Nobel Olga Tokarczuk: “Literature is dangerous for young women”

“ A literature, for young women, is very dangerous. To enter the classical world of literature, to participate as a reader, we somehow have to leave our femininity, and that is a difficult thing to mature as a woman, because classical culture is somehow against my femininity. The ‘Empúsio’ is somehow a revenge against classical literature, and I apologize to Thomas Mann, who I love and with whom I grew up, but one cannot write such a big book, with two volumes, without women”, he said.

The author, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature 2018, spoke at a literary session in Gomes Teixeira Square, Porto, in the context of the Babell festival, which featured readings Ana Celeste Ferreira and moderation of Marta Bernardes.

Tokarczuk, 64, is the author of “Travels”, “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead”, Bizarre Stories” and “Empúsio”, all edited in Portugal by Ferro Horse, among others.

It is the latter, launched in 2022 in Poland, that motivates reflection on the place of women in Western literature, especially by appearing on the path of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" (1924), which the writer claims to have inspired early.

In this work, Mann analyzes the Polish woman, “in a conscious way or not, this great construction on a dead body of an American woman and from there begins the whole book”.

In “Empúsio”, a group of men in a sanatorium in Silesia, in 1913, talk and create a way to “make a kind of parody, paraphrase, of the ‘Magic Mountain’, giving voice to women”.

“I dare, in this book, to sit at the table with Thomas Mann in the 1920s and say something on my part, nod. When I said that literature is a large reservoir of conscious and unconscious content, it is because this is possible in literature. We're always in dialogue. Neither Mann nor Cervantes died, like Hans Castorp [character of ‘The Magic Mountain’] is more real than some people, as Don Quixote is more real” than real people, he adds.

Tokarczuk spoke in Polish, in a session with real-time subtitling (and interpretation), which combined the work of professionals and the support of artificial intelligence, having been recorded an interruption due to the failure in simultaneous translation, signaled by the public, already after Tokarczuk asked “how is the translation”, from the stage, after a “very difficult experience” in another festival with translation using AI.

The writer, who worked as a psychotherapist before she devoted herself full-time to literature, greeted Canadian Margaret Atwood, who had starred in a previous session and attended the audience, among an audience with more than a thousand people who could choose between Polish-Portuguese and Portuguese-Polish translation.

Writing has always been “an obsession”, he admits, having grown up as the daughter of a librarian and reading, practically since he knows how to do so, all the books he ‘picked up’ on the shelves, even if he demanded sacrifices, abdicating “traveling like friends” to work in an art that is “very instinctive for himself, without schools that teach this craft that is writing”.

It welcomes the weight of research in its writing, between experience, the search for knowledge and creativity, and defended the book as something “more conscious than the author himself, going beyond it to meet him with the reader”.

“I really like it when the reader knows more about what I wrote than I do,” he confesses.

The literary festival Babell started on Wednesday and runs until Monday, with names such as László Krasznahorkai, Salman Rushdie and Dwayne Betts in a program of literary sessions, concerts, cinema and other performances that, in all, cost more than 3 million euros to the foundation of the Lello Bookshop, except the support of the House of Porto, which co-organizes the event.

Even today, the Chinese Cai Guo-Qiang presents a performance with ‘drones’ and fireworks over the Douro River, at the close of the previous last day of the festival.

On Sunday, at 2:30 p.m., the American Dwayne Betts will have a conversation at Gomes Teixeira Square, open to the public, changing the organization, during today's day, the posture he had for the other events, for which he needed a ticket, achieved by buying a book in the dozens of adherent bookstores in recent months.

Later, there are sessions with Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025, at 6:30 p.m., in the Lions, and at 9:30 p.m. it's Salman Rushdie's turn at the Porto Coliseum.