Bolaño: The Caracas Speech
Roberto Bolaño is a Chilean writer. When he won the Rómulo Gallegos award he gave this acceptance speech in Caracas (excerpt):
It was then that I had the first conscious inkling of my dyslexia. I shot with my left leg but wrote with my right hand. That was a fact. I would have liked to write with my left hand, but I did it with my right. And that, right there, was theproblem. For instance, when the coach would say, “Pass it to the guy on your right, Bolaño,” I wouldn’t know where to pass the ball. And sometimes, even, playing along the left flank, hearing my coach shout himself hoarse, I would have to stop and think: left—right. Right was the soccer field, left was kicking it out of bounds, out toward the few spectators, children like me, or toward the miserable pastures that surrounded the soccer fields of Quilpue, or Cauquenes, or the province of Bío-Bío. With time, of course, I learned to have a reference every time I was asked or informed about a street that was on the right or the left, and that reference was not the hand with which I wrote but the foot with which I kicked the ball.
And with Venezuela I had, more or less around the same time—meaning until yesterday—a similar problem. The problem was its capital. For me, the most logical thing was for the capital of Venezuela to be Bogotá. And the capital of Colombia, Caracas. Why? Well, by a verbal logic, or a logic of letters. The v in Venezuela is similar, not to say related, to the b in Bogotá. And the c in Colombia is first cousin to the c in Caracas.
I can’t distinguish right from left either.
PS: I know, this post should be in spanish, but I didn’t find the speech in spanish and didn’t dare to translate Bolaño back from english.
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