Kochi: Portuguese writer Bruno Vieira Amaral places himself in the shoes of a ‘witness’ who reports on life around him.
“You can be more truthful when you write in the first person, which is what I prefer to do. But, at the same time, I don’t want to be self-centred. That is why I turn to writing as a means to coming to terms with myself through tales about others… But there is a catch in it. When you write, you make things up. You lie, but you lie as a writer to be more truthful about the lives happening around you,” says a young Mr. Vieira Amaral, who won major European literary awards, including the Jose Saramago Prize for his maiden novel As Primeiras Coisas [The Former Things].
The writer was sharing his experience at an event organised titled ‘Post Script’ as an extension of the recently concluded Kerala Literature Festival at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Galician writer and translator Maria Reimondez, who calls herself a feminist and a critic of power, said she was on a constant endeavour to challenge the ‘form’ as well as the reinventing the language. Author of an acclaimed novel, Pirate , which speaks about the contemporary life of people in the Caribbean — written with the protagonist being identified in a gender that does not distinguish itself as masculine or feminine but is nevertheless feminine — Ms. Reimondez said Galician language had grammatical gender, making it almost impossible to be replicated in translation. She is currently working on a complex seven-part series of novels which are connected, but can remain independent all the same. She has also translated some contemporary writers Tamil writers like Salma into Galician.
For British poet Nia Davies, it is the sound of language that she is fascinated with. She is a poet because she likes to explore the hybridity of language as also because she has failed to become a novelist. It is the failure of communication that she is attracted to. As such, the language of poetry is not straight and communicative.
The writers, identified as among the most promising young writers of Europe, were brought to India by Alexandra Buchler, director of Literature Across Frontiers that seeks to familiarise European writing across languages with one another.
