帕慕克諾貝爾受獎演說

父親的手提箱 -- 帕慕克諾貝爾受獎演說


父親在去世的兩年前給了我一個小手提箱，裏麵裝的是他的作品，手稿和筆記。他裝作以前那樣輕鬆玩笑地要我在他走後再看，這個“走”當然是說的是他死了以後。

　　他說：“翻翻就行了。看看有沒有對你有用的東西。或許在我走後你可以挑選一些發表。”

　　說這話時是在我的書房裏。在四麵全是書的牆的包圍之中，父親想找個地方放下箱子。他左右徘徊，就仿佛一個想把自己身上的痛苦的負擔趕緊卸下去的人。最後，他悄悄地把它放在了一個不起眼的角落裏。那真是個有點尷尬卻又難忘的時刻。但隨後我們就恢複了常態。平常的輕鬆，俏皮和嘲諷性情立刻顯現出來。我們照例聊了些家長裏短，土耳其的政壇醜聞，還有父親一直沒有起色的商業投資，說這些時我們一點都不傷心。

　　父親走後，我圍著那個箱子轉了幾天，卻碰都沒有碰一下。這個小小的黑皮箱子我太熟悉了。父親旅行的時候總是帶著它。有時上班也用它來裝文件。我還記得小時候父親出差一回來，我就會打開箱子，把裏麵的東西都翻出來檢查一番，感受一下古龍水和異域的情調。這個箱子就像是一個老朋友，承載我的童年及過去的記憶。可現在我卻不能碰它一下，為什麽？當然是因為其中的沉重的內涵。

　　現在就來說說這沉重的內涵。這是一個人把自己關在一個房間裏麵，坐在桌子麵前，完全把自己投入到自己的思想表達中——這正是文學的意義。

　　我摩挲著父親的箱子，還是不敢打開它，可我卻非常了解那些筆記本上記的是什麽。我曾經見過父親往它們上麵寫東西。這也不是我第一次見到箱子裏的東西了。四十年代的時候，父親有一個很的圖書室。他也曾想當一名伊斯蘭詩人，還把瓦雷裏的詩譯成了土耳其語呢。但他不想過那種在一個窮地方寫幾首沒人看的詩的生活。父親的父親——我的祖父——是一個有錢的商人；父親小時和年輕時過得都是很富足，所以他也沒打算要為了文學，為了寫作忍受貧窮。他喜歡生活中精致的東西——對此我也深表理解。

　　當然，讓我無法打開父親箱子的第一條就是我害怕我會看到我不願意看到的東西。父親就是知道這一點才裝作不把它當回事的樣子。作為一個寫了25年書的人，這一情景實在讓我痛心。但我對於父親沒能認真投身文學事業不是生氣……我真正的擔心是發現父親是個優秀作家的可能。這正是我不敢開父親的箱子所擔心的。更糟的是我都不敢公開的承認這一點。因為如果從父親的箱子裏拿出來的真是偉大的文學作品，我就必須麵對父親身體裏麵存在著完全不同的另外一個人。這個可能性太可怕了。因為即便是一把年紀了，我也隻希望我父親就是我父親而不是一個作家什麽的。

　　作家是一種能夠耐心地花費多年時間去發現一個內在自我和造就了他的世界的人。當我談到寫作時，我腦子裏想到的不是小說，詩歌或是文學傳統，而是一個把自己關在房間裏，單獨麵對自己的內心的人；在自己的內心深處，他用言語建造了一個新的世界。這個男人或是女人，可能用的是打字機，也有可能利用電腦的先進技術，或者隻是拿筆在紙上寫。他寫作的時候可能喝茶，喝咖啡，抽煙，還時不時會站起來，望著窗外在大街上嬉戲的兒童，如果幸運的話，可能還能看到綠樹或是風景；也許他隻能麵對一堵灰牆。他可以像我一樣，寫詩，寫戲劇，寫小說。同樣都是坐在桌子後麵，努力的思考，結果卻大不一樣。寫作就是將他內在的凝視集中到文字上、研究在他回歸自我的內心後，依然人來人往的外部世界。他這樣做時還得從容、執著、興趣盎然。我坐在桌前，日複一日，月複一月，年複一年，不斷用文字填滿空白的稿紙，我感覺自己是在創建一個全新的世界，就像是在自己內心加入了許多人的性情。同樣地，一個人也可以一塊石頭一塊石頭地建起一座大橋或是大廈，我們作家用的材料就是文字。我們把它們放在手中掂量著，揣摸著他們相互之間的銜接關係，有時需要後退到遠處瞧瞧，有時需要用手指和筆尖細細摩挲，衡量再三，東移西湊，在時光流逝中創造出新的世界。


