2007 Prince of Asturias Awards
Presentation Ceremony
SPEECH BY
MR. AMOS OZ
Prince of Asturias Award for Letters
Oviedo, 26th October 2007
The Woman in the Window
If you buy a ticket and travel to another country, you are likely to see the monuments, the palaces and the squares, the museums and the landscapes and the historical sites. If you are lucky, you may have a chance to conduct some conversations with the local people. Then you will travel back home, carrying a bunch of photographs or postcards.
But if you read a novel, you actually obtain a ticket into the most intimate recesses of another country and of another people. Reading a foreign novel is an invitation to visit other people´s homes and other country´s private quarters.
If you are a mere tourist, you might stand on a street and look up at an old house, in the old part of town, and see a woman staring out of her window. Then you will walk on.
But if you are a reader, you can see that woman staring out of her window, but you are there with her, inside her room, inside her head.
As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people´s living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.
Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better love, but even a better person.
Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other: the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much hostility between us, too little curiosity.
Jews and Arabs have something essential in common: they have both been handled, coarsely and brutally, by Europe´s violent hand in the past. The Arabs - through imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and humiliations. The Jews - through discrimination, persecution, expulsion, and ultimately mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
One would have thought that two victims, and especially two victims of the same oppressor, develop between them a sense of solidarity. Alas, this is not the way it works, neither in novels, nor in life. Some of the worst conflicts are indeed between two victims of the same oppressor; two children of the same violent parent don´t necessarily like each other. Often they see in each other the image of the abusive parent.
Which is exactly the case between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. While the Arabs regards Israelis as latter-day crusaders, an extension of the white, colonizing Europe, many Israelis, for their part, regards the Arabs as the new incarnation of our past oppressors, pogrom makers and Nazis.
This situation charges Europe with a particular responsibility for the solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict: instead of wagging their fingers at either side, Europeans should extend empathy, understanding and help to both sides. You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel and being pro-Palestine. You have to be pro-Peace.
The woman in the window might be a Palestinian woman in Nablus. She might be a Jewish Israeli woman in Tel-Aviv. If you want to help make peace between these two women in the two windows, you had better read more about them. Read novels, dear friends. They will tell you much.
It is even time for each of these women to read about each other. To learn, at last, what makes the other woman in the window frightened, angry, or hopeful.
I have not suggested to you tonight that reading novels can change the world. I did suggest, and I do believe, that reading novels is one of the best possible ways to understand that all the women, in all the windows, are at the end of the day, in urgent need of peace.
I wish to thank the jury of the prize of the Prince of Asturias for granting me this magnificent award. Thank you, and Shalom to you all.
中译版全文见http://ckk.blogsome.com/2007/11/02/amos-oz-woman/。
以下为中译文版前几段，写的很优美：
如果你买一张票，旅行到另一个国家，你会想去看那里的纪念碑、宫殿、广场、博物馆、山水，以及历史遗迹。如果你很幸运的话，还可能有机会同当地人民交谈。然后你带着一大堆照片或明信片，回返家中。
但是，如果你读上一本小说，就能真正地获得进入另一个国家，另一个民族最隐秘之地的门票。读外国小说，就好比是得到造访别族家庭，以及别国私宅的邀请。
如果你只是游客，你会站在旧城的某条街上，仰望一座老宅，你看见有个女人，正从窗户里凝视着你。然后你便走开了
但如果你在读书，就也能看见那女人，看见她从自己的窗口向外观望，可是，你会和她做伴儿，在她房里，在她心中。
读外国小说时，你能真切地得到邀请，进入别人的内室，进入他们的童房，书房，进入卧室。你会受邀进入他们内心的悲伤，进入他们家庭的欢乐，进入他们的梦想。
这便是我相信文学乃人类沟通之桥梁的原因所在，我相信好奇能够成为一种道德力量。我相信，对他者的想像可以疗救狂热与盲信。对他者的想像，不仅会让你成为更好的商人，或是更好的情人，还能成为更好的人。
