01: KORSAKOV

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, writer [Colombia].

[Translation (subtitles): Marilena de Chiara]

Transcription:
“In The Emigrants, Sebald assigns to one of his characters, the uncle Ambros Adelwarth, a syndrome that he calls Korsakov, which consists in the replacement in our memory of real but forgotten memories for fictional memories, invented memories. In the book is a personal disgrace for the uncle, to me it always seemed at the same time a metaphor of the novelist. This is what we novelists do. We novelists take a childhood memory, such as the day our grandfather took us to the market for touching frozen fishes, and we convert it in a fantastic memory on the remote day our father took us to the circus to discover ice; and we remember this later on, facing the firing squad. This is how literature works.“