como funciona x dentro un escritor: mas del discurso de PAMUK
sale un libro y es inevitable tener que promocionarlo. No es que no quiera. Pero hay límites y límites. Ni tanto, ni tan poco. Lo complicado de hablar de tu libro nuevo no es tanto hablar sino tener que tratar de expresar lo inexpresable. Cada vez capto que no se nada del proceso, o si si, es reconfuso, y lo que te preguntan tiene mas que ver con las dudas que con respuestas contundentes. en todo caso, todo bien. Lo bueno de conversar con la prensa es que te enfrentas a un lector
como es casi imposible hablar sobre literatura, o del proceso creativo, creo
lo que mejor es escribir sobre aquello. No se puede danzar sobre arquitectura. Si uno pudiera resumir por que escribe o por que escribio tal cosa, no lo haria. Daria esa respuesta
dudad de Pamhuk acerca de como opera esos friks autistas que se dedican a crear
MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
by ORHAN PAMUK
The Nobel Lecture, 2006.
I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts—that is, the weight of literature…
…A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him wh he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy…
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance… …If a writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me…
…Now, many years later, I understand that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not enough: first, we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room. The precursor of this sort of independent writer—one who reads to his heart’s content, who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes others’ words, and who, by entering into conversation with his books, develops his own thoughts and his own world—was surely Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature…
…But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books—the thing we call tradition… …But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is…
…To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the otherness of another, in the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels in order to escape his life and flee to the West—just as I did later…
…What is happiness? Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you?
…For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patientl explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.
A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center…
…What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me… …All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a void at the center of our lives, to our feelings of happiness and guilt.
(© The Nobel Foundation, 2006.)
como es casi imposible hablar sobre literatura, o del proceso creativo, creo
lo que mejor es escribir sobre aquello. No se puede danzar sobre arquitectura. Si uno pudiera resumir por que escribe o por que escribio tal cosa, no lo haria. Daria esa respuesta
dudad de Pamhuk acerca de como opera esos friks autistas que se dedican a crear
MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
by ORHAN PAMUK
The Nobel Lecture, 2006.
I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts—that is, the weight of literature…
…A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him wh he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy…
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance… …If a writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me…
…Now, many years later, I understand that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not enough: first, we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room. The precursor of this sort of independent writer—one who reads to his heart’s content, who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes others’ words, and who, by entering into conversation with his books, develops his own thoughts and his own world—was surely Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature…
…But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books—the thing we call tradition… …But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is…
…To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the otherness of another, in the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels in order to escape his life and flee to the West—just as I did later…
…What is happiness? Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you?
…For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patientl explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.
A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center…
…What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me… …All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a void at the center of our lives, to our feelings of happiness and guilt.
(© The Nobel Foundation, 2006.)
posted by Alberto Fuguet at 7:28 AM
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