În fiecare limbă sunt alţi ochi
Each Language with Its Own Eyes

Summary/Abstract: Last year, Herta Müller was nominated among the candidates to the Nobel Prize. The essay published by Lettre Internationale represents a fragment from her lecture on poetics held in 2000 in Tübingen and read by the author at the “Nobel Jubilee Symposium on Witness Literature”in December 2001, in Stockholm. Herta Müller brings up the experience of the years lived in Romania under dictatorship (she emigrated in 1987 to Germany). The text contains sharp considerations on the spirit and the language of the two countries, Germany and Romania; it speaks about the enslaving of the language by dictatorships and about the linguistic, imaginative and spiritual enrichment of the German mother tongue through the interaction with the Romanian language. Herta Müller quotes Jorge Semprun who said that “ one’s fatherland is not in the language but in what it is said in that language”. The language is never a protected, apolitical area – says Herta Müller. The conclusion: you cannot separate a language from all the things that occur around you and therefore it is “legitimate or inacceptable, beautiful or ugly (…), good or bad. Each language with its own eyes”.

• Details
• Contents