　　作家的秘訣不在於靈感——因為誰也不知道它來自哪裏——而是靠固執，耐心。有一句老話——就是用根針挖井——我覺得就說出了作家的概念。在那些老故事中，我最喜歡Ferhat的那份決心，他可以愚公移山似的追求愛情——我非常理解他。在我的小說《我的名字叫紅》中，當我寫到那個老波斯畫家以一種不變的熱情長年畫著一模一樣的馬，一筆一畫都能倒背如流，閉著眼睛也能畫出那些漂亮的駿馬。我知道我在談論寫作的職業化，和我自己的生活。如果一個作家講的是自己的故事——要慢慢的講，要當它是別人的故事來講——假如他感覺到這些故事在他心裏已經成熟，他就該坐下來，把自己完全交付這一藝術——它已經被賦予了期待。靈感天使（通常經常光顧一些人而對另一些人卻不大理睬）喜歡有期待，有信心的人。而正是在一個作者感到最孤獨，對自己的努力，夢想及作品的價值最困惑的時候——這時他會認為自己的故事僅僅是自己的故事——天使就是選擇在這個時刻給他以故事，圖像和夢來幫他描繪出他想象中的世界。回頭想想那些我為之奮鬥一生的書，我自己都對那些時刻感到驚訝。那些讓我如此癡迷沉醉的句子，仿佛根本不是來自我自己的想象，而是冥冥之中的慷慨禮物。

　　我害怕打開父親的箱子，看到他的筆記本還因為我知道他忍受不了我在創作過程中經曆的艱辛。他不喜歡孤獨，而喜歡朋友、人群、沙龍、玩笑和夥伴。可後來我的想法又改變了。這些想法，這些所謂放棄和忍耐才能實現寫作夢想的說法，其實是我在自己的寫作生活和經曆中養成的偏見。不是也有無數才華橫溢的作家是在人群中，在家庭生活裏，在朋友的陪伴和愉快的閑聊中創作的嗎？還有，父親還在我小時候也曾厭倦了家庭生活的單調，離開我們去了巴黎。在那兒——和許多有名的作家一樣——他一個人呆在旅館的房間裏，看自己的筆記。我也知道，那就是現在躺在箱子裏的這些筆記。因為在把箱子給我之前的幾年間，他陸續地告訴我他那一段時期的生活。他甚至還告訴我我孩提時的種種往事，但卻絕口不提他的致命弱點，他的作家夢，還有他在旅館時的身份等煩人問題。他隻是大談他在在大街上碰過幾次薩特，看過些什麽書和電影，說起來眉飛色舞，一臉虔誠，就像宣布什麽重大新聞似的。我成了作家之後，我一直認為這要部分歸功於我有一個大侃世界知名作家遠勝於政壇高官和宗教領袖的父親。所以我必須在這種背景下來讀父親的筆記，同時牢記對他的圖書室對我的巨大裨益。我要記著父親和我們一起生活的時候，和我一樣就喜歡一個人看書，思考——而並未過多地注意自己的寫作水平。


　　可當我如此熱切地注視著這個父親留給我的箱子時，我還是感覺到我做不到。父親有時會從一摞書前麵的長沙發裏站起來，放下手上的書或雜誌，恍然若夢，長時間的沉靜在自己的思緒中。每當我看到他臉上一幅與我們開玩笑，找樂子和耍貧嘴大不一樣的神情時——也就是他開始內省的跡象——我（尤其是在小時候）就會不安地猜想他又不滿意了。如今，許多年過去了，我體會到這種不滿其實是成為一個作家的特性。要當一個作家，光有耐心和辛勞是不夠的。首先要從人群、同伴、家常瑣事，日常生活中逃離出來，然後把自己關在一個房間裏。我們乞求耐心和希望，以在筆下創造一個深刻的世界。但這種把自己關在房間裏的衝動正是推動我們作為的動力。蒙田——一個為內心愉悅而讀書，一個隻聆聽自己的心聲而抗拒他人的嘈雜的人，一個和自己的書的對話發展自己的思想以及自己的世界的人——當仁不讓地可作為早期現代文學獨立作家的先驅。蒙田是父親經常反複咀嚼的一個作家，也是他一直向我推薦的作家。我喜歡把自己看成是一個作家傳統中的一位成員，不管他們是誰，來自世界的那個角落，他們都一無例外的與世隔絕，把自己關起來隻跟書呆在一起。真正的文學始於一個把自己和書關起來的人。

　　一旦把自己關起來，我們很快就發現這其實不是想象中的那麽孤獨。我們有前人的話語為伴。它們在別人的故事裏，在別人的書中，我們把它們稱作傳統。我認為文學是人類在認識自我的追尋中最有價值的寶藏。各種各樣的社會，部落，人群變得越來越智慧，豐富，先進，就是因為他們重視自己作家們的話，而且，我們都知道焚書坑儒就意味著黑暗無知的到來。但文學從來都不僅是一個民族的事，那個把自己關起來的作者首先是進入自己意誌的旅程，積年之後，就會發現文學的永恒規則；這時他就需要把自己的故事當作他人的故事來講和把他人的故事說成自己的故事的藝術才能，因為文學就是這樣的。但前提是我們通攬別人的故事和書籍。

