Writing with the eyes. On the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Herta Müller

Abstract

With Herta Müller, the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a writer who comes from the Germanspeaking minority in the region of Banat, Romania. Müller began to write in clear opposition to the 'German identity' of the minority in Banat, which evoked among other things her father's Nazi past, but also in opposition to an official style based on a supposed monolithic Romanian identity and a social realism that left no room for individual expression. Confrontations with the secret police developed almost immediately. In 1987 she left for Germany, where she has lived ever since. She has published numerous works of fiction as well as essays, and is the recipient of many literary prizes. The Nobel Prize committee cited the sobriety and objectivism of her prose, which depictsimpressive landscapes of the dispossessed, and praised the intensity of her poetic language. Herta Müller's works are systematically based on autobiography, and therefore on memory. Her writing is full of short sentences that succeed each other inexorably and lack any subordination. The plot of the story is woven through images that gradually fill with meaning as the story develops. In my opinion, this is the most spectacular characteristic of this author's writing, in which the power of language to unmask an appalling reality is acknowledged. A desolate,provocative, magnificent language... and one that is extraordinarily difficult to translate. Perhaps this is why the author is so little known in Catalonia.