It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it’s popular. What I’m saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist – these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.
Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.
Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word “text” unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
A society can exist – many do exist – without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
A book brings its own history to the reader.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.
But a reader’s ambition knows no bounds.
Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.