　　父親有一個很好的圖書室——總共有1500冊藏書——對一個作家來說也足夠了。22歲時，我雖然還沒讀完這些書，可我卻對他們卻了如指掌——我知道哪本很重要，我知道哪本不重要卻容易讀，哪本是經典名著，哪本是任何教育都缺少不了的，哪本看完就忘卻不乏一些當地曆史有趣掌故，以及父親對哪個法國作家評價甚高。有時，我會遠遠地注視著這個圖書室，想象有一天，在另一個房子裏，我能建起自己的圖書室，一個更好的圖書室——給自己建一個世界。從遠處看父親的圖書室，在我看來就是一個真實世界的一個小縮影。是一個從伊斯坦布爾我們自己的角落看過去的世界。這個圖書室在這方麵尤其明顯。父親的圖書主要來自一次又一次到巴黎和美國的旅行，也有從專賣四五十年代外版書的商店和伊斯坦布爾大大小小的書商裏淘來的，那些書商我也認識。而我的世界是國內的——民族的——和西方的混合物。七十年代時，我也曾雄心萬丈地要打造一個自己的圖書室。那時我還沒決心成為一個作家——正如我在《伊斯坦布爾》提到過的，那時我意識到自己根本成不了一個畫家，但我也不知道我該走哪條路。在我的內心有一股強烈的好奇心，一種有著強烈希望的欲望促使我去閱讀和學習。同是我也覺得生活中好像缺了點什麽，好像我沒法過的跟別人一樣的生活。這種感覺部分跟我看著父親的圖書室是的感覺有聯係——生活得距離事務中心很遙遠，因為那時我們住在伊斯坦布爾的人都覺得有一種住在鄉下的感覺。我的焦慮和些許的失落感還有另一個原因，因為十分清楚自己生活在一個對藝術家絲毫不感興趣的國家——不論是畫家還是作家——這就令他們絕望了。七十年代時，我拿著父親給我的錢在從伊斯坦布爾的舊書商那裏貪婪地購買那些褪色的，灰頭土臉的卷角舊書。那些舊書店的可憐情形就像那些書一樣深深的打動了我——窮困潦倒的書商們的毫無生氣，淩亂不堪。他們在路邊，在清真寺的院子裏，在歙簌掉土的牆腳下隨便攤開自己的家什。

　　至於我在這個世界上的位置——在生活中和在文學上一樣，我的基本感覺就是“遠離中心”。在這個世界的中心，有一種比我們自己的生活要更豐富，更激動人心的生活，在伊斯坦布爾，在土耳其，到處都有，可我不在其中。今天，我想這個世界上有很多人會和我有同感。同樣的，世界文學，也有它的中心，離我也很遙遠。其實我腦子裏想的是西方而不是世界文學，我們土耳其人不在其中。我父親的圖書室就是一個很好的明證。在圖書室的一端，是伊斯坦布爾的書——我們的文學，我們本地的世界，有著無數親切的細節——而在另一端，是個外來者，西方或是世界文學，一個截然不同的，讓我們又痛又愛的世界。閱讀、寫作，就像是離開一個世界到另一個不同的、奇怪的和令人驚異的世界中去找尋安慰。我感覺父親就是靠讀這些小說來逃往西方世界——就像後來我做的一樣。或者，在我看來，那時的書就是我們撿起來逃避我們自己的文化的工具，因為我們對自己的文化感到如此的失落。為了充實自己的筆記，父親趕到巴黎，把自己關起來，然後又帶著手稿回土耳其。我看著父親的箱子，這就是讓我坐立不安的源頭。在一個房間裏寫作25年之後，我成了土耳其的作家，當看到父親把自己的想法緊緊地鎖在了箱子裏，就像寫作是一項秘密工作，要遠離社會、國家，和人們的視線。這讓我羞愧。這可能是我對父親不能像我一樣認真對待文學而倍感氣憤的原因吧。

　　事實上我就是因為父親沒選擇和我一樣的生活生氣。可他從未和自己的生活過不去，他一輩子都快樂地和朋友親人在一起。但我自己又有點知道我與其說是“生氣”不如說是“妒忌”，後者要準確得多了，而這一點又讓我尤其不安。每逢想到這點，我就會輕蔑，惱怒地大聲問自己：“幸福是什麽？”幸福是孤獨的關在暗無天日的房間裏嗎？或者是與芸芸眾生一起，過著或裝出過著舒適生活的樣子？還是不管幸福與否，都和周圍的人事和諧一致，享受生活的同時悄悄地寫下來？這些問題實在是太讓人煩惱了。誰說幸福是衡量生活的唯一標準的？大眾，報紙，每個人都把幸福當作評判生活的重要尺度。這事本身是不是說明其反麵也很值得探尋一番？畢竟，父親也曾多次從家裏逃跑——我又能說我對他有多少了解，我對他的焦慮又有多少理解呢？

