Irene Vallejo: “People seek refuge in the …

Literature consists of doing calligraphy exercises on the skin. This image suggested by the Italian writer Vasco Pratolini is perfect for reflecting on the beautiful calligraphy of Infinity in a reed (Siruela), from Spanish philologist and novelist Irene Vallejo, a fascinating 21st century Sherezade narration about the invention of books in the ancient world. Since its appearance in September 2019 in Spain, it has sold 150,000 copies – an incredible figure for an unclassifiable text, but classified as a “historical essay” – and has been translated into thirty languages. This vigorous body inhabited by words, which Infinite which has been tattooed in our memory, received the National Essay Award in November 2020.

Vallejo (Zaragoza, Spain, 1979), doctor of classical philology and exceptional broadcaster of the classical world, continues to be amazed by the phenomenon that generated Infinity in a reed. “It’s not in my wildest dreams that I could have imagined something similar – admits the author of the novels The buried light (2011) and The archer’s whistle (2015) – a Page 12. The most reasonable thing for a writer in these times is to think that his book has a good chance of going unnoticed among the avalanche of new titles ”.

Why has the book turned out to be a long-distance runner amid this pandemic?

–In times of confinement, people take refuge in the books. When reality becomes suffocating, in books we find ourselves with everything that calms us down, such as beauty, imagination, scenery and travel. All of this helped us deconfin the mind, where we couldn’t deconfin the body. Books are the simplest and most affordable form of culture; this is what Umberto Eco said: the book is an object bordering on perfection.

– Today, we can read a very old manuscript, but we have difficulty reading recent technological files because technologies age very quickly. What a paradox, right?

–Books were born at a time when things were meant to last. Now tech’s got the trap inside, What is planned obsolescence. In the end, we constantly try to put aside old programs and replace them with new versions. They’re designed with this goal in mind: that they don’t last long. There have been cases of libraries that have digitized their collections on different media and discarded the originals because they had been microfilmed and kept and found that later this requires a huge investment as they have to be transferred to new formats. It is an ongoing debate; we are still fighting destruction. The book has met the conservation goal.

– The narrative voice of “Infinity in a reed” is as if it were an oral narrator. Beyond the immense love of the book, it seems that you have some nostalgia for this lost orality. It’s like that?

– Orality has not disappeared from our lives and technology has allied itself with the old spoken word and now we have podcasts, audiobooks and many other formulas that keep it alive. There is a tribute to orality in the book and I’m glad you detected that because when I started writing it I offered to experience trying to transfer a narrator who would pose the story of the book as if it were told by Sherezade: someone who has experienced the transition from the oral world to the book. For that, I contacted an association of oral narrators who explained to me the techniques of story told by voice. Books are a relative novelty that is about 5,000 years old; From the time we learned to speak until 5,000 years ago, we communicate orally and this is the longest time in our past, an expanse that has been lost because orality has found no formula for survival. through the centuries. Books and writing are two very good tools, but they do not justify our feeling of superiority to our ancestors before writing, or to the people who over the centuries have found other means of passing on knowledge from generation to generation. generation.

Homer is like a ghost: little is known about him and instead there is information about Enheduanna, considered the oldest known author. Why is the oldest author forgotten?

– I wanted to contrast the story of Priestess Enheduanna, the first person to sign a history book, a character with a very clear profile, who is almost a complete stranger; most people haven’t heard of it. The oldest signed text we have was written by a woman. Instead, everyone has heard of Homer, but we’re not even sure he’s just one person.; probably this name includes many of those who contributed to the poems Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks themselves disagreed about where he was born and who he was; in other words, we worship a male ghost, forgetting a very important presence like that of Enheduanna. I am surprised that Enheduanna has been so relegated to memory, when she is such a fascinating character. Great female contributions must be highlighted.

– “We prefer to ignore that progress and beauty include pain and violence”, you say in the book. Why do we ignore the barbarism that lurks in the blind corners of civilization?

–The book symbolizes the triumph of civilization and we want to forget the acts of barbarism behind the transmission of knowledge, which encompasses the spoils of the Roman conquerors, when the books were taken from Greece and enslaved the Greek intellectuals so that they become the preceptors of the sons of the conquerors; the rich had specialized slaves who made copies of books for them. The women were ordered to remain oral and were not allowed to devote themselves professionally to speaking; it is all an inseparable part of the beauty heritage that the classics represent. When the beautiful copies of manuscripts of ancient abbeys are exhibited to us in a national library, it should be noted that the most luxurious were made with the so-called “vellum”, a skin from newborns or aborted embryos. There is a bloody and cruel background here and there is the paradox that many books carried environmental and animal welfare messages while in the same story of the book there is a history of slaughter and sacrifice. . We must be aware that there was also this dark side of civilization. I have a tendency to seek out the barbarism that lurks because I care about what they don’t want us to say.