![]() |
| nakasone,22.12.2006
|
Holas hace años que no creo un foro, esta vez quiero hacer una especie de convocatoria, el texto en ingles es el discurso de pamuk al recibir el premio nobel de literatura este año. No soy muy ducho en ingles a ver quien puede traducirlo, por favor lo agradeceré.
MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
The Nobel Lecture, 2006.
by ORHAN PAMUK
Issue of 2006-12-25 and 2007-01-01
Posted 2006-12-18
Two years before my father died, he gave me a small suitcase filled with his manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual jocular, mocking air, he told me that he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after his death.
“Just take a look,” he said, slightly embarrassed. “See if there’s anything in there that you can use. Maybe after I’m gone you can make a selection and publish it.”
We were in my study, surrounded by books. My father was searching for a place to set down the suitcase, wandering around like a man who wished to rid himself of a painful burden. In the end, he deposited it quietly, unobtrusively, in a corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever quite forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back to our usual roles, taking life lightly, we relaxed. We talked as we always did—about trivial, everyday things, and Turkey’s never-ending political troubles, and my father’s mostly failed business ventures—without feeling too much sorrow.
For several days after that, I walked back and forth past the suitcase without ever actually touching it. I was already familiar with this small black leather case, with a lock and rounded corners. When I was a child, my father had taken it with him on short trips and had sometimes used it to carry documents to work. Whenever he came home from a trip, I’d rush to open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savoring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. The suitcase was a friend, a powerful reminder of my past, but now I couldn’t even touch it. Why? No doubt because of the mysterious weight of its contents.
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.
When I did finally touch my father’s suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it. But I knew what was inside some of the notebooks it held. I had seen my father writing in them. My father had a large library. In his youth, in the late nineteen-forties, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, but he had not wanted to live the sort of life that came with writing poetry in a poor country where there were few readers. My father’s father—my grandfather—was a wealthy businessman, and my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man; he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties: this I understood.
The first thing that kept me away from my father’s suitcase was, of course, a fear that I might not like what I read. Because my father understood this, too, he had taken the precaution of acting as if he did not take the contents of the case seriously. By this time, I had been working as a writer for twenty-five years, and his failure to take literature seriously pained me. But that was not what worried me most: my real fear—the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover—was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father’s suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was entirely different from the one I knew. This was a frightening possibility. Even at my advanced age, I wanted my father to be my father and my father only—not a writer.
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who 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.
As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding words to empty pages, I feel as if I were bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way that one might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I understand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about the old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same passion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could re-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that I was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. 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.
I was afraid of opening my father’s suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would never have tolerated the difficulties that I had tolerated, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, company. Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, even my father had, at some point, tired of the monotony of family life and left for Paris, where—like so many writers—he had sat in a hotel room filling notebooks. I knew that some of those very notebooks were in the suitcase, because, during the years before he brought me the case, he had finally begun to talk about that period in his life. He had spoken about those years when I was a child, but he had never discussed his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his Paris hotel room. He’d spoken instead of the times he’d seen Sartre on the sidewalks of Paris, of the books he’d read and the films he’d gone to, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting important news.
When I became a writer, I knew that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who spoke of world writers much more than he ever spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. So perhaps, I told myself, I would have to read my father’s notebooks with my gratitude in mind, remembering, too, how indebted I was to his large library. I would have to remember that, when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts—and not pay too much attention to the literary quality of his writing. But as I gazed so anxiously at the suitcase he had bequeathed to me I also felt that this was the very thing I would not be able to do.
Sometimes my father would stretch out on a divan, abandon the book or the magazine in his hand, and drift off into a dream, losing himself for the longest time. When I saw this expression on his face, which was so different from the one he wore for the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life, when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze, I would understand, with trepidation, that he was discontented. 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. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors—and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. 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.
My father had a good library, fifteen hundred volumes in all—more than enough for a writer. By the age of twenty-two, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book. I knew which were important, which were light and easy reading, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library—build myself a world. When I looked at my father’s library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. My father had built his library mostly on his trips abroad, with books from Paris and America, but he had also stocked it with books bought at Istanbul’s foreign-language bookshops in the forties and fifties.
