Prose reading by Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Interview with 2006 Nobel Laureate in Literature Orhan Pamuk

Porque silenciar a un escritor?

Se escrito poco sobre el nuevo intento de silenciar al escritor Orham Pamuk, la policia hace unas semanas descubriò que se urdia un nuevo plan para asesinarlo y aunque matar un escritor no sea suficientemente importante como para llegar a la portada de un diario, nisiquiera las pequeñas reseñas aparecidas han merecido mayor comentario. Si bien es sabido que el escritor turco vive amenazado desde hace años, me preguntó que es lo que algunos piensan pueden logarar con la muerte de un artista, en este caso de un escritor: disciplinarlo, castigarlo, eliminar la incomodidad de quien piensa distinto y lo expresa, ejemplificar?

No entiendo la lògica que hay detràs de tales gestos de barbarie, no sòlo por este caso, sino por algunos nombres menos resonantes que han muerto a manos de los bàrbaros, en muchos casos extensiones de gobiernos dictatoriales o sectas extremistas, no es la primera vez, ni la ùltima, en que alguien piense que la desapariciòn fìsica de un escritor signicà algo màs que un crimen y un absurdo; quienes estan detràs de estos ataques no logran comprender el complejo proceso de la comunicaciòn, y menos aùn los efectos de un texto màs allà de su propio autor.

Ojala que estas pràcticas pudieran desterrarse, pero parecen ser parte de la naturaleza de quienes no admiten la diferencia.

Pamuk escribe sobre su ciudad

(…)
When I was writing my book I was thinking that probably critics would write «Pamuk did to Istanbul what James Joyce did to Dublin».

As I was writing, imagining the book as a modern, ambitious book, of course I had in mind James Joyce – what James Joyce did to Dublin.

To sum it up what he did for me was this: he considered his city, as I consider Istanbul, to be on the margins of Europe, not at the centre.

Of course if you lived in that corner of the world you would be obsessed with all the anxieties of nationalism – your country is important, your city is important.

So if you have that feeling then what you have to do is pull out your city, make it look and read like Paris or London – Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’ London – so that it will find its place in world literature.

City life, urban life, living in big cities, in fact, is living in a galaxy of unimportant, random, stupid, absurd images.

But your look gives a strange, mysterious meaning to these little details of streets, asphalt or cobblestone roads, advertisements, letters, all the little details of bus stops, or chimneys, windows.

All these things constitute a texture of a city, and each city in that fashion is very different.

You cannot give the image of a city with a postcard. But, in fact, with a taste from that texture, that is what I did.

The French author, Gerard de Nerval, who was a little depressive guy, a poet, came and wrote a big, thick, strange book called Voyage To Orient.

It is an ambitious, strange, sometimes coloured book, but some sections of it are wonderful.

Then his friend, Theophile Gautier, he wrote about Istanbul in an interesting manner.

But the best book written about Istanbul is by an Italian children’s writer, Edmondo de Amicis – a travel book for grown-ups.

But it was so successful that it was translated from Italian into many languages – for example, his chapter about the dogs of Istanbul, or the streets of Istanbul – these are the best writers on Istanbul.

So many people came, but some of them missed the whole point.

Some of them got some of it, but most of the foreigners saw and paid attention to the exotic rather than the random. They missed the texture.

They paid attention to monuments and looked for the exotic and the strange, and, in fact, added a colour of their own, which sometimes is not there.

If you have a vision of a city as a main hero, characters, in a way, are also instruments for you to see the city rather than their inner depths.

And the inner depths of the characters are also deduced from the city, as in Dostoevsky.

Then it’s impossible to distinguish the character from the city, the city from the character.

You have all these perspectives moving around in the city and to imagine them in our mind’s eye gives a correct and precise image of the city.

There’s another thing, and that is the sounds – things that you hear in each city that are different.

In western cities the sound of the subway or metro is very particular and it stays in your spirit and whenever you hear it in a film, suddenly all the memories of the city wake up in you.

In Istanbul it’s the «vvvvoooooot» – sirens of the boats, the «chck» from the chimney, waves of the Bosphorus hitting the quays along with the seagulls and old-fashioned little boats – «putu putu putu» kind of thing.

These are the things that immediately, if I close my eyes and you give it to me in another corner of the world, make Istanbul suddenly appear in my mind’s eye.
(…)

tomado de BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/3131585.stm

El sonriente Pamuk

Turco para más señas, en los últimos dos dìas su nombre empezò a sonar con fuerza, y finalmente Orhan Pamuk ganó, es el premio nobel de literatura de este año; en mi caso es una lectura pendiente, aunque fuentes confiable comentan su calidad como escritor, nada podrè decir sobre eso hasta que no leerlo, entre tanto el debe estar tan sonriente como en la foto.

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