bodies of knowledge, and their evaluation
Dec. 4th, 2008 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculum“When I reflected on the facts I had learned from the books I had brought so happily into my house, when I considered how little they mattered to the rest of the world, I would feel empty and useless and all the pleasure would seep away. But though I was, in my twenties, plagued by the idea that I lived far from the center of things, this did not stop me from loving my library dearly. When I was in my thirties, and went to America for the first time, to see other libraries and come face to face with the richness of world culture, it grieved me to see how little was known about Turkish culture, Turkish letters. At the same time, this pain allowed the novelist in me to see more clearly the difference between the transitory aspects of a culture and its essence.”
—Orhan Pamuk, “My Turkish Library,” New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008.
Pamuk, one of two writers with whom I share a birthday of June 7, has been able both to remind us of a rich cultural history and to make us care about the sometimes difficult politics and the endearing peccadilloes of his home country.
There are too many world cultures, most with a less globally distinguished pedigree, that never find their Orhan Pamuk. But Derek Walcott did right well by the island of Saint Lucia in that department. We, some of us, care all the more about the then-colony’s Latin motto statio haud malefida carinis because of Walcott’s willingness to write out in phonetic dialect the schoolboy’s enthusiastic explication when the teacher asked its meaning: “Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps!”
One has to be an insider to take that kind of risk, for which an outsider would rightly be pilloried even though the dialect is for the sake of a sly underlying joke. One has to be something of an outsider to know how to make all that inside information meaningful to a global audience.
Pamuk and Walcott are only two examples of my heroes in that department, as longtime readers of this weblog know well.
—Orhan Pamuk, “My Turkish Library,” New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008.
Pamuk, one of two writers with whom I share a birthday of June 7, has been able both to remind us of a rich cultural history and to make us care about the sometimes difficult politics and the endearing peccadilloes of his home country.
There are too many world cultures, most with a less globally distinguished pedigree, that never find their Orhan Pamuk. But Derek Walcott did right well by the island of Saint Lucia in that department. We, some of us, care all the more about the then-colony’s Latin motto statio haud malefida carinis because of Walcott’s willingness to write out in phonetic dialect the schoolboy’s enthusiastic explication when the teacher asked its meaning: “Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps!”
One has to be an insider to take that kind of risk, for which an outsider would rightly be pilloried even though the dialect is for the sake of a sly underlying joke. One has to be something of an outsider to know how to make all that inside information meaningful to a global audience.
Pamuk and Walcott are only two examples of my heroes in that department, as longtime readers of this weblog know well.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-04 09:18 pm (UTC)That's certainly food for thought: Stercorum pro cerebro habes.