MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

El Premio a The 21st Century Annual Best Foreign Novel Award (Mejor Traducción al Idioma Chino) que auspicia la Casa Editorial de Literatura Popular de China y China Foreign Literature Association ha sido entregado a Martin Walser por la traducción de su novela Ein Liebender Mann (traducida como "Un hombre enamorado") en que narra la historia de amor entre el setentón Goethe y una adolescente de 19 años. Dice la nota:

"Politics and media make us possessors of information, while literature teaches us how to utilize it," 82-year-old German writer Martin Walser said at the 21st Century Annual Best Foreign Novel awards ceremony last week at Peking University. In his keynote speech, Literature as Information Deliverer, Walser said: "We have the right to value a most important function of literature: Literature delivers information about ourselves." This was because writers express their emotions through the characters and readers see their lives in the books, he said. One of the most significant writers of German postwar literature, Walser ranks second on the list of the 500 most important German intellectuals (after Pope Benedict XVI) by the country's influential political magazine Cicero. [...] Walser is renowned for his perceptive observations of the human psyche - his protagonists are often plagued by identity problems and feelings of inferiority and dependency. Despite the fact he expresses at times controversial opinions on subjects of current political interest, alongside his literary activities, Walser doesn't think the novel is tantamount to social criticism. "A novel's appeal is not social amelioration of any kind, but something larger, higher and more radical," he says. "Utopia is a novel's very life, which enables readers to understand the suffering of characters in it." "Tolstoy has done this, so has Chinese writer Mo Yan," Walser asserts. He talks about how Mo manages to turn a distant and unfamiliar history into immediate and familiar details, such as grandmother's bound feet in Red Sorghum (红高粱). "I've never seen another writer who tells us as much about history as Mo, when portraying the current situation ... I dare to say that whoever wants to write about China must first read Mo." In his speech, Mo said he agreed with Walser's statement about the nature and function of literature. "Walser's claim that literature delivers information about ourselves, reveals almost all the secrets of a writer's profession," he said. "Recent years have witnessed increasing exchanges between Chinese and foreign writers. But the best exchanges, as far as I am concerned, are reading each other's books. All a writer's secrets are in his writings." Walser's award-winning novel A Man in Love (Ein Liebender Mann) is about the relationship between 73-year-old German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and 19-year-old countess Ulrike von Levetzow.

Etiquetas: alemania, china, martin walser, mo yan

This entry was posted on 12.22.2009 at 2:16 p. m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.