　　我第一次打開父親的箱子時就是受這種情緒影響的。父親生活中是不是有什麽我毫不知情的秘密或是不幸而他隻能默默忍受，傾瀉在紙上？一打開箱子，旅行的氣息就撲麵而來。我認出了其中的幾本筆記，父親多年前曾給我看過，但我卻從沒仔細讀過。我現在拿在手裏大多數筆記是我們還年輕時父親到巴黎去做的。我就想讀我所崇拜的作家的手記一樣急切地想要了解父親在我那個年級的時候都想了些什麽，寫了些什麽。不久我就意識到不是那麽回事。最讓我不舒服的是我在筆記中時不時能讀到作家的腔調。我知道那不是父親的聲音。一點都不真實，至少不屬於我認識的我的父親的聲音。在對父親寫作時可能不是他自己的擔心之下，還有更深的擔憂：害怕內心深處的自己也不真實，害怕在父親的作品裏找不到什麽好東西。這又增加了我對父親受太多作家的影響的憂慮。我年青的時候也為此深受折磨，幾乎陷入絕境，差點就放棄我的本性，我的寫作欲望，我對生活拷問的習慣。在我當作家的前十年裏，我對此倍感焦慮，盡管後來有所擺脫，我還是會擔心某天我還得承認自己的失敗——就像我在繪畫上的努力一樣——最終屈服於這種煩躁，放棄小說的創作。

　　我曾經提到過我關上父親的箱子時產生的兩種情緒: 在外省的被放逐感覺和我自己缺乏真實性的感覺。這當然不是我第一次有這樣的感覺。多年來他們就一直在我的閱讀、寫作當中存在著，我也就一直在研究，發現甚至深化這些各式各樣的、出人意料的，既讓人精神崩潰也讓人情緒高漲的情感和色彩。我的靈魂是早已被混亂，敏感和來自生活中和書本裏的稍縱即逝的痛苦所困擾，這些大多來自年輕時的體會。隻有當我寫書的時候才對真實性的問題（比如《我的名字是紅》和《黑書》）和邊緣性的生活(比如《雪》和《伊斯坦布爾》)有了更全麵的理解。對我來說，做一名作家就是去挖自己內心深處的隱秘傷疤，他們是如此的隱秘，有時甚至我們自己都不知道他們的存在，還要不辭辛苦地去研究、了解、揭示它們，真正的去擁有這些傷和痛，把他們變成我們的精神和作品中的看得見的部分。


　　作家談論的是大家都知道但卻不知道自己知道的事。他要去探討它們，關注他們的成長，這是一件令人愉快的工作；讀者們看到的是一個既熟悉而又不可思議的世界。當一個作家經年累月地把自己關在房間裏磨練自己的技藝的時候——他是在創造一個世界——如果他是從揭開自己的秘密傷口開始的話，不管他是否意識到了，他都是對人性賦予了最大的信任。我的信心就來自一個信念即所有的人都是一樣的，他們也有著和我一樣的傷痛的——因而他們會理解我。真正的文學都來自於那份充滿童真和希望的信心，就是所有的人都是相像的。但一個作家閉門數十載，就是在用這種姿態宣示一個基本的人性，揭示一個沒有中心的世界。

　　但是從我父親的箱子和伊斯坦布爾人蒼白的生活可以看出，這個世界的確有一個中心，而且離我們很遙遠。在我的書中，我曾詳細描述這個事實是如何激起過契訶夫式的邊緣感受，以及他是怎麽從另外一方麵引起了我自己的真實性的懷疑。根據經驗我知道這個星球上的大部分人都有這種情緒，相對於我，有些人可能還遭受著更為深刻的物質匱乏，沒有安全感和墮落感折磨。人類麵臨的重大難題還是土地缺乏，無家可歸和饑餓……但今天的電視和報紙可以比文學更為迅速簡潔的報道這些基本問題。而文學最迫切的任務是要講述並研究人類的基本恐懼：被遺棄在外的恐懼，碌碌無為的恐懼，以及由這些恐懼而衍生的人生毫無價值的恐懼；集體性的恥辱，挫折，渺小，痛苦，敏感和臆想的侮辱、還有民族主義者的煽動和對即將到來的通貨膨脹的擔心……不論何時我麵對這些傷感，煩惱，通常以誇張的語言表達出來的時候，我就知道他們觸及了我內心深處的黑暗。我們曾看過西方社會以外的民族，社會，和國家——我很容易認同他們——常常因為被恐懼折磨得犯一些愚蠢的錯誤，僅僅是因為害怕受到羞辱和敏感。我也知道西方——我也同樣容易認同的一個世界——一些國家和民族對自己的財富，對他們把我們帶進了文藝複興，啟蒙運動，現代主義有著不一般的自豪，但他們時不時的也由於自我滿足幹出一些同樣愚蠢的事來。

