Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the wealthy westernised district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the secular American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.
His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published seven years later in 1982. The novel is the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, Pamuk's own home district. The novel was awarded both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. The following year Pamuk published his novel The Silent House, which in French translation won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. The same year Pamuk went to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 to 1988. It was there that he wrote most of his novel The Black Book, in which the streets, past, chemistry and texture of Istanbul are described through the story of a lawyer seeking his missing wife. This novel was published in Turkey in 1990, and the French translation won the Prix France Culture. The Black Book enlarged Pamuk's fame both in Turkey and internationally as an author at once popular and experimental, and able to write about past and present with the same intensity. In 1991 Pamuk's daughter Rüya was born. That year saw the production of a film Hidden Face, whose script by Pamuk was based on a one-page story in The Black Book.
His novel The New Life, about young university students influenced by a mysterious book, was published in Turkey in 1994 and became one of the most widely read books in Turkish literature. My Name Is Red, about Ottoman and Persian artists and their ways of seeing and portraying the non-western world, told through a love story and family story, was published in 1998. This novel won the French Prix du meilleur livre étranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour (2002) and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award (2003). From the mid-1990s Pamuk took a critical stance towards the Turkish state in articles about human rights and freedom of thought, although he took little interest in politics. Snow, which he describes as “my first and last political novel” was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of “political novel”, telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. Snow was selected as one of the best 100 books of 2004 by The New York Times. In 1999 a selection of his articles on literature and culture written for newspapers and magazines in Turkey and abroad, together with a selection of writings from his private notebooks, was published under the title Other Colours. Pamuk's most recent book, Istanbul, is a poetical work that is hard to classify, combining the author's early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.
“Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?”
“Y lo peor era que mi cara se había transformado en otra completamente distinta, en la comisura de mis labios se abría paso una cierta desvergüenza de tanto beber y besar en las fiestas, mis ojos parecían lánguidos de permanecer despierto sin tener en cuenta la hora o de caer inconsciente por la bebida, en mi mirada había petulancia vulgar como la de esos estúpidos satisfechos de sus vidas, del mundo y de sí mismos, pero yo sabía que estaba contento con mi nueva situación, así que me callé.”
“Fue a lo largo de aquellos cuatro años cuando aprendí que la vida no es una espera sino algo que se puede disfrutar.”
“… se volvió hacia nosotros, que en ese momento estábamos de pie el uno junto al otro, y sonrió como si estuviera viendo una de esas inigualables maravillas creadas por Dios para doblegar el orgullo del ser humano y proclamar su estupidez, un enano perfecto o dos gemelos exactamente iguales.”
“Sabía que si regresaba a Venecia no podría retomar una vida que había dejado a medias en el mismo punto en que se había interrumpido. Como mucho, podría iniciar una vida distinta.”
“Luego pensamos que un buen relato debe tener un comienzo infantil, un desarrollo terrorífico como una pesadilla y un final amargo como una historia de amor que termina en una separación. ”
“Es algo sabido que la vida no está predeterminada y que todas las historias son una cadena de casualidades. Pero incluso los que son conscientes de esa realidad, cuando llega cierto momento de su existencia y miran atrás, llegan a la conclusión de que lo que vivieron como casualidades no fueron sino hechos inevitables. ”
“lo habían encuadernado cuidadosamente con un papel de aguas azul que hacía recordar los sueños.”
“..These exhibitions, and the stories behind them, should also in due course have their own catalogs and novels. As visitors admire the objects and honor the memory of Füsun and Kemal, with due reverence, they will understand that, like the tales of Leyla and Mecnun or Hüsn and Așk, this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul.”
“... el asesinato es algo que, con todos sus detalles y ritos, se aprende de otros, se aprende de las leyendas, de los cuentos, de las memorias, de los periódicos, en suma, de la literatura.”
“De hecho, ¿qué es leer sino dibujar en el silencioso cinematógrafo de nuestra mente una de las cosas que el escritor nos describe con letras?”
