About my Writing
Presentation 21.9.98 International Writing Program, University
of Iowa
I am Emil Zopfi from Switzerland.
But I think I’m not a typical Swiss writer, for two reasons.
– Initially I was a Electronics and Computer Engineer and until
the age of 40 I worked for companies like IBM or Siemens. Many
Swiss writers are teachers or have studied languages.
– I am an enthusiastic alpinist and sports climber. The average
Swiss writer, however, dislikes sport and prefers red wine, Italian
food and smokes pipe.
But being more serious: The typical Swiss writer doesn’t exist.
Switzerland is a small country with an extremely complicated political
and geographical structure. We have four languages, German, French,
Italian and Rumantsch and therefore we have «four literatures»,
as we say. The Swiss society is multicultural, 20% of our 7 Million
population are immigrants and they develop the so-called fifth
literature, written in dozens of different languages.
I speak Swiss German. Swiss German is only a spoken language and
therefore all Swiss German writers have to write in «High German»
which is in fact a foreign language. But our literature is strongly
influenced by the literary currents and fashions in Germany.
When I started writing in the early 70ties, German and Swiss writers
were discovering the so called «world of labour» as a new topic.
For a while «Literature of the world of labour» was a strong current
in German literature. It was a fact that literature before told
much about the life of artists, of rich people or freaks, but
almost nothing about the life of the great majority, the working
class. Neither conveyor belts and computers did exist in literature
nor the people who operated it. Writers hadn’t access to the factories
and workshops.
Therefore workers and employees were encouraged to write about
their experience and tell their own stories. «Take up the pen»,
wrote Friedrich Duerrenmatt, one of our most important writers,
in a poem. So the idea to write about my experience as a computer
engineer crossed my mind.
My first novel came out 1977 and was entitled «Each minute costs
33 Francs». The plot is set in a computing centre. I tell the
story of a night shift, one man is missing, the computer breaks
down, the operators desperately try to restart it.
«Take up the pen» is a strong political message. It implies that
everybody can be a writer and everybody has important experience
to share with others. It implies that writing should reflect real
life and not literature. The source of literature should be the
reality not only the library. I have taken up the pen and focus
of my writing is still today my personal experience.
Of course becoming a professional writer and journalist I found
other topics besides of the world of labour. I wrote about very
personal experiences, e.g. a book about the death of my mother.
I wrote historic novels, e.g. the «The Factory Bell», telling
the story of the first industrial strike in Switzerland. I wrote
children’s books. And I wrote about climbing and alpinism.
The story «A Cold Night on the Rock» was one of my first fiction
texts about climbing. It is based on a hard experience and it
is, like my first novel, the story of a desperate night. A young
and an old climber reach the summit of a mountain but because
of the late hour and the fog they don’t find the way down and
have to spend the night on the mountain face. It’s a story about
life and death, about fear and hope, about young and old.
Isolated on top of a mountain in a desperate situation man behave
more sincere as down in the valley. They cannot hide their real
character. Therefore I consider the mountain face as a stage for
stories that mirror everyday’s live clearly. It’s a mirror that
shows the truth. «Why do we climb mountains?», asks one of the
protagonists the famous novel «Mountain Trip» of Ludwig Hohl who
is one of the greatest Swiss writers of this century. The climber
answers: «To escape prison.» The mountain face is the way out
of the prison but it’s a prison itself.
In my story the mirror metaphor appears in the dreams of the young
climber
(E.g. page 5: It was like climbing on the surface of an enormous
flat mirror.)
(And page 9: Is it possible to choose any other life but a climber’s,
when you have seen the sun in the big walls that are like mirrors,
when you have heard the sound of the wind on the ridge and the
clicking of the quickdraws in the bolts in the vertical rock,
when you have tasted the feeling reaching the summit after a hard
fight on a great route? The whole week while working at the lathe
he saw noting but those pictures; he heard the wind and he felt
the cold of the night in the rocks.).
The mountain donates the writer a perfect dramatic frame: The
ascent, the top, the descent are three basic parts of a plot.
And so the mountain stands as a metaphor for life.
I published the story in 1976. Later I made a radio play out of
it. Ten years later it became a part of the novel «The Wall of
Sila», which tells not only the night but also the day before
and the day after. Two years ago I translated the first version
into English for the collection «The Colour of the Black Mountains».
Translating is not the correct expression, I have rewritten the
text completely including new developments in climbing techniques
and new political viewpoints.
Swiss literature is traditionally highly political, critical and
realistic. Under this aspect I’m close to the tradition that has
been set off by our great writers of the last century, e.g. Gottfried
Keller. We are a land of mountains and the mountain as a topic
and as a metaphor is very often found in our literature. One of
the first poems, written by Albrecht Haller in the 18th century,
had the title «The Alps». The great English alpinists who climbed
first the Swiss Alps were often also great writers. And I’m sure
you remember «Heidi», the romantic children’s book, written 100
years ago by Johanna Spyri. But reading modern Swiss literature
you will discover that Switzerland is no longer Heidi’s land.