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“When the flags start to flutter, common sense slides right into the trumpet”
(3)Here is a Nobel Prize speech that appeals to me, it is Herta Müller’s, translated into English by Philip Boehm.
The more that which is written takes from me, the more it shows what was missing from the experience that was lived. Only the words make this discovery, because they didn’t know it earlier. And where they catch the lived experience by surprise is where they reflect it best. In the end they become so compelling that the lived experience must cling to them in order not to fall apart.
Once again I am indebted to Jilly.
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3 Responses to ““When the flags start to flutter, common sense slides right into the trumpet””
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Shalom Sherry,
What beautiful writing.
This paragraph grabbed me:
No other object in the house, including ourselves, was ever as important to us as the handkerchief. Its uses were universal: sniffles; nosebleeds; hurt hand, elbow or knee; crying, or biting into it to suppress the crying. A cold wet handkerchief on the forehead for headaches. Tied at the four corners it protected your head against sunburn or rain. If you had to remember something you made a knot to prompt your memory. For carrying heavy bags you wrapped it around your hand. When the train pulled out of the station you waved it to say good-bye. And because the word for tear in our Banat dialect sounds like the Romanian word for train, the squeaking of the railcars on the tracks always sounded to me like crying. In the village if someone died at home they immediately tied a handkerchief around his chin so that his mouth stayed closed when the rigor mortis set in. In the city if a person collapsed on the side of the road, some passerby would always take a handkerchief and cover his face, so that the handkerchief became the dead man’s first place of peace.
B’shalom,
Jeff
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[...] enamored with the beautiful words of the Romanian expatriot poet Andrei Codrescu, but, thanks to Sherry Chandler, whose words I also love, I have another Romanian writer to wrap myself in: 2009 Nobel Lauriate [...]
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I read it with bated breath, Jeff, I was so caught up in her narrative and so frightened for her in retrospect. What a remarkable woman. And to think, I’d never heard of her before she won this prize.
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Sherry has also received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
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