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🦋 Language kidnapped

Ariel Dorfman's saga of exile in Feeding on Dreams is also a saga of language, language lost and rediscovered. Heinrich Böll puts into words the younger man's predicament when the two authors meet in Paris, a few years after the coup in Chile:

What he shared with me was the problem that German writers had faced after the Third Reich. "Hitler contaminated the language," he said. "We could no longer write the word comrade, the words joy and exultation and brotherhood. It was kidnapped, the language itself, by the Nazis. That was the task we could not avoid, that is what you must worry most about. Not allowing them to control the language with which you will tell the story of your times. This is something that needs to be done now, before you overthrow Pinochet. It cannot wait till tomorrow or it may be too late."

posted evening of Thursday, September first, 2011
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