Critics, Books and Changes

A few minutes ago I finished reading the 3rd book for uni - As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. It’s been a while since I didn’t just swim through a book, but sank in it.

While the complicated story of the Bundrens was overwhelming me, I started thinking of everything that’s hidden behind it and the meanings of their entire journey and the way in which characters are built. And then I’m thinking that no matter how much would the author has intended to say, the reader sees more. Any experience has hidden meanings that you don’t even think about, no matter how dull it might be, because people are too complex (I hope) to do something just because. Any journey from point A to point B involves changes - sometimes big, sometimes subtle. I change every day while commuting to university for one hour, you change even more when you have to get through fire to bury someone and end up finding the love of your life.

And now I remember how 4 years ago I was arguing with my Romanian teacher about how authors said what they wrote. Why interpret so much? What’s on the paper is the truth. Who took the time to hide ideas through their writings? Literature comes from the heart when you start writing, you write what comes, you don’t spend time thinking about what are the right words.

Fast forward to the moment when I started reading literary critics and when I had to write poems for Street Delivery and we get to this day when I have just finished reading Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey and compared to Emily Wilson’s translation from 2018.

Yes, literature comes from the heart. But thoughts don’t have a shape and you have to find words that have the exact shape of your thoughts.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t even fit what they are trying to say. - Addie Bundren, As I Lay Dying.

I think I found my motto as a writer. No matter how hard you try to find the right words, they can be interpreted, read and re-read, understood and re-understood by every person who reads them.

Literary critics probably interpret books most correctly, often knowing the context in which they were written and the author’s background. But each and every one of us, the readers, can take exactly what they need from each book. This combination of the knowing critic and the subjective reader can be best seen in the two translations that I mentioned before because none of the translators was a native speaker of Ancient Greek (of course) and, without wanting to, they put their own stamp on the way they understood the text.

I don’t think I got to fully understand yet what does it mean to write and choose your words, although I do this even now, writing these articles. I can’t wait to be pressured by word limits and not to be able to explain in hundreds of words what I wanted to say. I will do this soon when we will start working on our 7-page script for a short stage play (10 minutes). I can’t wait, then, to learn to let people interpret my text the way they feel. I can’t show up in the life of everyone who will ever read me and tell them that they misunderstood what I wanted to say. I might know what I wanted to say, but maybe the reader doesn’t want me to tell him this, but something completely different. Do you know what I mean?

I will finish with a quote by Petronela Rotar, one of my favourite writers, in which she explains in short her perspective on What did the author want to say? in a Facebook comment:

I hope the author didn’t want to say something so obvious and that he/she gives credit to the reader to evaluate on his/her own.