In the seventies, I did begin, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer; as I related in my book “Istanbul,” I had come to suspect that I would not be a painter, as I had hoped, but I was not yet sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others. Part of this feeling was connected to what I felt when I gazed at my father’s library: that I was living in the provinces, far from the center of things. This was a feeling I shared with everyone in Istanbul in those days. There was another reason for my anxiety: I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists—whether painters or writers—and offered them no hope. In the seventies, when I took the money my father gave me and greedily bought faded, dusty, dog-eared books from Istanbul’s old booksellers, I was as affected by the pitiable state of these secondhand bookstores—and by the despairing dishevelment of the poor, bedraggled booksellers, who laid out their wares at roadsides, in mosque courtyards, and in the niches of crumbling walls—as I was by their books.
As for my place in the world: in life, as in literature, I felt, fundamentally, that I was not “at the center.” At the center of the world, there was a life that was richer and more exciting than our own, and, like all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. In the same way, there was world literature, and its center was far away from me. Actually, what I had in mind then was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were certainly outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end of the room, there were Istanbul’s books—our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail—and at the other end were the books from this other, Western world, which bore no resemblance to ours, a lack of resemblance that caused us both pain and hope. 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.
Books in general, it seemed to me in those days, were what we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found wanting. And it wasn’t only by reading that we could leave our Istanbul lives and travel West; it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris and shut himself up in a room, and then he had carried the notebooks back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it seemed to me that this was part of what was causing me disquiet: after working in a room, trying to survive as a writer in Turkey for twenty-five years, I was galled to see my father hide his deep thoughts in this suitcase, to see him act as if writing were work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason that I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.
In fact, I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent it happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me also knew that I was not so much “angry” as “jealous,” that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. I’d ask myself in a scornful, angry voice: 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?
But these were ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got the idea that the most important measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers—everyone acted as if it were. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family many times—how well did I know him, and how well could I say that I understood his disquiet?
| | |
| lyapunov,22.12.2006
|
| yo con gusto te ayudare atraducir semejante texto lleno de inspiracion y emocion!!!!!! | | |
| lyapunov,22.12.2006
|
| mmmm. intentare ser lo mas fiel a el texto posible ya que yo manejo un ingles muy depurado y el señor ganador del premio no es tan bueno en su ingles como yo asi que comenzare con el primer parrafo!!!!! | | |
| madrobyo,22.12.2006
|
tengo la traducción.
"No quiero ser turco, quiero ser frances."
Algun error, aceptare su ayuda. | | |
| lyapunov,22.12.2006
|
bHace dos años mi padre estiro la pata. él me dio una pinche maleta atascada de sus manuscritos y mugrosos cuadernos. al muy... se sentia muy jocoso, él me dijo que queria que yo los leyera(como si tuviera suficiente tiempo)después que se fuera, y definitivamente el se quebro y me dejo con esa maleta llena de chucherias!!!!!/b
si te gusta mi traduccion con gusto continuare con los siguientes parrafos | | |
| Finch,23.12.2006
|
"LA MALETA DE MI PADRE"
Dos años antes de su muerte, mi padre me dió una pequeña maleta llena de sus manuscritos y notas. Adoptando el aire sarcástico y burlón que lo caracterizaba, me dijo que quería que yo los leyera después de su partida, es decir después de su muerte.
“Sólo dale una mirada,” dijo un poco fastidiado. “Ve si hay algo que pueda ser de utilidad. Quizá después de que me haya ido puedas hacer una selección y publicar algo.”
| | |
| nakasone,23.12.2006
|
MM, lyapunov como traductor francamente mueres de hambre.
madrovio igual
finch está por buen camino... | | |
| Finch,24.12.2006
|
"Estábamos en mi estudio, rodeados de libros. Mi padre buscaba un lugar donde poner la maleta, dando vueltas como un hombre que desea despojarse de una carga dolorosa. Al final, la puso discretamente y sin ruido en una esquina. Fue un momento vergonzoso, que ninguno de los dos pudo olvidar, pero una vez que pasó y reanudamos nuestro papel de tomar la vida a la ligera, pudimos relajarnos. Conversamos como siempre - sobre cosas triviales y cotidianas, los eternos problemas políticos de Turquía y sus negocios, la mayoría fracasados - sin mayor tristeza."
| | |
|
![]() |