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Hardest to get published in Turkey: Orhan Pamuk
Vandana Shukla
Tribune News Service

Jaipur, January 21
Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate whose session remained talk of the day on the opening day of Jaipur Literature Festival, which took off today, said, "I am translated in 58 countries but the hardest thing was to get published in Turkey (the country he belongs to and writes about).”

Commenting on the political interventions in cultural pursuits, a reality in the part of the world he comes from, he said, "I am not much interested in politics, I am just trying to protect my dignity. But, there are things which grow bigger and bigger. If you dream of a Utopia, you are looked at as a dissenter in the part of the world I come from.”

Narrator of multiple realities through his novels like ‘The Museum of Innocence’ and ‘My Name is Red’, Pamuk explained why he chooses to explore love in his narratives. “All the culture of love has been to put it on a pedestal, my effort in ‘The Museum of Innocence’ had been to say, Oh My God! What a horrible thing it is! For a macho, upper class man from Istanbul in the 1960s, who is deeply antagonised by his deeply felt love, shame, and embarrassment, things replace his object of affection. Human beings are capable of getting attached to another human being, and to things. so, I have given that aura to things. It is also about sexual politics, about the concept of chastity and virginity in Istanbul society of the 1960s." Though he deals with layered conflicts in his novels, he says, he does not attempt to resolve them. “I don’t want to be scholarly, I want my readers to read my novels in a enjoyable and human way."

Talking about Eastern cultures and their struggle to keep the past alive in a fast-changing world, he said, “There is a continuity of past in ‘My Name is Red’, when I went to USA it influenced me by its planned exactness, and at that age my reaction was to forget tradition to embrace modernity. On much introspection I thought of a 16th century Mughal artist's life and searched for continuity of past in the present. past should be reinvented, not to be kept in a museum."

Thousands of book lovers from 23 countries braved delayed flights, missed trains, hiccups in visa clearance and non-availability of rooms in the Pink City to attend the literature festival.

In its sixth year, the festival saw all four tents - venues for various events - bursting at seams with literature enthusiasts trying to fix the four Rubik’s cubes at the same time, by being present at each one. Book lovers did not mind standing for hours or sitting on the floor to listen to their favourite authors. The spectrum covered on the opening day of this five-day festival had literature discussed and read out from four continents covering a little short of a dozen languages in 20 sessions. William Dalrymple, director JLF, called it intellectual fusion of 23 countries. “Unlike other literature festivals, we are not too serious. We are like Salman Khan taking off his shirt in an autorickshaw driver’s gathering.”

Sheldon Pollock, the renowned Sanskrit scholar and a Padma Shri (2010), in his keynote address, said: “After two generations we will be reaching a zero capacity of people to understand classical languages, statistically.” Lovers of film lyrics and Urdu poetry spilled out of the Mughal Tent to listen to the Gulzar talk on subtlety of composing poetry.When Javed Akhtar gave a talk on how languages evolve and die, in the context of Urdu, many youngsters coaxed him to speak in Urdu. Session ‘Two Nations Two Narratives’ - addressed by novelists from Pakistan, Muneeza Shamsie and Kamila Shamsie - saw blasphemy law and Salman Taseer’s murder discussed in a way befitting a literary festival, free of bias and fear.