Galery

1

Once, when you jokingly told your 10-year-old daughter that you are an enchantress she believed you and told this to her school-mates. Do you feel that magical powers reign inside you when you are immersed in the universe of words and sculpt them?

"Magician" for me generally means a shaman, a being with a greater degree of identification and insight, that is able to subsume itself in the surrounding world. A "shaman" (or an enchantress) of words must be identified with their own space, namely language, following the example of the shaman of isolated tribes who identifies himself with the surrounding space, i.e. nature. A writer has to listen not only to the meaning of words, but also to their rhythm, the breath of sentences and the taste of punctuation. In this sense, in terms of the rhythm and flow of words, I would answer affirmatively, yes, sometimes I felt like an "enchantress". But not in the sense of the content of a story, of what we call its plot. There I become a craftsman, a plumber of words, who, with the relevant tools, takes care for the story not to overspill and drown the reader. The other magical feeling of words, to feel the audience gripped, anxiously awaiting the continuation of the story, unfortunately is not related to the written word. This type of magic that is very similar to the power of music entirely belongs to oral storytellers, narrators of tales, who are rarely found in our electronic age. In oral storytelling, the listener enjoys the rhythm of speech and the re-creation of the story time and again, as it thus becomes a little different from the previous time, but also the living presence of the breathless audience. The magic of Scheherazade undoubtedly is more compelling than the magic of the computer keyboard.

I cannot help it, sometimes I feel that I was born in the wrong era. Three hundred years ago, I would have been a true enchantress of words, and maybe of other things...