　　這就意味著我父親不是唯一把一個有中心的世界看得太重的人。而那促使我們閉門數十年寫作的是一個相反的信念；那信念是相信有一天我們的文字會被讀到而且被理解，因為世界上的人都是相似的。可從我父親及我自己的作品來看，似乎是有點過於樂觀了，因為裏麵充滿了對被擠在邊緣，排斥在世界外圍的怒氣留下的傷痕。陀思妥耶夫斯基一生對西方愛恨交織——現在我也許多方麵體會到了。但如果說我認識到了一個基本的真理的話，如果我要為這一樂觀主義辯解的話，就是因為我和這位偉大的作家一起經曆了對西方的愛恨情仇，一起關注了他在另一方向上建立的另一個世界。

　　所有獻身這一任務的作家都明白這樣一個現實：不論遠來的目的是什麽，我們曆經數十載滿環希望創建的一個世界最終將轉移到另一個完全不同的地方去。他將把我們帶到一個遠離那張我們帶著傷感和怒氣工作的桌子，到傷感和怒氣的另一麵，另一個世界。我父親可能還沒到那裏嗎？就像一塊正在形成的大陸，慢慢的從五彩繽紛的薄霧中升起，就像經過長途的海上旅程，終於見到了小島，這個新世界一直在迷惑著我們。我們就像當年西方的旅行者飄洋過海尋找伊斯坦布爾一樣，被霧靄魅惑了。在這個以希望和好奇開始的旅程結束時，一座滿是清真寺和尖塔，密密匝匝布滿屋舍，街道，山巒，橋梁，斜坡的完整的城市展現在你的麵前了。看到它，我們都希望走進去，藏身其中，就像我們讀一本書那樣。因為感到土氣，被排斥，氣憤，或是極端孤獨，我們坐下來看書，卻發現了一個超越這些傷感情緒的全新世界。

　　我現在的感受和我孩童和青年時期正好相反：對我來說世界的中心就是伊斯坦布爾。這不僅是因為我一輩子都生活在此，而且因為過去33年裏，我一直在講述它的街道，橋梁，居民，購，房舍，清真寺，噴泉，傳奇英雄，商店，名人，汙點，它的日日夜夜，我把它變成了自己的一部分，完全接納了它。當我親手建成這個世界時，目標就達到了。這個世界存在我的腦海中，它比那個我所生活的世界還要真實。這是因為，在我的世界中，所有的人和物還有建築都開始相互交流，以一種我不曾預料的方式互動起來，就像是它們不適依賴於我的想象和書，而是獨立存在一樣。

　　看著那箱子，我覺得父親在他寫作的那些年裏可能也發現了這些樂趣：我不應該對他預先判斷。我很感激他。不管怎麽說，他從來不是一個呼來喝去，懲罰不分的平庸父親，而是一個讓我自由選擇，對我表示最大限度的尊敬的父親。我常想，要是我當初偶爾能對父親談談我的想象該多好啊，不管是放肆的還是幼稚的。因為跟我其他朋友的童年不一樣，我從來沒怕過我的父親，我有時還認為我之所以能成為一名作家就是因為我父親當初就想當作家。我必須要一顆容忍心來閱讀它——看看他在旅館房間裏究竟寫了些什麽。

　　正是帶著這種希望，我又走到了那個箱子跟前。它還靜靜地立在父親放置的地方。我全神貫注地通讀了幾本手稿和筆記。我父親寫了些什麽呢？我記得有一些是巴黎旅館窗外的景致，幾首詩，一些似是而非的觀點，分析等等……我寫作的時候就像一個出了車禍的人拚命要回憶起到底發生了什麽事，卻又害怕會記起太多的可怕場景。在孩提的時，我父母一到吵架的邊緣——就是他們相互不說話的時候——爸爸就會打開收音機來調節一下情緒，而音樂就會幫助我們很快地忘掉不愉快。


　　現在讓我來說幾句像音樂一樣能調節情緒的好話吧。你知道，我們作家問得最多的一個問題也是最喜歡的一個問題就是：為什麽寫作？我寫作是因為內心的衝動，也因為我不能像別人一樣做好其他的工作，還因為我想讀到像自己一樣的人寫的書。我寫作是因為生所有的人的氣，每一個人。我寫作是因為我喜歡整天地坐在桌子前麵子寫東西。我寫作是因為隻有改變真實的生活來分享經驗。我寫作是因為我想讓其他的人，世界上所有的人都了解到我們在土耳其伊斯坦布爾過的是一種什麽樣的生活，我們還將繼續生活下去。我寫作是因為我喜歡紙張、鋼筆和墨水的芬芳。我寫作是因為相對其他東西，我更信仰文學，信仰小說藝術。我寫作是因為是一種習慣和熱情。我寫作是因為我害怕被遺忘。我寫作是因為我喜歡寫作帶來的榮耀和樂趣。我寫作是因為我享受孤獨。也可能我寫作是因為我希望你們能理解我為什麽對你們這麽的憤怒，對每一個人都這麽的憤怒。我寫作是因為我喜歡別人讀我的故事。我寫作是因為我曾經寫過一部小說，一篇文章，某一頁的開頭，我想把它寫完。我寫作是因為每個人都希望我寫下去。我寫作是因為我有一個孩子般的執著：要有一個不朽的圖書室，書架上還要有自己的書。我寫作是因為把生活中的美和豐富轉變成文字是一項激動人心的工作。我寫作不僅僅是要講述一個故事，而是要創造一個故事。我寫作是因為我希望能逃脫那不祥的預兆，就像在夢裏一樣我有個地方要去卻總也到不了。我寫作是因為我從來沒讓自己快樂過，寫作能讓我快樂。