“¿Qué puede haber más revelador, más gratificante, más curioso que una fotografía, que un documento que esconde la expresión del rostro de una persona?”
“¿Por qué nos inquieta un hombre bañado en lágrimas? Una mujer que llora puede considerarse una parte excepcional pero conmovedora y digna de pena, de nuestra vida cotidiana, la acogemos con sinceridad y cariño. Pero ante un hombre que llora nos llena un sentimiento de desesperación. Es como si para él hubiera llegado el fin del mundo o como si él hubiera llegado al límite de lo que podía hacer.”
“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
“Tužna projekcija života za pjesnika je primamljivija od samog života.”
“When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead, we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something...I don't know...even an earring”
“With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul.”
“Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.”
“ESAELP GNITTIPS ONThis mysterious decree would incite me to defy it and spit on the ground at once, but because the police were stationed two steps away in front of the Governor's Mansion, I'd just stare at it uneasily instead. Now I began to fear that spit would suddenly climb out of my throat and land on the ground without my even willing it. But as I knew, spitting was mostly a habit of grown-ups of the same stock as those brainless, weak-willed, insolent children who were always being punished by my teacher. Yes, we would sometimes see people spitting on the streets, or hawking up phlegm because they had no tissues, but this didn't happen often enough to merit a decree of this severity, even outside the Governor's Manson. Later on, when I read about the Chinese spitting pots and discovered how commonplace spitting was in other parts of the world, I asked myself why they'd gone to such lengths to discourage spitting in Istanbul, where it had never been popular.”
“The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.”
“In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”
“Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.”
“We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction”
“As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them”
“Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents”
“There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.”
“1. Музеи созданы не для того, чтобы ходить по ним и смотреть на вещи, а для того, чтобы чувствовать и жить.2. Коллекция создает душу вещей, которая должна ощущаться в музее.3. Когда нет коллекции, то это не музей, а выставочный зал.”
“Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.”
“A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!”
“For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.”
“The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.”
“It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people.”
“The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life”
“The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse.”
“Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave.”
“أين الأرواح المتشابهة (المتناسخة) التى أستطيع التحدث معها؟ أين البلاد التى أجد فيها الحلم الذى تحدث إلى قلبى؟ أين هؤلاء الذين قرءوا الكتاب أيضاً؟”
“As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the time I returned from the East, bakeries that once sold large one-hundred drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for the same price, and they no longer tasted the way they did during my childhood.”
“A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.”
“... el arte que es simplemente malo ni siquiera es capaz de provocarnos repugnancia. ”
“Estoy sufriendo las penas del infierno sin ni siquiera haber muerto.”
“Porque cuando ves esos cuadros tú también quieres verte así, quieres creer que eres una criatura completamente distinta a las demás, sin igual, particular y extraña.”
“... el desinterés, el tiempo y los desastres naturales irán royendo lentamente nuestras pinturas hasta acabar con ellas.”
“... termitas, gusanos y mil y un bichos carcomerán nuestros libros hasta destruirlos.”
“... la muerte no es el final de todo, eso seguro. Pero, tal y como está escrito en todos los libros, es algo que produce un dolor increíble.”
“El color es el tacto del ojo, la música de los sordos, una palabra en la oscuridad.”
“El significado de los colores es que están ante nosotros y podemos verlos - le contestó el otro -. No se puede explicar el rojo a quien no lo ha visto.”
“... los colores no pueden comprenderse, se sienten.”
“¿Es el amor el que vuelve estúpidas a las personas o es que sólo los estúpidos se enamoran?”
“La sabiduría de una ciudad no hay que medirla por los sabios que acoge, ni por sus bibliotecas, ni por sus ilustradores, calígrafos y medersas, sino por el número de crímenes tortuosos cometidos en sus calles oscuras a lo largo de miles de años.”
“La poesía y la pintura, el color y la palabra, son hermanos, ya lo sabes.”