Mystery of written words....by Mogadalai

Mystery of written words

by Mogadalai

The following passage is taken from Maxim Gorky's My Universities. My Universities is the third part of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy; the other two are My childhood and In the world. The latter part of this book describes his life in a village on the banks of Volga. Gorky's description of the village life is very poetic, and reminded me of RK Narayan and The Remembered Village of MN Srinivas. The present extracts come from the part where he describes his experiences in teaching an illiterate fisherman of the village to read and write, and how the fisherman Izot responds to his reading experience.

He was a very enthusiastic and fairly good pupil and would be absolutely amazed at his own progress. Sometimes, during a lesson, he would suddenly get up, take a book from the shelf, raise his eyebrows high and read two or three lines after a great effort. His face would turn red and he would look at me and say in an astonished voice: 'You see, I can read, ever hear anything like it!" Then he would close his eyes and repeat some poetry:

"Just like a mother mourning over the grave of her son,
So wails the sandpiper over the desolate plain..."

'Read it?'

Several times he would ask cautiously, almost in a whisper: 'Tell me, my friend, how it all comes about. A man looks at these commas and hyphens and they turn into words and I recognize them, they're our living words! How do I know this? No one's whispering them into my ear. If these were pictures, then I could understand. But here it seems that the thoughts themselves are printed on the page - how do they do it?'

What could I answer? My 'don't know' annoyed him.

'The work of a magician!' he said sighing, as he peered at the pages and held them up to the light.

Undoubtedly, the work of another magician!

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