Maximum expectation. Auditorium of the Museo del Prado crowded. The director of the institution, Miguel Falomir, stands waiting. Finally, the long-awaited enters. Among a huge applause. He shows a slight gesture of recognition, a minimal movement, with his head, towards the dedicated public. Hieratic, almost imperturbable, he sits in the front row of the public and waits patiently for the photographers to shoot, take one, multiple photos. Shooting and taking photos are just two of the terms used by Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee (Cape Town, 1940), the author of Misfortune, The Iron Age, Childhood, Youth or Elizabeth Costello, a South African nationalized Australian who grants minimal interviews and lavishes between little and less, he addressed yesterday in his talk on The languages of art. A talk in which images and words clashed at all times and music ended up appearing in the middle.
Coetzee is the first guest of the Escribir el Prado project, which intends to attract big names in world literature to Madrid so that they can transmit their particular and complex vision of the museum. And Coetzee, in conversation with his translator, Mariana Dimópulos, did not disappoint in transmitting that complexity in a talk that asked about the relationship between images and words, if they are translatable to each other and if an image, as the topic says, is really worth thousand words.
After promising in Spanish to the generous laughter of the public that the next lecture he will give in Madrid will be entirely in this language, Coetzee, an atheist with the appearance of a Protestant pastor, started with a painting of the construction of the Tower of Babel and recalled that one of the kings of Babylon, Nimrod, wanted to build a tower so high that it touched the sky, equating himself to God, who punished him by making everyone speak different languages. “Thus, speaking different languages is a punishment, if we had been humble we would all speak the original language, of Eden, in which all things enjoyed their true name. After Babel, things lost their original names. The words we use today, according to God's rule, are false, between the word and what it points to there is a gap, ”he pointed out.
In theory, the images, he reasoned, should not be subject to the curse of Babel nor should they need translation, and they would have to penetrate our hearts through our eyes without intermediaries. But the truth, she warned, is another: the images have to pass the sieve of interpretation before reaching us, we read them with the data and context that we possess, the images are full of words.
“Can you translate an image into words? No. The verbal substitute will be something else. But the language of images is not that of truth: from Plato to today we know that the image is not the object itself and that with its seductive capacity it can be more false than the word”, he warned.
Having said that, when asked if images are important in his writing, he concluded, like all the talk, with a yes and a no: “The word music has not yet appeared in this conversation today, the third of the great arts. I do not compose a sentence without attention to the rhythm, movement and weight of the words. But yes, I have images in my head when I write of the characters and how they look at each other, because observing, looking at another living being attentively, is not a neutral registration process, it is full of what psychologists call affection, and what we call feelings, and it is very similar to how we look at great pictorial works: great paintings teach us not only to look at them, but how to feel about them”.
