Đạp thuyền trên hồ Xuân Hương, Đà Lạt, 1955, Gấu thực sự ngạc nhiên, mình đang sống trong một thế giới khủng khiếp.

INTERVIEWER

Trong Hồ Sơ K. ông phán, chỗ của tớ không phải ở trong lịch sử, mà ở bàn viết.

Kertesz: Tớ đếch viết ở bàn viết. Nhưng thôi, bỏ ba chuyện lẻ tẻ đi vô đời tư, nhảm lắm!
[Rarely ever did I write at a desk! But let’s not talk about personal things]

Imre Kertész, The Art of Fiction No. 220

Interviewed by Luisa Zielinski

INTERVIEWER

In your Nobel Lecture you said, “The nausea and depression to which I awoke each morning led me at once into the world I intended to describe.” Did writing subdue this condition?

IMRE KERTÉSZ

I was suspended in a world that was forever foreign to me, one I had to reenter each day with no hope of relief. That was true of Stalinist Hungary, but even more so under National Socialism. The latter inspired that feeling even more intensely. In Stalinism, you simply had to keep going, if you could. The Nazi regime, on the other hand, was a mechanism that worked with such brutal speed that “going on” meant bare survival. The Nazi system swallowed everything. It was a machine working so efficiently that most people did not even have the chance to understand the events they lived through. 

To me, there were three phases, in a literary sense. The first phase is the one just before the Holocaust. Times were tough, but you could get through somehow. The second phase, described by writers like Primo Levi, takes place in medias res, as though voiced from the inside, with all the astonishment and dismay of witnessing such events. These writers described what happened as something that would drive any man to madness—at least any man who continued to cling to old values. And what happened was beyond the witnesses’ capacity for coping. They tried to resist it as much as they could, but it left a mark on the rest of their lives. The third phase concerns literary works that came into existence after National Socialism and which examine the loss of old values. Writers such as Jean Améry or Tadeusz Borowski conceived their works for people who were already familiar with history and were aware that old values had lost their meaning. What was at stake was the creation of new values from such immense suffering, but most of those writers perished in the attempt. However, what they did bequeath to us is a radical tradition in literature.

INTERVIEWER

Do you consider your own works part of this radical tradition?

KERTÉSZ

Yes, I do, except I’m not sure whether it is my work or my illness that’s going to kill me now. Well, at least I tried to go on for as long as I could. So obviously I haven’t yet died in the attempt to come to terms with history, and indeed it looks as though I will be dying of a bourgeois disease instead—I am about to die of a very bourgeois Parkinson’s.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing a means of survival?

KERTÉSZ

I was able use my own life to study how somebody can survive this particularly cruel brand of totalitarianism. I didn’t want to commit suicide, but then I didn’t want to become a writer either—at least not initially. I rejected that idea for a long time, but then I realized that I would have to write, write about the astonishment and the dismay of the witness—Is that what you are going to do to us? How could we survive something like this, and understand it, too?
Look, I don’t want to deny that I was a prisoner at Auschwitz and that I now have a Nobel Prize. What should I make of that? And what should I make of the fact that I survived, and continue to survive? At least I feel that I experienced something extraordinary, because not only did I live through those horrors, but I also managed to describe them, in a way that is bearable, acceptable, and nonetheless part of this radical tradition. Those of us who were brave enough to stare down this abyss—Borowski, Shalamov, Améry—well, there aren’t too many of us. For these writers, writing was always a prelude to suicide. Jean Améry’s gun was always present, in both his articles and his life, always by his side.
I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon’s head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become educated, to be entertained, so we can’t ask them to deal with such gruesome visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this being an ugly literature of horrors.
Perhaps I’m being impertinent, but I feel that my work has a rare quality—I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

To read the rest of this piece, purchase the issue.

Note: Bài phỏng vấn này, đọc thú lắm, và nó liên quan đến "nhà văn sống sót" mà TTT viện ra khi ông trả lời Le Huu Khoa, trong bài viết bằng tiếng Tây, trong Mảng Lưu Vong, La Part d’Exile:

Kinh nghiệm văn chương của ông trong thời kỳ chiến tranh từ 1954 tới 1975?

Ngoài thơ ra, tôi trải qua hai giai đoạn đánh dấu bằng hai tác phẩm văn xuôi. Cuốn đầu, Bếp Lửa, 1954, miêu tả không khí Hà-nội trước 1954; đi và ở đều là những chọn lựa miễn cưỡng, chia lìa hoặc cái chết. Lập tức có phản ứng của những nhà văn cách mạng. Trong một bài điểm sách trên Văn Nghệ, một nhà phê bình hỏi tôi: "Trong khi nhân dân miền Bắc đất nước ra công xây dựng xã hội chủ nghĩa, nhân vật trong Bếp Lửa đi đâu?". Tôi trả lời: "Anh ta đi đến sự huỷ diệt của lịch sử," mỗi nhà văn là một kẻ sống sót. (1)

INTERVIEWER

Liệu có phẩm chất cứu chuộc trong “viết”, chính nó?
Is there perhaps a redemptive quality to writing itself?

Kertesz: Có đấy, nhưng không phải cho mọi người
Not for everybody.

INTERVIEWER

Nhưng cho ông?

[GCC sẽ chuyển dịch bài viết này hầu độc giả Tin Văn]