Alberto Manguel
Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Long ago in a faraway desert, a man of whom we know nothing decided that the words he had scratched onto clay were not conventional accounting signs numbering legal decrees or heads of cattle, but the terrible manifestations of a wilful god. He concluded that therefore the very order of these words, the number of letters they contained, and even their physical appearance must have a sense and meaning, since the utterance of a god cannot hold anything superfluous or arbitrary. The Cabbalists took this faith in the literary act even further. Since (as the Book of Genesis recorded) God had said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, they argued that the very word light possessed creative powers, and that if they knew le mot juste and its true intonation, they too would be able to become as creative as their Creator. The history of literature is, in some sense, the history of this hope.
—Alberto Manguel, Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator, The Spectator, March 10, 2001
Posted on November 6, 2003 at 9:54 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Only when the writer relinquishes the text, does the text come into existence. At that point, the existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet, does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.
—Alberto Manguel, Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator, The History of Reading, 1996
Posted on April 17, 2000 at 11:50 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had "walked over our grave," as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us — the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
—Alberto Manguel, Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator, The History of Reading, 1996
Posted on April 24, 2000 at 7:04 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I believe there is an ethic of reading, a responsibility in how we read, a commitment that is both political and private in the act of turning the pages and following the lines. And I believe that sometimes, beyond the author's intentions and beyond the reader's hopes, a book can make us better and wiser.
—Alberto Manguel, Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, 1998
Posted on April 23, 2003 at 8:30 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
What remains invariable is the pleasure of reading, of holding a book in my hands and suddenly feeling that peculiar sense of wonder, recognition, chill or warmth that for no discernible reason a certain string of words sometimes evokes.
—Alberto Manguel, Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, 1998
Posted on May 5, 2003 at 5:01 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
For me, words on a page give the world coherence. . . . Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be.
—Alberto Manguel, Argentine-born Canadian essayist, novelist, anthologist, editor, and translator, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, 1998
Posted on May 6, 2003 at 9:28 PM
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