely for historical reasons (but even then they have provided inspiration, plot, or some other form of artistic direction or element of knowledge to those who have followed). However, the majority have survived because the stories they have told, the characters they have created, the ideas they have initiated, and the use they have made of their language, are so exceptional that they are still admired, and sometimes still loved, today. The argument therefore goes: if it has lived for so long, it is worth reading. Furthermore, it is argued, worth reading for pleasure.
The structure:
The geographical divisions of the sections on this website have no logic behind them and are arranged for convenience (or out of a desperate search for manageability). If this site was to be divided up and structured whilst adhering to a strict linguistic, literary, and political logic, it would either have several thousand separate sections or would be one boundless, chaotic tangle. There are many areas of the world that have not held consistent borders and in which authority has been both imposed from within and from without at different periods. Furthermore, few countries, if any, speak the same language now as they did, say, two thousand years ago. Consequently, it is possible to point to many a country which has a rich literary heritage composed in its ancient language, which evolved a more modern language that was then denied to it through the prolonged occupation by a conquering power (under which, forcibly, its literary production was written in the language of that power) and which has only comparatively recently begun to express itself in its modern, native language. Add to this the cross border dimensions of the languages themselves - for example the Turkic family of languages which, roughly, are spread across almost five thousand miles between the Adriatic and Lake Baikal - and you have a nearly insoluble problem of taxonomy.
In the manner of some bewhiskered statesman of an ancien regime, therefore, the dividing lines have been drawn briskly and insensibly across the map with no regard for the people, or in this case authors, who have now to live together within their confines. In an ideal world, each geographical area would have been obviously self-defined: in which language and literature would have grown organically without let or hindrance. Of course, whenever one speaks of an ideal world, it is not so much the world one would like to idealise or perfect but the population or rather that small part of it that feels compelled to interfere in the lives of the other, larger part. Examining almost any point on earth and following the development of its intellectual and artistic life over the last several thousand years, that life has been bullied, battered and sometimes entirely suppressed by both religious and secular power and ideology at some time or other (and often for great chunks of time). Even if it is expected, the extent is dismaying. The cultural life of almost every corner of the globe has been created through adversity - chiefly the adversity imposed by man on his fellow men.
That said, the intellectual and artistic works developed in the Garden of Eden would most probably have been dull, repetitive and insipid things. So too, sometimes, the enforced spread of a dominant language has itself been beneficial - at least to itself, (its effect on the languages it will have ‘overwritten’ is incalculable). In the Rome section for example, none of the writers listed there can definitively be said to have been born in Rome itself and many of the finest Latin works were written by those who came from conquered nations or who indeed wrote after the Roman Empire had ceased to be. It could be said that the greater part of the Roman Empire was not territorial but linguistic and, in terms of durability and influence, much the stronger.
[Please see below (at the very bottom) for a list of which countries, leaving aside the obvious single nation divisions, fit into which section.]
Other points worth mentioning:
If there is such a word, this website is certainly occicentric - and within that set - it is even more eurocentric. This unfortunate bias is merely a reflection of the editors background and, if you like, ignorance. There are doubtless other eccentric imbalances and for all of them a simple apology will have to suffice. However, the hope remains that, at least when it is finished, the greater part of the world’s writers will have been included. In the furtherance of that objective, a great many questions about why such and such a thing has or has not been done or complaints about why it has been done in a particular way can probably, almost all of them, be answered by the response: “I’d like to try and get it finished in a single lifetime.”
Finally : Help
In view of the size of this project and the number of people undertaking it (one), it seems fair to suppose that the possibility of there being no mistakes is, flatly, none. The gleeful pointing out of any errors or omissions will be received with dignified good manners and, of course, gratitude. However, since this website was not intended to list every human being who ever wrote a phrase or two, it would be appreciated if only glaring omissions were reported, rather than the most obscure.
Anyone wishing to correct a mistake should do so via the following email address:
editor@the-written-world.com
Countries sorted into sections:
Northern Europe:
Belgium (Flemish), Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
Eastern Europe:
Albania, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.
Caucasus & Central Asia:
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmensistan, and Uzbekistan.
North Africa & Middle East:
Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
Africa:
Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tomé and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe,
East Asia & Oceania:
Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kiribati, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nauru, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Thailand, East Timor, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Vietnam.
South & Central America:
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
North America:
Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States of America.
{As at Nov. 2015}
(A few small sovereign states have been absorbed into neighbouring larger ones where there is no obvious linguistic rationale for maintaining the borders that separate them.)