Literary Mongolia: Word on the steppe
Simon Wickhamsmith discusses G. Mend-Ooyo and the trajectory of the country’s publishing industry
This article is part of an ongoing series exploring cultural trends around the world
If you have enough money, you can publish your book in Mongolia. Since the democratic revolution in 1990, publishing in Mongolia has revolved primarily around the relationship between writers and printing companies, who produce books to order with an ever higher quality of design and production. The fact that anyone can have their work published means that the quality is somewhat patchy, but it does result in a more open and democratic system. In the end, the winners – as is the case everywhere – are books that entertain and inspire and challenge, but amateur writers with a few stories or poems they wish to share beyond their families and friends can publish them too, and that is no bad thing.
The history of the distribution of literary works in Mongolia really begins in the late 1920s. Before the Soviet-backed revolution of 1921, printing was controlled by the monasteries, and the books that were published were primarily religious texts. Writers of non-religious work – generally poems, or brief works of fiction – produced manuscripts that they circulated among their coteries: literacy tended to be restricted to official scribes and trained monks, with the result that much of what was produced was performed before an audience. In any case, books are heavy, and such unnecessary weight tended to be eschewed by nomads, whose concern was moving their livestock and household equipment from one seasonal camp to another.
During the seven decades of Soviet influence, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party created an increasingly byzantine system of censorship to prevent undesirable books from being published. The State Publishing House, set up during the 1940s, constituted the only way in which literary work – indeed, any books – could reach the general public. The Mongolian version of Glavlit, the Soviet Union’s state censorship bureau, worked slowly and methodically through texts submitted by members of the Writers’ Union – those who were not members could not submit their work – and those deemed worthy of publication were eventually produced and distributed.
I talked with my friend G. Mend-Ooyo, whose work I have often translated, and who is one of Mongolia’s leading writers and cultural critics, about the use of censorship when he was starting out as a poet. He described to me how Glavlit processed his first book, Birds of Thought, before its publication in 1980. Mend-Ooyo initially submitted his poems to the Writers’ Union’s head of poetry, who at that time happened to be his mentor, B.Yavuuhulan. Yavuuhulan approved the manuscript, but said that Mend-Ooyo should include something about Lenin or the Soviet Union, a nod to the “friendship” that existed between the two countries and their increasingly old and stubborn leadership. The manuscript, duly augmented by “In the Lenin Museum”, was then sent to the head of the Writers’ Union, and after some weeks it was approved and sent to the censorship bureau. only after each poem had been read, and each page stamped as ideologically acceptable (literally each page: if a censor missed a page, or made any kind of error, they would probably lose what was a powerful and influential position), did the manuscript go forward to publication. So slowly did the wheels grind that Birds of Thought took three years from initial submission to publication. Glavlit, as part of the Party machinery, kept detailed files on the literary and political activity of all those whose manuscripts were submitted, but when I asked Mend-Ooyo whether he had seen his Glavlit file (in the hope that I, too, could take a look), he said that all the files had been destroyed by fire during the rioting that followed the national elections of July 2008.
When I first went to Mongolia in 2006, as the English translator of Mend-Ooyo’s novelistic almanac Altan Ovoo, I was struck by the workings of the Mongolian book industry. Thanks in part to the fact that, immediately after the revolution, the Party had begun to push literacy as the central plank of its education policy, Mongolia’s literacy rate is now at 98.3 per cent and the demand for poetry as well as fiction is considerable. Indeed, the winning poem for the annual national prize for poetry, the Bolor Tsom (Silver Goblet), is published in newspapers and learnt by heart by readers, and while not lauded as superstars (although a few years ago, a reality television show was broadcast in which teams of poets recited against one another) many of Mongolia’s poets enjoy a high social status as intellectuals and cultural critics, as well as creative artists.
Books, then, are an important cultural commodity. Book launches happen with great frequency, staged in arts centres, galleries, hotels and even government buildings, and are well attended. Before its launch, a book’s publication, unlike Mend-Ooyo’s experience with the Party’s censors forty years ago, can nowadays take as little as a week or two, from the completion of a manuscript, through the design of the book (either by the author or by the printing company), to the printing and delivery of the final product.
Having received a consignment of books, it is up to the author to hawk the books around Ulaanbaatar’s small network of bookstores. In 2006, there were three of which I was aware, including the state department store (modelled on the Soviet GUM store in Moscow) whose book department was barely larger than a garden shed. Now the same store has an entire floor devoted to books – literature, but also self-help books, history and social sciences, and a large array of school textbooks, tourist books, foreign books and office supplies.