　　在把箱子留在我辦公室後一個星期，父親又來看過我一次；一如既往，他給我買了巧克力（他忘了我都48歲了）。也一如既往，我們聊了些生活，政治和家庭瑣事。後來他終於看到他放的箱子被我移動過了。我們就互相看了看，陷入了尷尬的沉默。我沒說我打開了箱子，看了裏麵的內容，相反，我隻是把視線移開了。他立刻明白了。就像我明白他明白了一樣。就像他明白我明白他明白了一樣。但所有的明白就在幾秒鍾之內明白了。因為父親是一個快樂，懶散但卻對自己有信心的人；他隻是照例衝我笑了笑。當他離開時，沒忘記把他作為父親該說的讚揚鼓勵之詞又重複了一遍。

　　我也同往日一樣，注視著他離開，無比羨慕他的快樂，無憂無慮和處世不驚的脾氣。我也記得那天我心裏有一小會兒的竊喜讓我感到羞恥。那是由我感覺到我可能生活上可能過得不如他舒適的念頭引起的。可能我不如他過得快樂，自由自在，但我獻身於寫作了——你明白……我為自己對父親有這樣的想法感到羞愧。在所有的人中，父親從來沒讓我痛苦過——他完全讓我自由發展。這些都讓我們想到寫作和文學是和生活中中心的缺失，和我們的幸福與負疚相聯係的。

　　我的故事同時也相應地提醒我那天還有一件事讓我更加內疚。在父親把箱交給我的二十三年前，在我決心放棄一切把自己關起來去當一名小說家四年之後，就是我22歲時，我完成了第一步小說《傑夫德貝伊與其子》。我用顫抖的手將打印稿拿給父親看，想聽一點他的意見。這並不僅是因為我相信以他的品位和智慧，或是他的意見對我來說非常重要，還因為他不像母親那樣，反對我成為一個作家。在這點上，父親遠比我們有遠見多了。我迫不及待的等著他的消息。兩個星期之後他來了，我跑過去把門打開。父親沒有說任何話，隻是張開手臂給了我一個擁抱，用這種方式告訴我他非常非常喜歡這部作品。有一會兒，我倆陷入了那種由於異常激動帶來的無言沉默。後來，等我們平靜下來開始說話，他用了一種誇張的語言對我和我的處女作表達了他的強烈信心：他告訴我說總有一天我會贏得像站在這裏接受這個獎項這樣的無限快樂。

　　他說這話不是因為想用好聽的來安慰我，或是把這個獎項作為目標來刺激我；他像所有的土耳其父親那樣給自己的兒子以支持，並鼓勵我說：“總有一天，你會獲得榮譽並成為帕夏！”許多年來，無論何時，他看到我都以同樣的話語鼓勵我。

　　我父親在2002年12月去世了。

　　今天，我站在這裏，站在給予我這無尚光榮的獎項的瑞典文學院的同事們和尊敬的來賓們麵前，我深切地希望此刻他就在我們中間。

　　（根據瑞典文學院官方網站英文稿譯出 翻譯：湘洋）
Nobel Lecture
December 7, 2006

My Father's Suitcase

Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.

'Just take a look,' he said, looking slightly embarrassed. 'See if there's anything inside that you can use. Maybe after I'm gone you can make a selection and publish it.'

We were in my study, surrounded by books. My father was searching for a place to set down the suitcase, wandering back and forth like a man who wished to rid himself of a painful burden. In the end, he deposited it quietly in an unobtrusive corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back into our usual roles, taking life lightly, our joking, mocking personas took over and we relaxed. We talked as we always did, about the trivial things of everyday life, and Turkey's neverending political troubles, and my father's mostly failed business ventures, without feeling too much sorrow.

I remember that after my father left, I spent several days walking back and forth past the suitcase without once touching it. I was already familiar with this small, black, leather suitcase, and its lock, and its rounded corners. My father would take it with him on short trips and sometimes use it to carry documents to work. I remembered that when I was a child, and my father came home from a trip, I would open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savouring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. This suitcase was a familiar friend, a powerful reminder of my childhood, my past, but now I couldn't even touch it. Why? No doubt it was because of the mysterious weight of its contents.

I am now going to speak of this weight's meaning. It is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and retires to a corner to express his thoughts – that is, the meaning of literature.

