OCTAVIOPAZ
603
Latin classics. Today they are much less widely read, though fortunately
they have not disappeared entirely; translations of Homer, Virgil, The–
ocritus, and Horace are still done into a great number of the world's
languages. On the other hand, we read modern writers in other lan–
guages far more frequently today than our fathers did. This network of
coincidences and oppositions, some of them implicit, others explicit,
constitutes the literary conversation of a period - a conversation almost
always silent, conducted alone in a room with a book.
As
we read, we
converse with authors in our own language and in other languages; some
of those authors are alive, but the majority are not. Quevedo says, in a
sonnet that seems to be written not on a sheet of paper but on a block
of time that has turned to stone:
Retired to the peace of this desert:
with a collection of books that are few but wise,
r
live in conversation with the departed
and listen to the dead with my eyes.
The contemporary publishing industry is dissolving the diversity of
publics into one impersonal majority. This is not the result of a deliberate
choice made by this person or that, nor is it the work of a conspiracy:
the trend comes from the very nature of the system that rules the world
of publishing. The literary trade today is motivated by purely economic
considerations. The value of a book, thus, is the number of people who
purchase it. Earning money is a legitimate activity, and so is producing
for the "mass public"; but a literature dies and a society becomes
decadent when the principal aim of publishers is to manufacture best–
sellers and works for popular entertainment and consumption. There are
indeed times when the popularity of a book and its excellence coincide:
the works of Dickens and Balzac, Byron and Victor Hugo, to cite a few
examples from the last century. But one should not close one's eyes to
the fact that the history of literature in the West, especially in the
Modern Age, has been and is that of minorities: writers and critics who
rebelled against the status quo, poets and novelists who invented new
forms, artists who were hermetic and difficult. The logic of the market–
place is not the logic of literature.
As the publishing industry becomes more and more impersonal -
the field has now been invaded by powerful multinational corporations -
economic considerations replace literary ones. All is not lost, of course: a
·Quevedo wrote this sonnet in a litde village in the north of the Sierra Morena, where he
had a country house.
Des~t
here means a place where there are few people.