But one of the problems of the Mongolian system is that books by dead authors rarely get printed. Occasionally – as with the work of R.Choinom (1936–79), who spent much of his adult life blacklisted because of his vociferous writing against the government, or the novelist S. Erdene (1929–2000) – a writer’s surviving family (Erdene’s son E. Bat-Uul, for instance, is a former mayor of Ulaanbaatar) will pay for the design and publication of some or all of their works. This is unusual, however, and most of the leading twentieth-century writers have become spectral memories, their work available only in books published before 1990. These books are sold, in various stages of disrepair, by the second-hand booksellers who set up in the sunshine on folding tables on the street, or in the rain or snow in small huts scattered through Ulaanbaatar’s downtown.
But some publishing houses have now been set up, such as Monsudar and Nepko, the latter established by the journalist Baabar (Bat-Erdene Batbayar), one of the leading voices in the pro-democracy movement of the late 1980s. Such publishers will, I suspect, eventually cut off the desktop publishing route and force authors to compete for the chance to be published. Mend-Ooyo has sufficient resources and reputation to guarantee that whatever he publishes will sell. He travels internationally, and it has been suggested that he might become Mongolia’s first Nobel laureate in literature, so his work carries considerable cultural capital.
Mend-Ooyo was raised in the southeast of the country, where he encountered the traditional vertical Mongol script when his father traced the letters out in the snow, and poetry in the stories and poems told by the elders in his community, and in the enthusiasm of a teacher named D. Gombojav. Gombojav was a poet and translator whose attitude had displeased Party officials in Ulaanbaatar, and whose punishment was to teach at the rural school which Mend-Ooyo attended. Gombojav instilled in Mend-Ooyo a love for the Mongolian language, and it is this that has guided Mend-Ooyo to produce literature that speaks of the endless undulations of the steppe, the pacing of horses and camels, glowering thunderclouds and brilliant sunshine, and the stories and warmth of family and the wider nomadic community.
Mend-Ooyo came to Ulaanbaatar in the early 1970s to study education, and immediately gathered around him a network of poets. They would meet where they could, sharing and critiquing new poems. They called themselves Gal, which means “fire”, signifying the fire around which nomads sit and share stories and poems. They were not against the government, as Choinom or Gombojav had been, but rather they encouraged as open an ｅxpression of literary art as possible: they read foreign literature, translated into Mongolian – sometimes into Russian – and wrote everything from modernist and surrealist works to verses styled on traditional Mongolian epics.
Gal disbanded at the end of the 1970s, at about the time Mend-Ooyo was putting together Birds of Thought. Its members, young men and women who were experimenting with literature and who wanted an end to Mongolia’s social and cultural isolation, had barely any influence at the time, but eventually many of them became important cultural and scientific figures. Mend-Ooyo became one of the most successful poets of his generation and – along with O. Dashbalbar (1957–99), a poet who became a controversial and popular politician in the 1990s, and D. Nyamsüren (1949–2002) the son of a monk, whose poetic brilliance was matched by his wild spirit – he was recognized as a representative of the culture of the Gobi desert on the border between Mongolia and China.
Over the twelve years that I have known him, Mend-Ooyo has been a powerful advocate for the place of books, book design and book production in Mongolia’s literary world. He publishes not only his own work, but frequently the work of other, younger, writers, both in Mongolian and in translation. He also promotes the Mongolian script, replaced in the 1940s by the Cyrillic script, but revived after 1990, and mandated – albeit for only a few years – in Mongolian schools.
We might say that Mend-Ooyo’s mission began with Birds of Thought in 1980, but his trajectory has also, on perhaps a more mundane level, become the trajectory of Mongolia’s literary publishing. Without “In the Lenin Museum”, his first book would not have made it past the censors and out among the public: such was the fate of his contemporaries, too, and for every Mend-Ooyo there were others whose potential could not, for whatever reason, take wing.
In the almost three decades since the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Mongolia, Mend-Ooyo’s work has flourished, together with that of many of his friends and colleagues. Mongolia’s international literary presence is quietly spreading, and the growth of its small publishing industry, placing books in the hands of tourists as well as of Mongolian readers, is hard evidence of these developments. In his poem “A Lesson from the World”, written in 1978, when he was twenty-six, and included in Birds of Thought, Mend-Ooyo offers a positive, transcendental image of globalized humanity, and a new way of understanding the world of the imagination, carried around the world between the covers of books:
While I have been alone by myself in the world,
I have placed the sphere of the world before me.
I have sat holding it in my hands,
full of wonder.“The world revolves around the sun,”
my teacher said,
“and we revolve together with the world,”
and I was glad.No doubt about it, the hills of thought are shaking,
a sweet song’s melody sounds,
the bells ring and ring.In this way the earth gathers in my mind,
eternally rotates through wisdom,
the fate of the cosmos belongs to me.
Simon Wickhamsmith is a translator of Mongolian literature and teaches in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Writing Program at Rutgers University.