When I did touch my father's suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it, but I did know what was inside some of those notebooks. I had seen my father writing things in a few of them. This was not the first time I had heard of the heavy load inside the suitcase. My father had a large library; in his youth, in the late 1940s, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, but he had not wanted to live the sort of life that came with writing poetry in a poor country with few readers. My father's father – my grandfather – had been a wealthy business man; my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man, and he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties – this I understood.

The first thing that kept me distant from the contents of my father's suitcase was, of course, the fear that I might not like what I read. Because my father knew this, he had taken the precaution of acting as if he did not take its contents seriously. After working as a writer for 25 years, it pained me to see this. But I did not even want to be angry at my father for failing to take literature seriously enough ... My real fear, the crucial thing that I did not wish to know or discover, was the possibility that my father might be a good writer. I couldn't open my father's suitcase because I feared this. Even worse, I couldn't even admit this myself openly. If true and great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed an entirely different man. This was a frightening possibility. Because even at my advanced age I wanted my father to be only my father – not a writer.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorising each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

I was afraid of opening my father's suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would not tolerate the difficulties I had endured, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, salons, jokes, company. But later my thoughts took a different turn. These thoughts, these dreams of renunciation and patience, were prejudices I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote surrounded by crowds and family life, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, my father had, when we were young, tired of the monotony of family life, and left us to go to Paris, where – like so many writers – he'd sat in his hotel room filling notebooks. I knew, too, that some of those very notebooks were in this suitcase, because during the years before he brought it to me, my father had finally begun to talk to me about that period in his life. He spoke about those years even when I was a child, but he would not mention his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his hotel room. He would tell me instead about all the times he'd seen Sartre on the pavements of Paris, about the books he'd read and the films he'd seen, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting very important news. When I became a writer, I never forgot that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who would talk of world writers so much more than he spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. So perhaps I had to read my father's notebooks with this in mind, and remembering how indebted I was to his large library. I had to bear in mind that when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts – and not pay too much attention to the literary quality of his writing.

But as I gazed so anxiously at the suitcase my father had bequeathed me, I also felt that this was the very thing I would not be able to do. My father would sometimes stretch out on the divan in front of his books, abandon the book in his hand, or the magazine and drift off into a dream, lose himself for the longest time in his thoughts. When I saw on his face an expression so very different from the one he wore amid the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life – when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze – I would, especially during my childhood and my early youth, understand, with trepidation, that he was discontent. Now, so many years later, I know that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. To become a writer, patience and toil are not enough: we must first feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life, and shut ourselves up in a room. We wish for patience and hope so that we can create a deep world in our writing. But the desire to shut oneself up in a room is what pushes us into action. The precursor of this sort of independent writer – who reads his books to his heart's content, and who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes with other's words, who, by entering into conversation with his books develops his own thoughts, and his own world – was most certainly Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who – wherever they are in the world, in the East or in the West – cut themselves off from society, and shut themselves up with their books in their room. The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.

My father had a good library – 1 500 volumes in all – more than enough for a writer. By the age of 22, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book – I knew which were important, which were light but easy to read, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which were forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated very highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library – build myself a world. When I looked at my father's library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. The library was evidence of this. My father had built his library from his trips abroad, mostly with books from Paris and America, but also with books bought from the shops that sold books in foreign languages in the 40s and 50s and Istanbul's old and new booksellers, whom I also knew. My world is a mixture of the local – the national – and the West. In the 70s, I, too, began, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer – as I related in Istanbul, I had come to feel that I would not, after all, become a painter, but I was not sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others. Part of this feeling was connected to what I felt when I gazed at my father's library – to be living far from the centre of things, as all of us who lived in Istanbul in those days were made to feel, that feeling of living in the provinces. There was another reason for feeling anxious and somehow lacking, for I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists – be they painters or writers – and that gave them no hope. In the 70s, when I would take the money my father gave me and greedily buy faded, dusty, dog-eared books from Istanbul's old booksellers, I would be as affected by the pitiable state of these second-hand bookstores – and by the despairing dishevelment of the poor, bedraggled booksellers who laid out their wares on roadsides, in mosque courtyards, and in the niches of crumbling walls – as I was by their books.

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was 'not in the centre'. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father's library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul's books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world's otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. It wasn't just by reading that we left our Istanbul lives to travel West – it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father's suitcase, it seemed to me that this was what was causing me disquiet. After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.

Actually I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine, because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent his life happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me knew that I could also say that I was not so much 'angry' as 'jealous', that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. That would be when I would ask myself in my usual scornful, angry voice: 'What is happiness?' Was happiness thinking that I lived a deep life in that lonely room? Or was happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or acting as if you did? Was it happiness, or unhappiness, to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all around one? But these were overly ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got this idea that the measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers, everyone acted as if the most important measure of a life was happiness. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the exact opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family so many times – how well did I know him, and how well could I say I understood his disquiet?

