1 00:00:02,190 --> 00:00:12,990 Welcome to translating COVID 19. This is a series of Skype recorded video conversations which explore fontes methods 2 00:00:12,990 --> 00:00:18,390 and practises of translation in the context of the current global health crisis. 3 00:00:18,390 --> 00:00:25,080 My name is martyrdom. Nidhi and I am an Army Research Fellow at the Queens College University of Oxford. 4 00:00:25,080 --> 00:00:28,110 If you wonder what a beautiful image in the background is, 5 00:00:28,110 --> 00:00:34,710 that is the Queen's College or library, and I thank Claire Hooper for providing this picture. 6 00:00:34,710 --> 00:00:40,230 Today, I have the privilege and indeed the pleasure to join in conversation. 7 00:00:40,230 --> 00:00:46,410 Nicola Gardini, professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of Oxford. 8 00:00:46,410 --> 00:00:57,400 An exquisite painter and the author of award winning novels, essays, literary monographs, memoirs, poetry collections and translations. 9 00:00:57,400 --> 00:01:04,300 In this video, Nicole and I will reflect on the role of translation in the midst of the pandemic. 10 00:01:04,300 --> 00:01:12,490 But before starting, please let me think first of all, Nikola, without whom this conversation would not be possible or the speaker's colleagues 11 00:01:12,490 --> 00:01:17,440 and participants who in various ways have contributed to translating illness, 12 00:01:17,440 --> 00:01:21,790 which is the brother project, which is translating COVID 19, belongs. 13 00:01:21,790 --> 00:01:26,170 And last but not least, I would like to thank the funders of this project. 14 00:01:26,170 --> 00:01:35,230 The Queens College Welcome to tionaL Strategic Support Fund and your five fund at this university, Nikola. 15 00:01:35,230 --> 00:01:40,840 I would like to break the ice with a question that is as obvious as it's challenging. 16 00:01:40,840 --> 00:01:48,910 Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have been approached with mixed words of encouragement and provocation. 17 00:01:48,910 --> 00:01:53,530 So on the one hand, given the transnational dimension of these crises, 18 00:01:53,530 --> 00:02:02,560 people have thought that they could not have been a better time to bring together the two seemingly unrelated words of translation and disease. 19 00:02:02,560 --> 00:02:11,620 On the other hand, however, others have been more sceptical or rightly cautious by pointing out the many people died 20 00:02:11,620 --> 00:02:17,590 and therefore that the imperative of research right now is very clearly to save lives. 21 00:02:17,590 --> 00:02:23,320 Translation these people fear is not going to serve this purpose. 22 00:02:23,320 --> 00:02:26,650 So how exactly is at all? 23 00:02:26,650 --> 00:02:32,440 Do you think that translation can help us be allies or keep allies in the current 24 00:02:32,440 --> 00:02:39,100 circumstances and that Sound Nation actually play a role in fighting illness and death? 25 00:02:39,100 --> 00:02:45,110 Or is it just destructive form of entertainment in the face of absurdity? 26 00:02:45,110 --> 00:02:49,970 Yes, very good, thank you very much, Martha, for this invitation. 27 00:02:49,970 --> 00:02:57,420 You know how interested I am in the language of illness, as you mentioned, I'm a translator too. 28 00:02:57,420 --> 00:03:12,470 And and thanks thanks to you, these two terms in this translation are receiving one attention, one unifying focus. 29 00:03:12,470 --> 00:03:21,020 And I feel very, very, very proud to be here because illness is a mysterious text. 30 00:03:21,020 --> 00:03:34,340 Illness asks us to translate this extreme experience, which most of the time we do not understand into something comprehensible, something shareable. 31 00:03:34,340 --> 00:03:40,010 That's an act of translation, indeed. Why do we need translation? What do we need it for? 32 00:03:40,010 --> 00:03:50,780 Well, to make to make sense sharable know there is a language for for this kind of disease COVID 19. 33 00:03:50,780 --> 00:03:54,380 And it's the science of sorry, it's the language of science. 34 00:03:54,380 --> 00:04:00,200 It's the language of politicians. It's the language of statistics. 35 00:04:00,200 --> 00:04:14,090 But is it really a language that is? Isn't it just maybe a lingo or, you know, a dialect more than a language we can all share and participate in? 36 00:04:14,090 --> 00:04:19,890 I do think that translating illness, translating COVID is not just entertainment. 37 00:04:19,890 --> 00:04:34,280 It's indeed a primary activity we all should take part in by fun through finding words to make sense of what's going on. 38 00:04:34,280 --> 00:04:38,870 Of course, it also, as you said, it's it looks absurd. 39 00:04:38,870 --> 00:04:46,880 We're facing absurdity. We're facing something we never even considered possible. 40 00:04:46,880 --> 00:05:02,090 I mean, until October or November, who could have thought that in a matter of weeks, the world would fall into this major worry and massive death? 41 00:05:02,090 --> 00:05:06,680 Who could have predicted this? Nobody. Now we need to make sense of that. 42 00:05:06,680 --> 00:05:12,560 Why did we not in the first place? Why didn't we understand? 43 00:05:12,560 --> 00:05:18,590 Why didn't we understand the signs of what was going to happen? 44 00:05:18,590 --> 00:05:25,340 We are really facing a linguistic problem here, not just, you know, in a technical sense. 45 00:05:25,340 --> 00:05:35,900 We are not probably translating literature into other languages, but we are translating experience, dock experience, 46 00:05:35,900 --> 00:05:48,350 obscura experience, complicated experience, controversy and experience unexpected experience into a new language, into a new medium. 47 00:05:48,350 --> 00:05:58,730 Now the very act of translation what we literary people can consider a translation in in the literal meaning is still part of it. 48 00:05:58,730 --> 00:06:08,570 I mean, I don't I don't. I don't think translation a as a linguistic linguistic act is out of the out of the picture 49 00:06:08,570 --> 00:06:16,580 because we are all now right now translating our languages into into other languages. 50 00:06:16,580 --> 00:06:29,210 We are trying to communicate globally. And what we're doing here is indeed creating one common language for everybody to speak the same things. 51 00:06:29,210 --> 00:06:33,170 And that's exactly the aspiration of translation. 52 00:06:33,170 --> 00:06:46,280 All translations in the history of of human communication have had that ambition to make sense finally of finally available for the whole community. 53 00:06:46,280 --> 00:06:57,170 Now the community's global. So we are indeed, when we speak of it, we are really trying hard, probably still quite helplessly. 54 00:06:57,170 --> 00:07:03,170 But nonetheless, we feel we should try hard to speak the same language. 55 00:07:03,170 --> 00:07:10,790 That is, we all agree on some things and creating we need to create a new code. 56 00:07:10,790 --> 00:07:14,840 Ovid should really come with a new code to speak about it. 57 00:07:14,840 --> 00:07:22,340 Now, creating a new code into which accommodate the discoveries of experience is translation. 58 00:07:22,340 --> 00:07:28,040 So I don't see that to illness and translation as inimical. Yeah, a date. 59 00:07:28,040 --> 00:07:36,950 All major experiences of the of the human being are linguistic experiences because they do not just happen. 60 00:07:36,950 --> 00:07:41,150 They need to be told they they need to be analysed. 61 00:07:41,150 --> 00:07:44,700 They need to be understood. And we are. 62 00:07:44,700 --> 00:07:50,220 A stand linguistically. Of course. Thank you so much, Nikola. 63 00:07:50,220 --> 00:07:58,200 Now that you're talking about Dick, I'm thinking that humankind throughout history has tried to make sense, 64 00:07:58,200 --> 00:08:07,410 to give name and to make it exist linguistically to make a linguistic sense of absurdity and illness. 65 00:08:07,410 --> 00:08:15,660 So disrespected during the coronavirus lockdown, there has been renewed interest in pestilence fiction. 66 00:08:15,660 --> 00:08:19,740 On the 20th of March, the Guardian reported that Penguin Classics, 67 00:08:19,740 --> 00:08:27,990 which is the British publisher of the Plague by Albert Company, was shipping thousands of copies of the book every month. 68 00:08:27,990 --> 00:08:37,260 They're struggling to keep up with orders. Can you help understand how pandemics have been translated across space and time? 69 00:08:37,260 --> 00:08:42,000 And what can we learn from these acts of translation? Yes. 70 00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:55,590 Well, pandemic pandemics are political problems. Pandemics, of course, concern doctors and and and whoever is involved in coming up with the remedies. 71 00:08:55,590 --> 00:09:05,550 But when we look back to the great narratives of of pandemics, epidemics in the history of world literature, 72 00:09:05,550 --> 00:09:12,570 we will always see this bond between disease, illness and and the politics. 73 00:09:12,570 --> 00:09:17,680 I mean, to here is a very good example. It's a it's quite a recent one. 74 00:09:17,680 --> 00:09:28,980 He's his plague test is indeed a major metaphor for colonialism in northern Africa. 75 00:09:28,980 --> 00:09:30,870 But just let's go back to the very beginning. 76 00:09:30,870 --> 00:09:41,640 I mean, to to his account of the plague in Athens, interestingly enough, that that plague happens at the very beginning of the Peloponnesian War. 77 00:09:41,640 --> 00:09:53,250 And it it well, it seems to come from some external source that preceded his debates, 78 00:09:53,250 --> 00:10:06,300 whether it's the Spartans who disseminated the disease or or the eastern US, that is the Persians or whoever came to to to the Port of Athens. 79 00:10:06,300 --> 00:10:12,720 But he leaves it open. He says, Well, you know, we can't in the end, really establish who who started this. 80 00:10:12,720 --> 00:10:20,100 Nonetheless, it's interesting that his own account of the wall is opened by the account of the play, 81 00:10:20,100 --> 00:10:29,140 as if the plague were there to signify a made a big a bigger picture, 82 00:10:29,140 --> 00:10:42,090 a greater scheme than the actual military events or the political crisis, which which brought about the conflict between Sparta and Athens. 83 00:10:42,090 --> 00:10:56,430 The same is true of other plagues. There's one which is less known, and I'm quite familiar with the epidemic of syphilis in the early 16th century. 84 00:10:56,430 --> 00:11:05,370 I work on the Renaissance, and syphilis was indeed diagnosed or indeed even discovered by one Girolamo, 85 00:11:05,370 --> 00:11:16,420 A or a famous Italian doctor in in in the history of epidemiology. 86 00:11:16,420 --> 00:11:25,110 Pakistan is a big guy, is a big name. A big shot? No, I mean, probably scholars know him because he was also Latin poet and knew Latin. 87 00:11:25,110 --> 00:11:37,410 But anyway, he wrote not only a treatise on contagions, but also a poem in three books very gradually and in language nonetheless. 88 00:11:37,410 --> 00:11:46,980 Very scientific in its approach on syphilis and Geronimo Castro is very clear on the connexion 89 00:11:46,980 --> 00:11:54,690 between the middle and the military crises of Italy and the emergence of the disease. 90 00:11:54,690 --> 00:12:08,940 So the disease is both an allegory, a metaphor for a lack of equilibrium, for the loss of balance in the political stability of of of a given country. 91 00:12:08,940 --> 00:12:17,460 And it is also the outcome of that of that lack of balance, of that lost balance. 92 00:12:17,460 --> 00:12:32,400 So all contagions are to be understood within a bigger framework because they do not just happen for no apparent reason. 93 00:12:32,400 --> 00:12:38,760 They are the result of a long chain of errors. 94 00:12:38,760 --> 00:12:44,210 And some of these errors are of a political nature. 95 00:12:44,210 --> 00:12:49,200 Well, thank you very much for this, Nicole. Makes me think no. 96 00:12:49,200 --> 00:13:02,970 As we discussed in the past month together, is it although the language of war sufficient a sufficient lexicon to express the experience of COVID 19? 97 00:13:02,970 --> 00:13:06,930 Right? Yes. I mean, this is a good question mark. 98 00:13:06,930 --> 00:13:16,320 You are referring, of course, to a prevalent metaphor or metaphor ology, which is current and very, 99 00:13:16,320 --> 00:13:29,460 very common to hear COVID as an enemy and as as somebody or something we need to wage war on. 100 00:13:29,460 --> 00:13:43,350 Now, Susan Sontag wrote, What remains to me a definitive interpretation of military metaphors of figurative military figures, 101 00:13:43,350 --> 00:13:49,650 figurative speech in relation to illness, and she was right in rejecting that language. 102 00:13:49,650 --> 00:14:01,710 She was speaking of AIDS, which is another great pandemic. Interestingly, it's very hard to see the connexion between COVID 19 and and and AIDS today. 103 00:14:01,710 --> 00:14:07,860 But let's not forget that another big pandemic was just this one. 104 00:14:07,860 --> 00:14:12,690 The AIDS not too long ago and HIV on the ground? 105 00:14:12,690 --> 00:14:19,590 Yeah. And so a lot of what AIDS taught us through literature. 106 00:14:19,590 --> 00:14:30,760 We seem to have forgotten, actually, and we're still struggling to devise a new code to speak about what's going on. 107 00:14:30,760 --> 00:14:38,490 Um, no, it's not enough to to treat to treat COVID as an enemy, and I don't think it's correct code. 108 00:14:38,490 --> 00:14:43,650 It is is just a natural phenomenon. It's something that nature does. 109 00:14:43,650 --> 00:14:49,260 Viruses exist. They are neighbours. 110 00:14:49,260 --> 00:14:55,320 They are lives that are around its life. 111 00:14:55,320 --> 00:15:02,280 It's one of the many forms that life takes on two two two two two to stay in the world. 112 00:15:02,280 --> 00:15:12,790 We need to live to learn how to live with viruses, with bacteria, with people we don't like and and a lot more. 113 00:15:12,790 --> 00:15:17,070 So I'm I'm completely against wars. 114 00:15:17,070 --> 00:15:26,970 I wouldn't think of myself as as a person who would defend war ever in, in life or anywhere in the world. 115 00:15:26,970 --> 00:15:32,040 I do think that we humans have got language to communicate, 116 00:15:32,040 --> 00:15:40,950 even when language is extremely difficult to use, even when cultural translation seems the hardest. 117 00:15:40,950 --> 00:15:46,320 But nonetheless, it's really what we need to always resort to. 118 00:15:46,320 --> 00:15:50,190 So I would go for other metaphors. Of course, it's hard. 119 00:15:50,190 --> 00:15:58,060 It's easier to agree on such a blatantly dramatic over dramatic metaphor. 120 00:15:58,060 --> 00:16:06,420 Now we feel under attack. We are not attacked. We are just coping with a very difficult disease. 121 00:16:06,420 --> 00:16:12,510 But we should also come to terms with our responsibilities. Yes. 122 00:16:12,510 --> 00:16:23,370 What are you saying? Very much, Nicole? I thought, if I care you, I was just thinking of, of course we are not here defending in defending death. 123 00:16:23,370 --> 00:16:30,840 But what you are talking about is very thought provoking indeed is the fact that the translation provides 124 00:16:30,840 --> 00:16:37,680 a language of tolerance and equality that allows us to see things from a different perspective, 125 00:16:37,680 --> 00:16:42,150 perhaps the perspective that we naturally would reject. 126 00:16:42,150 --> 00:16:47,940 And to see things within a broader picture in this case, the eco system of the Earth. 127 00:16:47,940 --> 00:16:56,070 Indeed. Thank you, Mata'afa, for completing what what I left implicit in what I was saying. 128 00:16:56,070 --> 00:17:05,400 Yeah. First of all, let's learn what a virus is. I mean, we people speak, speak of enemies when they don't know what they're talking about. 129 00:17:05,400 --> 00:17:14,220 Once we we know things and people better, there's there's less room left for for making up an enemy. 130 00:17:14,220 --> 00:17:26,790 Now viruses need us because they don't have a strong identity and they they need another body, another another set of cells to feed on. 131 00:17:26,790 --> 00:17:28,800 This is what happens with HIV. 132 00:17:28,800 --> 00:17:40,260 So actually, if we knew more about viruses, we would know that identity in nature is something fluid, something uncertain. 133 00:17:40,260 --> 00:17:49,570 Of course, we're very jealous of our own identities. As humans, I mean, the the whole immuno system was was biological is a biological create, 134 00:17:49,570 --> 00:17:57,730 a wonderful biological creation which determines and determines what is the South and what is not the south. 