The phonic and syntactic richness of Portuguese, more than the nature of its people or the flair of its authors, places its poetry among the most remarkable in world literature. As a vehicle for expressing the primitive impulse represented by poetry, its possibilities are so varied and its effects so unique that, even when worked on by ordinary hands, it sometimes achieves results worthy of sincere admiration.
Tag: literature
It Is Impressive to Note the Ever-Present Interest…
It is impressive to note the ever-present interest in contemporary literature, found even in authors who are aware that great literature is, by definition, timeless. To note that, while there are dozens of centuries that will not be absorbed, thousands of works that will not be read due to lack of time, interest in contemporary works still thrives, and contemporary works attract attention that the majority of secular works, already consecrated by the test of time, do not. How to explain why the opposite does not happen? How to explain that what is common is not an almost desperate desire to absorb the essentials of these tens of centuries and thousands of works? There seems to be no rational explanation for any of this.
Once, a Few Years Ago…
Once, a few years ago, I was told that there was a piece of music whose weight was so tremendous, so dark and so dramatic that it seemed to contain something infernal. It was Prokofiev. I recognized the music immediately and smiled. Then, to make it clear that there was nothing exaggeratedly tremendous, dark or dramatic about it, I played a track from the Réquiem. At the first note, astonishment and certainty, opened up by an overwhelming contrast. The same feeling was repeated last night when, after four years, I returned to my favorite novelist, to the author to whom I have devoted the most hours and from whom I cannot separate myself. On the same day, I finished a work by Thomas Bernhard, a work in which the same technique is used exhaustively to express psychological tension, affliction, restlessness, despair, and who knows what else. So, Dostoyevsky. No need to say anything more.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s Superiority
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s superiority over other novelists is not technique and has nothing to do with technique, which shows that, in literature, it does not take precedence over artistic motivation, which is the essence of a work. What we notice in the novels of both writers is that, when we read them, we feel entirely absorbed by the narrative and an infinity of ideas move through our mind, but never those related to the artifices of narration, which go unnoticed unless we set out to analyze them exclusively. They are both superior because their motivations are superior.