(Ενα απόσπασμα από την εισήγησή μου σε συνέδριο που πραγματοποιήθηκε στην πόλη Asilah του Μαρόκου )Each civilization has its own characteristics, each comprises a collective and all embracing general way of life that includes tradition, aesthetic experience, religious beliefs, personal and collective values, sentiments or emotions, innovation, everyday habbits, personal creation. Social experience itself constitutes the fundamental element and the particularity of each culture. In other words, culture is connected to the core of society in which it is developed, and reflects its desire to express and celebrate the characteristics of the way of life or its history.
But culture cannot evolve, expand and generally succeed without communicating it to others. Umberto Eco in his theory of the ‘semiotics’ suggests that the whole of civilization should be studied as a phenomenon of communication, while the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre with his question “ how we communicate with one onother, underlines this point too. It is true that one nation’s culture affects the learning cognitive situation of another, and opens our horizons to new ideas and perception. Through viewing the inner mirror of other peoples lives, their cultural identity we became more aware of our own and consequently of what one may call human civilization
Once culture is communicated it automatically integrates itself into what we may call human civilization,
Needless to say that the rapid social and political developments, the technological evolution and the novel power of massive forms of communications transformed the picture of the 20th and 21st century in that respect. There many models of communication have tried review the impact of its messages on one another. I shall not enumerate all of them as they will take all of my time. However, I shall stop at the most significant one, which is literature and translation. Trough my personal experience as a writer and a literary translation for the past twenty years, I have come to believe that literature is the most significant channel, the most effective way of communicating one’s culture, as it is the mirror on which all of the above elements are reflected upon. And the means to achieve this is translation. Once literature is translated it is not restricted anymore to the limited borders of its birthplace, it shrugs off its locality, exotic or special features and takes up its universal trait, the special colours and odours become universal concepts and ideas….
Literature is a universal language, even when writers depict the very core of their own society or the themes they deal with are derived from of their cultural surrounding. Writers are not mere narrators of a local myth their writing is the result of a complex and composite observation of μan in a universal sense and what determines his existence, his behaviour, and acts...
But culture cannot evolve, expand and generally succeed without communicating it to others. Umberto Eco in his theory of the ‘semiotics’ suggests that the whole of civilization should be studied as a phenomenon of communication, while the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre with his question “ how we communicate with one onother, underlines this point too. It is true that one nation’s culture affects the learning cognitive situation of another, and opens our horizons to new ideas and perception. Through viewing the inner mirror of other peoples lives, their cultural identity we became more aware of our own and consequently of what one may call human civilization
Once culture is communicated it automatically integrates itself into what we may call human civilization,
Needless to say that the rapid social and political developments, the technological evolution and the novel power of massive forms of communications transformed the picture of the 20th and 21st century in that respect. There many models of communication have tried review the impact of its messages on one another. I shall not enumerate all of them as they will take all of my time. However, I shall stop at the most significant one, which is literature and translation. Trough my personal experience as a writer and a literary translation for the past twenty years, I have come to believe that literature is the most significant channel, the most effective way of communicating one’s culture, as it is the mirror on which all of the above elements are reflected upon. And the means to achieve this is translation. Once literature is translated it is not restricted anymore to the limited borders of its birthplace, it shrugs off its locality, exotic or special features and takes up its universal trait, the special colours and odours become universal concepts and ideas….
Literature is a universal language, even when writers depict the very core of their own society or the themes they deal with are derived from of their cultural surrounding. Writers are not mere narrators of a local myth their writing is the result of a complex and composite observation of μan in a universal sense and what determines his existence, his behaviour, and acts...
