Maximum expectation. Auditorium of the Prado Museum full. The director of the institution, Miguel Falomir, waits right. Finally the long awaited enters. Between huge applause. He shows a slight nod of recognition, a minimal nod, to the devoted audience.
Hieratic, almost imperturbable, sits in the first row of the audience and patiently waits for the photographers to shoot, take one, multiple photos. Shooting and taking photos will be precisely two of the terms on which the Nobel J.M. Coetzee (Cape Town, 1940), the author of Disgrace, The Iron Age, Childhood, Youth or Elizabeth Costello, a South African nationalized Australian who grants minimal interviews and spends less and less, addressed the his talk on The languages of art. A talk in which images and words clashed all the time and music ended up appearing in the middle.
Coetzee is the first guest of the Escriure el Prado project, which plans to attract big names in world literature to Madrid so that they can convey their complex view of the museum. And Coetzee, in conversation with his translator, Mariana Dimópulos, did not disappoint when it came to conveying this complexity in a talk that asked about the relationship between images and words, if they are translatable to each other and if really a A picture, as the saying goes, is worth a thousand words.
After promising in Spanish to the generous laughter of the audience that the next dissertation he gives in Madrid will be entirely in that language, Coetzee, an atheist with the appearance of a Protestant pastor, started with a painting of the construction of the Tower of Babel and went remember that one of the kings of Babylon, Nimrod, wanted to build a tower so high that it bordered 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 primordial language, of Eden, in which all things enjoyed their true name. After Babel things lost their original name. The words we use today, according to God's standard, are false, between the word and what it indicates there is a gap", he pointed out. In theory, images, he said, should not be subject to the curse of Babel, nor need translation, and should penetrate our hearts without intermediaries. But the truth, he warned, is different: the images must pass the sieve of interpretation before reaching us, we read them with the data and context we have.
"Can an image be translated into words? No. The verbal substitute will be something else. But the language of images is not the language of truth: from Plato until today we know that the image is not the object in itself and that with its capacity for seduction it can be more false than the word", he established. Having said that, when asked if images are important in his writing, he concluded with a yes and a no: “The word music has not appeared even today, the third of the great arts. I don't compose a sentence without paying attention to the rhythm, movement and weight of the words. But yes, I have images in my head when I write about the characters and how they look at each other, because observing, looking at another living being intently, is not a neutral process of registration, it is full of what psychologists call it affection, and which we call feelings, and it is very similar to how we look at great pictorial works: they teach us not only to look at them, but how to feel about them”.