So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father's suitcase. Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life about which I knew nothing, something he could only endure by pouring it into his writing? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel, recognised several notebooks, and noted that my father had shown them to me years earlier, but without dwelling on them very long. Most of the notebooks I now took into my hands he had filled when he had left us and gone to Paris as a young man. Whereas I, like so many writers I admired – writers whose biographies I had read – wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now. It did not take me long to realise that I would find nothing like that here. What caused me most disquiet was when, here and there in my father's notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father's voice, I told myself; it wasn't authentic, or at least it did not belong to the man I'd known as my father. Underneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote, was a deeper fear: the fear that deep inside I was not authentic, that I would find nothing good in my father's writing, this increased my fear of finding my father to have been overly influenced by other writers and plunged me into a despair that had afflicted me so badly when I was young, casting my life, my very being, my desire to write, and my work into question. During my first ten years as a writer, I felt these anxieties more deeply, and even as I fought them off, I would sometimes fear that one day, I would have to admit to defeat – just as I had done with painting – and succumbing to disquiet, give up novel writing, too.

I have already mentioned the two essential feelings that rose up in me as I closed my father's suitcase and put it away: the sense of being marooned in the provinces, and the fear that I lacked authenticity. This was certainly not the first time they had made themselves felt. For years I had, in my reading and my writing, been studying, discovering, deepening these emotions, in all their variety and unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colours. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, most often as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (as in My Name is Red and The Black Book) and the problems of life on the periphery (as in Snow and Istanbul). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.

But as can be seen from my father's suitcase and the pale colours of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a centre, and it was far away from us. In my books I have described in some detail how this basic fact evoked a Checkovian sense of provinciality, and how, by another route, it led to my questioning my authenticity. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with these same feelings, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, lack of security and sense of degradation, than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger ... But today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature can ever do. What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world – and I can identify with them easily – succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.

This means that my father was not the only one, that we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a centre. Whereas the thing that compels us to shut ourselves up to write in our rooms for years on end is a faith in the opposite; the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people all the world over resemble each other. But this, as I know from my own and my father's writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins, of being left outside. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt towards the West all his life – I have felt this too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West, to behold the other world he has built on the other side.

All writers who have devoted their lives to this task know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing, will, in the end, move to other very different places. It will take us far away from the table at which we have worked with sadness or anger, take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father have not reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, slowly rising from the mist in all its colours like an island after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before them a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes, an entire world. Seeing it, we wish to enter into this world and lose ourselves inside it, just as we might a book. After sitting down at a table because we felt provincial, excluded, on the margins, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings would seem to begin to talk amongst themselves, and begin to interact in ways I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books, but for themselves. This world that I had created like a man digging a well with a needle would then seem truer than all else.

My father might also have discovered this kind of happiness during the years he spent writing, I thought as I gazed at my father's suitcase: I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all: he'd never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father, but a father who always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw from my imagination, be it in freedom or childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father, and I had sometimes believed very deeply that I had been able to become a writer because my father had, in his youth, wished to be one, too. I had to read him with tolerance – seek to understand what he had written in those hotel rooms.

It was with these hopeful thoughts that I walked over to the suitcase, which was still sitting where my father had left it; using all my willpower, I read through a few manuscripts and notebooks. What had my father written about? I recall a few views from the windows of Parisian hotels, a few poems, paradoxes, analyses ... As I write I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel – when they fell into one of those deadly silences – my father would at once turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.

Let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father came to pay me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten I was 48 years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father's eyes went to the corner where he had left his suitcase and saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead I looked away. But he understood. Just as I understood that he had understood. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding only went so far as it can go in a few seconds. Because my father was a happy, easygoing man who had faith in himself: he smiled at me the way he always did. And as he left the house, he repeated all the lovely and encouraging things that he always said to me, like a father.

As always, I watched him leave, envying his happiness, his carefree and unflappable temperament. But I remember that on that day there was also a flash of joy inside me that made me ashamed. It was prompted by the thought that maybe I wasn't as comfortable in life as he was, maybe I had not led as happy or footloose a life as he had, but that I had devoted it to writing – you've understood ... I was ashamed to be thinking such things at my father's expense. Of all people, my father, who had never been the source of my pain – who had left me free. All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a lack at the centre of our lives, and to our feelings of happiness and guilt.

But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, and that brought me an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, aged 22, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons; with trembling hands I had given my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. This was not simply because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect: his opinion was very important to me because he, unlike my mother, had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he at once threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked it very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that so often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me or my first novel: he told me that one day I would win the prize that I am here to receive with such great happiness.

He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion, or to set this prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, giving support to his son, encouraging him by saying, 'One day you'll become a pasha!' For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.

My father died in December 2002.

Today, as I stand before the Swedish Academy and the distinguished members who have awarded me this great prize – this great honour – and their distinguished guests, I dearly wish he could be amongst us.