Column_I READ PEOPLE’S THOUGHTS
And it is hard to understand for me people reading aloud. Somebody who delighted with a phrase’s sound reads aloud a sentence from a poem or a novel.
Does such a person read that charming section many times like in trance, in different keys every time putting stress on a different word? Does that person recite it in front of the mirror watching every syllable which comes out of his lips? Does that person interrupt his wife or her husband and tells to listen?
For me it is hard to understand such a person, but when I see so many paeans to a perfect sound of this or that text, a praise of authors, who reflect the melody of language so well, I take an existence of such a reader for a good sign. Well, I believe there are such people. However “to believe” does not mean “to understand”.
For example, I do not understand the admiration of novels whose narrator is some kind of non-professional actor, most likely drunk or other unemployed, some underclass person who probably represents the whole. It is said in those admirations that an author proved that he has a perfect hearing. As for me, he could also prove that he has perfect smell. But I would rather like him to have a perfect talent for convincing, which makes me believe that a person with primary education, in an alcoholic support of a cheap vine is able to make a coherent monologue from a story of his life. After all the admiration concerns a reflection of some reality, meanwhile people in such situation jabber. And if we asked this person for writing his thoughts, the jabber would transfer into a broken Polish of some kind. I know what I am saying about because I worked in an archive once and I read denunciations of workers written by other workers. It is a different story. Because of it I do not understand arguments indicating the perfect hearing of most of Polish writers and their sensitiveness to colloquial language (I am sorry, Maciej Malicki is a different story). Especially that I have a feeling that was not written by any hoodlum non-professional actor, but still the same educated person with manners of Witold Gombrowicz.
Talking about “the language” in every second critical text annoys me? Not my business. I do not understand sense or beauty of different stylizations of a language of a novel into apparently the spoken one. My loss. And raconteurs make me board after third sentence, even in so called “life”.
In literary discussions I would rather hear about matters like a literary construction and a use of the construction in other book’s constructions. About the language composed from thoughts and senses, not about Polish language which sounds in their souls.
Somebody asked me once about the melody of my “novel’s” language. I answered with a short text. I am not a bird to sing. I am a writer to write.
Adam Kaczanowski
Translated by Agnieszka Żbikowska