24 de octubre de 2021

374

“Ladies and Gentlemen,

A few years later, the woman in the photograph, my mother, who missed me although I hadn’t yet been born, was reading me fairy tales.

In one of them, by Hans Christian Andersen, a teapot that had been thrown on the trash heap complained about how cruelly it had been treated by people―as soon as its handle broke off, they had disposed of it. But if they weren’t such demanding perfectionists it could still have been of use to them. Other broken objects picked up his tune, and told truly epic stories of their modest little lives as objects. [...]

Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk.”


Olga Tokarczuk

The Tender Narrator, Nobel Lecture by Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2018, © THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2019.

No hay comentarios: