| nakts paldiesasaciņa |
Jan. 20th, 2011|08:42 pm |
vēl tikai gribēju pateikt paldies brašajam holandiešu tautas dēlam, profesōram Geritam Nōrdzejam.
šis ir anekdōtisks izvilkums no viņa sarunas ar Robertu Kinrosu, izdevēju un vispār tādu klusu superstāru burtu laukumā. Pilns intervijas teksts te, pie viņa bijušajiem studentiem, kas nu jau paši rūdīti pasniedzēji.
For me the greatest exercise in history came from the University of Leiden [looks for a book] ... 3,000 years ago! Somebody came to my class, said he was from the University of Leiden, a student of theology now specializing in Semitic archaeology. His professor had told him that he should come to me. He showed me a small Polaroid picture and asked if I could say something about it. I said that there were some characters of this size, written on this kind of material, with this kind of ink, probably from the seventh century bc, and that it was probably Moabitic. He said 'oh thank you'. A week later I heard from him again. He said that in five minutes I had told him more from this Polaroid picture than the Semitic institute at Leiden had found with the original in half a year and with a host of professors. He asked how I did this. I said: "oh that's easy: I don't think about a scholarly principle but about a principle of physics". You can assume that the effects that you can get on your own desk will have happened also in other times. When he showed the picture, I just tried to imagine how I would try to do such a thing. "Oh, yes, thank you", and again he went away.
The next week he came back. "That was nice", he said; and now asked me if I could tell him the trick. I said that I couldn't, because I didn't know anything about Semitic writing, or about the Moabites, and so on. I said that the only thing I could do was what I was doing then in the class - to give my students a hold on actual things that happen now. Often you have to find a groove to go back into the past, or what you think the past might have been - to get a handle on it. They published a book about this, with friendly remarks about my contribution.
This book makes me out to be an authority on old Semitic writing. But for me the important thing was that I could claim that if you say something about writing and design that is valid, then it should be valid not only for Monotype typefaces or for handwriting with a broad pen, but it should be valid for all writing, of all times and all civilizations. So this was an opportunity to test this, and these people said that my views about writing a text script and a cursive had some meaning for their archaeological investigations. |
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