135 00:17:57,730 --> 00:18:08,020 And we manage to evolve as a as a species because we did create a south biological south. 136 00:18:08,020 --> 00:18:10,750 But this biological self is not definitive, 137 00:18:10,750 --> 00:18:27,370 and it's definitely not safe all the time when these viruses attack us to just repeat what the supporters of the military metaphors would say. 138 00:18:27,370 --> 00:18:39,310 We would claim when these viruses enter the system, they show us that we are permeable systems. 139 00:18:39,310 --> 00:18:46,210 We are permeable entities. We are not one as we think we we are. 140 00:18:46,210 --> 00:18:51,010 And this is true also in in the human interaction. 141 00:18:51,010 --> 00:19:06,130 So viruses teach us that we we mix with one another, that we we penetrate one another by all kinds of of interactions and exchanges. 142 00:19:06,130 --> 00:19:14,590 There are some exchanges that are possibly deadly, like letting the virus do what it wants with our body. 143 00:19:14,590 --> 00:19:26,500 But there are. But but this is the rule of nature. We are constantly entering other realms and we are constantly entered by other kinds of light. 144 00:19:26,500 --> 00:19:35,530 I tried to do to speculate about this and in a novel of mine, that's why I have some ideas about this. 145 00:19:35,530 --> 00:19:41,020 HIV is indeed and the virus of HIV, which is a very mutant virus, 146 00:19:41,020 --> 00:19:49,120 definitely more mutant than than it is a very good example of what what I've just said. 147 00:19:49,120 --> 00:19:55,180 So yes, we need other metaphors. And as you said, we need peace. 148 00:19:55,180 --> 00:20:06,130 Only through peace will we be able to look at the other to look at our neighbour in whatever form it comes to need column. 149 00:20:06,130 --> 00:20:13,060 Yeah. So the novel that you just mentioned, you'd love it and we tardy and the life published by February 19, 150 00:20:13,060 --> 00:20:16,780 2015, and they have actually found quotations from it. 151 00:20:16,780 --> 00:20:21,550 If you don't mind them, I read them, although the translation mine is really bad. 152 00:20:21,550 --> 00:20:26,750 So please forgive it. But I think that these two quotation tithing very well. 153 00:20:26,750 --> 00:20:30,220 What you say in the attempt to describe the illness, 154 00:20:30,220 --> 00:20:38,350 we never consider the primarily linguistic nature of suffering the clash with the unspeakable and the inexpressible, 155 00:20:38,350 --> 00:20:42,580 the failure of semantics, the imprecision of conclusions. 156 00:20:42,580 --> 00:20:53,560 It just makes us believe in a foreign land where all languages we know are put to death and none of them prove to be useful, not even silence. 157 00:20:53,560 --> 00:21:02,370 And then Nicola adds that however, in the very moment one would leave us and I quote language it springs out of cells. 158 00:21:02,370 --> 00:21:08,380 Each bird eats of practise autonomy. It is what we call head. 159 00:21:08,380 --> 00:21:14,500 I is very beautiful line that I want you to read. 160 00:21:14,500 --> 00:21:25,780 So now that are talking about the the special perspective the translation provides us with, which is the perspective of tolerance, 161 00:21:25,780 --> 00:21:37,330 of understanding, of allowing the other to interact with the author and yet in a way that allows us to preserve our own identity. 162 00:21:37,330 --> 00:21:42,130 I would like to move on to another question which is related to this idea. 163 00:21:42,130 --> 00:21:51,910 So in one of our last phone conversation, you told me in Italian that there some phenomena associated South African radio 164 00:21:51,910 --> 00:21:58,300 that we can not understand the phenomenon that has been turned into an absolute. 165 00:21:58,300 --> 00:22:07,960 So would you like to comment a bit more on the sentence and perhaps is going to ask that what is the link with translation in this case? 166 00:22:07,960 --> 00:22:20,920 Yeah. Yes. Well, nothing taken as an absolute can really help us understand how things work. 167 00:22:20,920 --> 00:22:34,000 So we need to always see things in their connexions with what is probably not there to be seen immediately, but must be inferred as being present. 