Word power

It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster.

It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster. On the half-hourly news bulletins, the Eurozone, elections in the Philippines, a mass grave in Serbia take the lead, while our very own British muddle almost disappears. On The Strand this week, the daily arts programme, Harriet Gilbert introduced us to the new Writer in Residence at Bush House, the World Service’s centre of operations in the heart of London. Hamid Ismailov is a refugee from Uzbekistan, who fled from Tashkent more than a decade ago because his writings were banned there and he was living in fear of arrest and imprisonment. He’s now head of the Central Asian service at Bush House by day, and a poet and novelist by night. His works are still banned in his homeland. When The Railway was first translated into English in 2006, it was described as a poet’s novel, teeming with characters and fuelled by ‘toska’, a word impossible to translate, suggesting both the deep melancholy of life on the Steppes, blasted by savage winds and bitter power struggles, and its antidote in the bright colours and fatalistic humour of its music and literature.

Ismailov is proudly following in the tradition of other writers at the World Service, such as George Orwell, once banished from the microphone because his voice was ‘too squeaky’ after the injuries to his throat he suffered while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.