A conversation with Ernest Hemingway, the author of "The Old Man and the Sea"



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UNITED STATES

His sober and somewhat austere style had a great influence on the fiction of the century XX. The Adventures of Ernest Hemingway and His Strong Image and Media Marked a Time

A few days after the anniversary of his birth, we dusted off a fragment of a famous interview with the Nobel Prize for Literature and Pulitzer Prize, by George Plimton and published in The Paris Review in 1958.

Here is part of the conversation, published in Spanish in Narrators The Ateneo, in 1996 and reprinted by the Argentine newspaper Clarín on July 18, 1999.

– Are the hours devoted to the writing process agreeable to you?

I find them very pleasant. When I work in a book or in a story, write it every morning as soon as there is light. At that time, no one is upset and cool, and one goes to work and warms up as he writes. One reads what he has written and, as always, interrupts when he knows what will happen next. We follow this point …

– Can you get rid of the project to which it is delivered when it is far from the typewriter?

Of course, but it requires discipline and this discipline is acquired

– Do you make revisions or rewrites when you read at the place where you stopped the day before? Or revisions come later, when all the work is done?

Every day I rewrite to the point where I left the day before. When everything is finished, I see it naturally. So you have another chance to correct and rewrite when another person is typing and you see the material cleaner. The last chance is the tests. We thank all those chances.

-Reply a lot?

It depends. I've rewritten the end of "Goodbye to Arms" on the last page, thirty-nine times before being satisfied.

– Was there a technical problem? What was it or what made it uncomfortable?

I was looking for the right words

– With which places did you work the most? The Ambos Mundos hotel seems to have been one, judging by the number of books you have written there. Or does the environment not exert too much influence on its work?

The Ambos Mundos of Havana was a very good place to work. This farm is a splendid place or it was. But I have always worked well everywhere. I mean, I've been able to work as well as I can under different circumstances. The phone and the visitors are the ones who destroy the work.

– Is emotional stability necessary to write well? He once told me that he could only write when he was in love. Could you elaborate further on the subject?

What a question! But I congratulate you for the attempt. You can work at any time if people leave you alone and no one interrupts them. Or rather, if one can be ruthless with others. But the best writing happens, by the way, when you're in love. If you do not mind, I prefer not to expand on the subject.

– And what about economic security? Can it hurt good writing?

If you arrive early in life and enjoy life as much as work, you need a lot of character to resist temptations. Once writing has become the biggest vice of one, in the greatest pleasure, only death can interrupt it. Economic security is then of great help because it avoids worries. The worries destroy the ability to write

– Do you remember exactly when you decided to become a writer?

No, I've always wanted to be a writer

-When you write, do you find out you're influenced by what you're reading right now?

Not since Joyce wrote "Ulysses". This was not a direct influence. But at that time when the words we knew were forbidden to us and where we had to fight for one word, the influence of his work was what changed everything and allowed us to break with restrictions

[19459004Inrecentyearsyouseemtohaveescapedthewriters'companyWhy?

It's more complicated. The more we go to writing, the more we are alone. Almost all old friends, the best, die. Others are moving away. You only rarely see them, but you write and you have almost the same contact you had when you met them at the cafe in the old days.

– Do you like reading your own books without you feeling like you want to make changes?

Sometimes, when I find it difficult to write, I read them to cheer me up and I remember that it was always difficult and sometimes almost impossible.

– To what extent do you think the writer should be involved in the socio-political problems of his time?

Everyone has his own conscience and there should be no rules for the functioning of consciousness. The only thing we can be sure of a politicized writer is that, if his work lasts, one will have to ignore politics when he reads it. Many politically engaged writers frequently change their political ideas. It's very exciting for them and for political and literary critics.

– Would you say that there is always a didactic intent in your work?

-Didactics is a word that has been misused and ruined. "Death in the afternoon" is an informative book

– What do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of facts instead of the facts themselves?

Why worry about this? Things that have happened and things such as they exist and all that we know and everything we can not know, we do something by means of l & # 39; invention, something that is not a representation but a new thing more real than any other real and alive, and we give you life, and if you do it well enough, it also gives you immortality . That's why we write.

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