The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov is the winner of the “International Storytelling Prize”, the first Italian prize dedicated to short story, directed and chaired by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi. Refined poet, prose writer, literary scholar, translated into nineteen languages, today (Wednesday 13) at 4.30 pm he will be awarded at the San Giorgio Library in Pistoia. On this occasion he will present his latest book, “Cronorifugio” (Voland, 2021) and will hold a lecture entitled “Crisis” which we publish here. The translation is by Giuseppe Dell’Agata who translates all his books for Voland.
His Lectio
“We are always on the eve of some crisis. You know that the meaning of the word “crisis” is that of overthrow, transformation. We also know that our books are wiser than ourselves. I now read the titles of my latest books retroactively.
And everything became moon, this is the title of the collection of short stories whose fundamental theme is the sensation of some end and of a particular apocalypse. An apocalypse that is a very personal fact. A personal and daily apocalypse. Like the one we experienced in the early days of the pandemic. My last collection of short stories, closer to the moment of the International Ceppo Prize, was released in Italy at the very beginning of the pandemic. It collided with containment and quarantine, but managed to get the libraries to reopen. I thought of her as a living person. Its title is, no more, no less All our bodies. Someone with a good sense of humor had written “All our antibodies.” In the time when all of our bodies were locked up in their respective rooms, only books could travel. While I was staying in a house in Berlin (that’s where the pandemic surprised me), all of our bodies from my stories were entering different Italian houses. I received letters and the dearest appreciations.
Yes, our stories are alive and have bodies. And what I had always believed came true: stories save. What Sheherazade knew, in telling her stories every night and earning day after day, we have proved ourselves. What Boccaccio does in the Decameron, describing the exchange of stories during the plague, also happened to us. Literature is not just invention. The exchange of stories is therapeutic and salvific, vaccine and medicine. Someone had said somewhere that writers are an early warning system. Another, if my memory does not betray me, argued that writers are like the geese that saved Rome. It may not seem particularly nice to compare writers to geese but anyway, whoever of us writes, writes with one of the feathers of those geese that saved Rome. Allow me to read you one of the super short stories of All Our Bodies. It is entitled Error: “She is five years old. He has lined up all his stuffed animals on the ground and asks them: ‘How are you guys today?’ Then he gets behind them and replies: ‘Better than tomorrow …’. She must have been wrong, I think from the other room. We usually say, ‘Better than yesterday’. ‘Better than tomorrow’ presupposes, as I can say, a higher degree of alarm. But when does an error become a signal? ». Yes, sometimes the signs are hidden in a child’s words. In the last year and a half of the pandemic life, it is as if over time something has jammed, directions have reversed and the past and the future have swapped places. I dare to say that this feeling of crisis and the jam of time was in the air even before it all happened.
A few years ago I started writing my latest novel, Cronorifugio, with the disturbing feeling that the present is no longer our home. An eerie feeling of the future abolished. If the future were a plane and we were at the airport, the board would say: “Future canceled”. Or, in a slightly more consoling way: «Future delayed». What should be done in troubled times like ours, when the present is disheartening and the future is absent? You change direction and try to live in the past. In the novel Cronorifugio we speak precisely of times of disintegration of the genre and of an influx of the past that arrives like a deluge. One of the chapters opens with the following sentences: «And then the past began to conquer the world… It was transmitted from man to man like an epidemic, like the Justinian plague or the Spanish flu. (…) The contagion had spread everywhere …. ».
The novel, which tells of the virus of the past, was finished a month before the first announcements about the new virus appeared. It is not about prophecy and the like. There was simply in the air the alarm and the presentiment of the crisis that were waiting to be told. Nothing more and nothing less. The novel talks about the search for a refuge in time, as refugees in space are no longer able to help us. If we destroy the space around us, the only refuge to run to is that of the past. This is why Gaustin constructs his “past clinics” in the novel.
The past is a decent monster. Those who descend into his subterranean realm rarely make it out. Especially if this descent into the past is undertaken by entire states. But let me say something soothing. The consolation that literature gives us is that, sooner or later, every pestilence passes and turns into a book or a story. And these books or stories again help us to survive even the present plagues and crises, into which we have sunk. Literature is salvific “.
13 October 2021 | 11:28
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