168 00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:42,850 And therefore COVID must be understood within the broader framework of our political choices of economic crises of international. 169 00:22:42,850 --> 00:22:54,850 All relationships, relations of all, we need to see it as a cultural phenomenon, also not just as an emergency. 170 00:22:54,850 --> 00:22:58,620 And and that's why, again, 171 00:22:58,620 --> 00:23:14,280 translation comes in and comes back in into the picture because it's again a question of relating what phenomena that might look discrete, 172 00:23:14,280 --> 00:23:25,890 separated independent from one another and the bonds, the links, all the connexions we may come up with will be that act of translation. 173 00:23:25,890 --> 00:23:36,150 Of course, if we take translation as this cultural say strategy, we would probably not come up. 174 00:23:36,150 --> 00:23:39,870 We won't come up with that with the text, with the definitive text. 175 00:23:39,870 --> 00:23:46,980 The translation is not a result. It's it's a process. And it's that kind of process we need. 176 00:23:46,980 --> 00:23:52,660 We need to cultivate. So and this probably also answers your very first question. 177 00:23:52,660 --> 00:23:57,690 Well, concerning the entertaining nature of translation. 178 00:23:57,690 --> 00:24:04,650 Well, if we think that translation is just something we want to read and take pleasure from and get pleasure out of? 179 00:24:04,650 --> 00:24:11,700 Well, probably, yes, that we don't need translation in this case, but we need another kind of translation the process, 180 00:24:11,700 --> 00:24:20,640 the effort to reach out for something that we still haven't been able to define, and it's the constant quest for definition. 181 00:24:20,640 --> 00:24:25,850 That, to me, is the very nature the core of the translation we need here. 182 00:24:25,850 --> 00:24:32,480 Thank you so much for showing us so many different facets of this process. 183 00:24:32,480 --> 00:24:36,500 And there is one final point I would like to discuss with you. 184 00:24:36,500 --> 00:24:46,490 And if 13 specifically to your artistic life because Nikola, as well as the academic, is also right there that mentioned before. 185 00:24:46,490 --> 00:24:51,440 So as a novelty, the order could pull out what that contagion mean to you. 186 00:24:51,440 --> 00:25:02,870 Why should a writer cross the boundaries of literature, which in a sense, are the homeland to trespass into the foreign territory, or Madison? 187 00:25:02,870 --> 00:25:12,710 In other words, wouldn't it be better or more efficient if everyone stuck to their role? 188 00:25:12,710 --> 00:25:20,690 Yes. Yeah, I mean, it took me some years to approach medicine. 189 00:25:20,690 --> 00:25:25,370 Of course, there were some autobiographical motivations. 190 00:25:25,370 --> 00:25:32,870 I think it all started when my father got Alzheimer's, and I observed and very closely, 191 00:25:32,870 --> 00:25:43,280 and I became very acquainted with his linguistic impairments as a linguist, myself as a literary student, a scholar. 192 00:25:43,280 --> 00:25:45,710 I managed even though I was his son. 193 00:25:45,710 --> 00:25:55,310 I managed to observe him from, you know, from a critical point of view, almost as if I were doing some, some close reading. 194 00:25:55,310 --> 00:26:02,480 And that prompted me to stop reading quite a lot of literature on the mind, you know, neuroscientific literature. 195 00:26:02,480 --> 00:26:06,140 Some of it, of course, was quite hard for me. But I, you know, 196 00:26:06,140 --> 00:26:13,040 I started speaking with the neuroscientists and I really did try hard to translate what I 197 00:26:13,040 --> 00:26:22,700 as a man of letters said or could say into what a neuroscientist had to say or could say. 198 00:26:22,700 --> 00:26:26,120 It was hard. It was hard because neuroscientists, 199 00:26:26,120 --> 00:26:37,790 at least those I spoke with and I even worked with at some point in New York were quite reluctant to my metaphors. 