BEIJING, Dec. 22 -- "Politics and media make us possessors of information, while literature teaches us how to utilize it," 82-year-old German writer Martin Walser said at the 21st Century Annual Best Foreign Novel awards ceremony last week at Peking University.
In his keynote speech, Literature as Information Deliverer, Walser said: "We have the right to value a most important function of literature: Literature delivers information about ourselves."
This was because writers express their emotions through the characters and readers see their lives in the books, he said.
One of the most significant writers of German postwar literature, Walser ranks second on the list of the 500 most important German intellectuals (after Pope Benedict XVI) by the country's influential political magazine Cicero.
He has received countless prizes, including the Gruppe 47 Prize (1955), Hermann Hesse Prize (1957), Georg Buchner Prize (1981), and German Booksellers Peace Prize (1998).
Walser is renowned for his perceptive observations of the human psyche - his protagonists are often plagued by identity problems and feelings of inferiority and dependency.
Despite the fact he expresses at times controversial opinions on subjects of current political interest, alongside his literary activities, Walser doesn't think the novel is tantamount to social criticism.
"A novel's appeal is not social amelioration of any kind, but something larger, higher and more radical," he says. "Utopia is a novel's very life, which enables readers to understand the suffering of characters in it."
"Tolstoy has done this, so has Chinese writer Mo Yan," Walser asserts. He talks about how Mo manages to turn a distant and unfamiliar history into immediate and familiar details, such as grandmother's bound feet in Red Sorghum (ºì¸ßÁ»).
"I've never seen another writer who tells us as much about history as Mo, when portraying the current situation ... I dare to say that whoever wants to write about China must first read Mo."
In his speech, Mo said he agreed with Walser's statement about the nature and function of literature. "Walser's claim that literature delivers information about ourselves, reveals almost all the secrets of a writer's profession," he said.
"Recent years have witnessed increasing exchanges between Chinese and foreign writers. But the best exchanges, as far as I am concerned, are reading each other's books. All a writer's secrets are in his writings."
Walser's award-winning novel A Man in Love (Ein Liebender Mann) is about the relationship between 73-year-old German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and 19-year-old countess Ulrike von Levetzow.
The novel is also the first book to have benefited from the Translation Grant Program at the Goethe Institute. The program, which started in January, is scheduled to subsidize the translation of 16 books each year, in the next three years.
Michael Kahn-Acermann, director of the Goethe Institute (China), said the program was created to facilitate the translation and publication of German books in China.
The 21st Century Annual Best Foreign Novel Award is jointly held by the People's Literature Publishing House and China Foreign Literature Association. It aims to honor and introduce to Chinese readers the latest quality foreign literature.
(Source: China Daily)
