The true artist, understanding his vocation and his role on this earth, must accept that it matters little what happens to him in life, what torments he suffers, which paths he takes. What matters is the profit he makes from the raw material that is offered to him to shape it and convert it into art, reacting to the reality that surrounds him and the conditions that are imposed on him. There is no control over the environment; there is, however, over the responses—which represent, in short, the artist’s individuality.
Tag: literature
The Lesson of Dostoevsky
If there is something instructive in Dostoevsky, which should be learned by every artist, it is the fact that the Christian Dostoevsky, when he puts words into the mouth of a nihilist, ceases to exist. This is art; this is a prerequisite for a work that is intended to be convincing. If we take Demons alone, for example, that magnificent work in which nihilism has perhaps never been expressed so eloquently and multifacetedly, the Christian Dostoevsky appears so shy, amid multiple and very strong voices, that he appears almost non-existent. This is why many have called Dostoevsky, the Christian, a nihilist. And that is why his work, susceptible to endless interpretations, is one of the most authentic treasures of universal literature.
Aesthetic Variations…
In the first volume of Casos, the wild rips, the drama and violence border on the absurd. Perhaps I paid a style homage to the one from whom I inherited the format. In the second volume, I took out the blood, loosened the dramatic arcs and, structurally, tried writing almost always without restraints, while keeping the format, to see if the narratives would come out more natural. The result? I fail to conclude… Certainly, they were less impactful narratives; but, perhaps, more spontaneous and sincere.
Wonders of This Century
It is a real wonder to be able to find, in a few clicks, from the end of the world, audios in dead languages pronounced according to the original speech. I think about the study of languages in past centuries. It is inevitable to see myself as privileged. For a long time I read English without knowing the correct pronunciation: a crass and compromising error—and I only understood it when I started reading poetry. In poetry, if one does not know the pronunciation, one does not understand contractions that may occur, sometimes the metrics seem confusing and, above all, one ignores the sounding of the verses which, in many cases, is fundamental. In The Raven, for example, pronounce open the closed tonic “o” that repeats itself closing all the stanzas of the poem, and the frowning effect, the idea and the feeling suggested by the phoneme are gone. Nevermore, nevermore, nothing more, nothing more… Here we already have an “r” which, in the English pronunciation, prolongs and amplifies the preceding vowel. From this the obvious conclusion: to understand the expressiveness of great poets, it is indispensable to know the phonetics of the language in which they composed. And, in this respect, the reader of this century only sins by neglect.