My ​Father's Suitcase 2 csillagozás

The Nobel Lecture
Orhan Pamuk: My Father's Suitcase

“Two ​years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase full of his writings, hand writings and notebooks.”
Orhan Pamuk gave a speech called “My Father’s Suitcase” when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in December 2006. This emotional speech which sincerely conveys the spirit of Pamuk’s thirty two years of writing effort, had a deep, worldwide impact. This book combines “My Father’s Suitcase” which is a basic text about writing and living with Pamuk’s two other speeches in which the same subjects and problems are discussed from other perspectives. “The Implied Author”, the speech that Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh Prize given by World Literature magazine, in April 2006 is about the psychology of writing and the urge and adventure of being a writer. Pamuk’s other speech, “In Kars and in Frankfurt” that was given when he received the Peace Prize given by the German Publishers Associations in October 2005 is investigating the power of the writer to… (tovább)

Eredeti cím: Babamın Bavulu

Eredeti megjelenés éve: 2006

>!
Faber and Faber, London, 2007
28 oldal · ISBN: 9780571238613 · Fordította: Maureen Freely

Népszerű idézetek

Zizzer>!

Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.

(első mondat)

Zizzer>!

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, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years.

3. oldal

Zizzer>!

[…] literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first 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 this is what literature is.

5. oldal

5 hozzászólás
Zizzer>!

My father had a good library – 1 500 volumes in all – more than enough for a writer. By the age of 22, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book – I knew which were important, which were light but easy to read, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which were forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated very 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.

5. oldal

Zizzer>!

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived.

10. oldal

Zizzer>!

My real fear, the crucial thing that I did not wish to know or discover, was the possibility that my father might be a good writer. I couldn’t open my father’s suitcase because I feared this. Even worse, I couldn’t even admit this myself openly. If true and great literature emerged from my father’s suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed an entirely different man. This was a frightening possibility. Because even at my advanced age I wanted my father to be only my father – not a writer.

3. oldal

Zizzer>!

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity.

8. oldal

Aurora_Serenity_White I>!

I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself.

Aurora_Serenity_White I>!

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.


Hasonló könyvek címkék alapján

John Steinbeck: East of Eden
Elif Şafak: How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha (angol)
Svetlana Alexievich: Voices from Chernobyl
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
José Saramago: Death at Intervals
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men
Elif Shafak: The Island of Missing Trees
Toni Morrison: A Mercy
Louise Glück: Averno