Tag: writing

Anything from an author is tolerated, except dishonesty. To fail on this point is to nullify everything that is produced. As readers, the mere feeling that there are hidden intentions in a work and that we are being deceived is reason enough to throw it away; after all, how can we willingly play the clown? If we cannot, safeguarded by the sincerity of the author, give it the credit it needs to be worth reading, it is best to abandon it. There are, of course, countless other authors who fulfill this requirement and have a lot to teach us.

In the midst of endless hardships, there is no denying that poetic work holds a certain delight when it comes to choosing rhymes, choosing them and then seeing their effect. No matter how mechanized the process, the discovery of an unexpected rhyme is always pleasurable and stimulating, becoming like an addiction that only makes the poet more and more attached to language. After all, it is an addiction that ends up being productive and, once experienced, makes one wonder about the indifference with which some poets have repelled it.

If, on the one hand, it is very useful for an artist not to get carried away and to save some of his inspirations so that he can work on them better, on the other hand, he has to develop a very keen sense for recognizing his exceptional moods and ideas, in short, he has to know when it is essential to seize the moment. There are ideas that unfortunately pass, and states of mind that can only be experienced once. Age shows this above all. The experienced writer, no matter how experienced, cannot return to the past in order to write. There is nothing wrong with that, except if, out of an abundance of caution, he perceives in it an opportunity that has been lost.

Perhaps the most intricate problem facing Brazilian novelists is whether or not to portray colloquial language. Assuming this necessity, there is the very complicated problem of measurement, for which there seems to be no sure solution. That is to say: the gulf between the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and the cultured language is so immense, but so immense, that there is no possible conciliation, but rather tolerable, or perhaps necessary betrayals, which are interspersed in the chosen model. Cultured language, compared to colloquial language, is artificiality and ridicule in Brazilian Portuguese. Colloquial language, on the other hand, does not fit into formal Portuguese except as an infinite set of spelling, prosodic and syntactic errors, which, if portrayed faithfully, make the language almost unrecognizable. How, then, to solve it? The novelist, if he really sees the situation he is narrating, will naturally feel restrained from putting into the mouth of a character a speech that is inconceivable to him. At the same time, he is a novelist, not a speaker; he therefore handles—and hopefully loves—the written language and tradition. From all this, there is only one certainty: the easiest thing is not to be a novelist in Brazil.