200 00:26:37,790 --> 00:26:44,180 The language they don't know. I mean, most doctors don't know that they too use metaphors all the time, 201 00:26:44,180 --> 00:26:51,620 even though they think they're using a perfectly shaped and crystallised terminology. 202 00:26:51,620 --> 00:26:55,010 But they're terminologies full of metaphors. 203 00:26:55,010 --> 00:27:04,010 And but they, of course, wouldn't tell you that this is the case because they're looking for, you know, clear and transparent sense. 204 00:27:04,010 --> 00:27:10,550 They want meaning to be graspable for everybody in the same manner. 205 00:27:10,550 --> 00:27:19,580 They don't want ambiguities. On the contrary, we mean people of letters meet the men women of letters in the youngsters. 206 00:27:19,580 --> 00:27:26,690 We cultivate ambiguity. We we we try to look into it. 207 00:27:26,690 --> 00:27:33,830 Now it all started like that, and then I, I became all the more interested in medicine. 208 00:27:33,830 --> 00:27:46,400 Every time I had to see a doctor and every time I realised the doctor had very poor linguistic tools to talk to me or to talk to my my loved ones. 209 00:27:46,400 --> 00:27:54,830 So I, I became ever more aware that medicine today would greatly benefit benefit from literature. 210 00:27:54,830 --> 00:27:59,540 I spoke with even the university faculties in Italy. 211 00:27:59,540 --> 00:28:03,950 Some people, some some professors, became interested in my work. 212 00:28:03,950 --> 00:28:13,010 I was invited to conference says I opened the World Conference on AIDS two years ago because of my novel. 213 00:28:13,010 --> 00:28:19,880 And they even were even tempted to ask me to teach courses in literature for four doctors. 214 00:28:19,880 --> 00:28:29,390 Of course, it was flattering. I didn't do it, but I think it's about the time we really reconnected medicine and literature, 215 00:28:29,390 --> 00:28:37,280 which is something that was at the very beginning of of literature of medicine. 216 00:28:37,280 --> 00:28:41,670 I mean, the bond between medicine and poetry has always been there. 217 00:28:41,670 --> 00:28:48,920 We forgot it. But let's go back to Africa star or the guy I mentioned, the guy who made who named syphilis. 218 00:28:48,920 --> 00:28:56,720 He was an amazing poet and the very, very, very good scientist and medical doctor. 219 00:28:56,720 --> 00:29:02,240 Medicine is a language. It's it's hard to call it a science. 220 00:29:02,240 --> 00:29:11,120 It rests on many sciences, but it's still a very humanistic world of of interests. 221 00:29:11,120 --> 00:29:16,580 We need to rekindle the linguistic awareness of medicine. 222 00:29:16,580 --> 00:29:22,400 Thank you. Need Cohen. And this is absolutely true, and I shall leave you completely. 223 00:29:22,400 --> 00:29:30,710 And that would also, of course, add to the. Once the other of the toll, could that be in the same manner? 224 00:29:30,710 --> 00:29:42,860 Also, literature is a very bodily experience and there is no literary text without the beating heart or thinking mind moving to. 225 00:29:42,860 --> 00:29:46,340 Let me say this, I don't know if you if you if you like me to say this, 226 00:29:46,340 --> 00:29:56,780 but we don't wish I shouldn't silence the fact that you were a medical student yourself at some level and you compare it to literature. 227 00:29:56,780 --> 00:30:06,020 I mean, I think you started as a literature student, then moved to medicine, and after some years in medicine, you moved that back to to literature. 228 00:30:06,020 --> 00:30:13,670 So there could be a more qualified, I believe, a scholar than you to make to conclude these terms. 229 00:30:13,670 --> 00:30:21,800 Thank you very much. Anthony Gola, this is very kind of you, and I thank you immensely for this wonderful talk. 230 00:30:21,800 --> 00:30:26,960 I could not have hoped for a better and fascinating beginning. 231 00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:31,430 And thank you to each one of you for watching this video. 232 00:30:31,430 --> 00:30:37,220 We hope that these reflections will help us find new ways to translate in. 233 00:30:37,220 --> 00:30:39,488 Thank you so much. Thank you and good.