Claudio Magris
Claudio Magris is an Italian novelist, essayist, philologist, and germanist born in Trieste on April 10, 1939, whose career has ranged across literary scholarship, journalism, translation, and screenwriting.
Educated at the University of Turin, Magris has worked across a notably wide set of disciplines. He is a literary scholar and philologist as well as a practicing novelist and essayist, and he has also worked as a journalist and screenwriter. His engagement with both the Italian and German languages runs through his career as a translator and germanist, and he has produced work in both tongues.
Beyond writing and scholarship, Magris entered political life, serving as a senator for Friuli-Venezia Giulia from 1994 to 1996. That period in the Senate was relatively brief, but it represents a distinct chapter alongside his longer work in literature and language. His roles as a writer, scholar, and elected official place him among the more varied figures in Italian public and cultural life.
The roles Magris has occupied — novelist, essayist, philologist, germanist, literary scholar, translator, journalist, screenwriter, and senator — point consistently to someone working across the boundaries of language and discipline. His use of both Italian and German, combined with his grounding in philology and literary scholarship, runs as a thread connecting the different areas in which he has worked.
Quotes by Claudio Magris
Judge not,′ it has been said, but being a juryman can be a pleasant occupation when one is not weighing up human actions and years in prison, but the books or the wines of the season.
The courage to put an end to war, to see the abysmal stupidity of it, is certainly no less than that needed to start one.
Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love – more rooted, more absolute – which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.
The great commander knows that in order to win one needs to know the remote and also the immediate reasons for the war, the capacities of the soldiers, which is to say the social and political make-up of the states, determining the variety, the quality and the character of the men.
To use the term ‘clerk’ as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.
True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.
Siempre te ha gustado escribir, no importaba el qué, escribir y ya está; es el gesto lo que cuenta, gesto de poeta, gesto de rey, soberano albedrío sobre las pobres vocales y consonantes que aparecena tus órdenes y se ponen en fila, march en, alienación derech, rompan filas.
...al corazón no se le dan órdenes, decía, el corazón se rompe, y si se le dice que no se rompa se rompe igualmente, como el mío...
Sabías que la poesía no es jamás sólo tuya, como el amor, sino de todos; no es el poeta el que crea las palabras, decías y declamabas, es la palabra la que se le hecha encima y le hace poeta...