14: EUROPE

Daniel Gascón, writer / screenwriter [Spain]

[Translation (subtitles): Carlos Ortega]

Transcripción:

“When I went to England in 2001 to study at East Anglia University with an Erasmus scholarship, I was aware that I was heading to Sebald’s country. This was the place where he wrote, where he taught classes, where he had created a translation centre for literature. Now it seems to me that the journey that I was making thanks to an european project, was also a trip to an imaginary country: the slightly decentralized Europe, that is also one of the subjects in Sebald’s ouvre. Sebald’s literature picks up the legacy of the central european tradition and the experience of the 20th century. It is heir to the writers that took his clases and were in his books. And tells the catastrophes that the europeans have brought to other territories and to themselves. Sometimes, some of those tragedies are less comfortable or evident than others that are more popular. I remember that at his doorstep there was an etching of Goya that I now always associate with his books: The sleep of reason produces monsters.  On occasions I would see him walk around the university’s lake. His way of walking, sometimes morose and almost always oblique, now seems to me the best way to find the shortest distance between two points, and the best way to establish a relationship that few had paid attention to before.“