Şirin, Shirin (mimesis, ou 'But what we have in hand now are endless fragments')

quando o filme Shirin fez a volta das poucas salas, li em quase todas as notícias que Shirin era uma história antiga mas que não tinha grande importância no filme. uma história antiga mostrada daquela maneira e sem importância era uma impossibilidade. Kiarostami escolher uma história sem importância também não era possível. (lição: não ler jornais, mas isso já eu sabia)

"Şirin", um capítulo em Other Colors, embora não refira o filme [deve ter sido escrito antes], dá aquilo que me faltava.

algumas partes:

(...) The second story is as old as the first. It too has many variations. It appears in the Thousand and One Nights, int the parrot's tales of Tutiname, and in Nizami's Hüsrev and Şirin, itself taken into various other books. I shall try to summarize the Nizami version.

Şirin is an Armenian princess and a great beauty. Hüsrev is a prince, the son of the Persian shah. Şapur wants to make his master Hüsrev fall in love with Şirin, and Şirin with Hüsrev. With this in mind he travels to Şirin's country. One day, when Şirin has gone to the forest with her courtiers to eat and drink, he hides among the trees. There and then, he draws a picture of his fine handsome master, hangs it on a tree, and makes himself scarce. As Şirin frolics in the forest with her courtiers, she sees the picture of Hüsrev hanging from the branch and falls in love with this person from the picture. Şirin does not believe in her love; she wants to forget the picture and her response to it. Then, during another excursion to another forest, the same thing happens. Şirin is again affected by the picture; she is in love but helpless. During a third excursion, when Şirin again sees Hüsrev's picture hanging from a branch, she knows she is helplessly in love with him. She accepts her love and begins to search for the person whose likeness, whose image, she has seen.

In the same way, Şapur makes his master fall in love with Şirin, but in this case he does not use pictures but words. After falling equally in love, one through pictures and the other through words, these two young people begin to search each other out. Each sets out for the other's country. Their paths cross on the banks of a spring, but they fail to recognize each other. Şirin, tired from her travels, undresses and steps into the water. The moment he sets eyes on her, Hüsrev is besotted. Is this the beauty he has come to know through words and stories? At a moment when he is not watching her, Şirin also sees Hüsrev. She too is deeply affected. But Hüsrev is not wearing the red robes that might have helped her recognize him. She is sure of her feelings but surprised and confused enough to entertain these thoughts: It was a picture hanging from the tree, but the man before me is alive. What I saw hanging from the branch was a likeness, but this is a real man.

In Nizami's version, the story of Hüsrev and Şirin carries on with the utmost elegance. What I can identify with most easily here is Şirin's surprise, the way she wavers between image and reality. I see her innocence - her susceptibility to a painting, the way she lets an image give rise to desire - as something we can still understand today. And perhaps I can see it, too, in Nizami's affection for the tradition that makes things happen in threes. But the uncertainty Şirin feels when she first sets eyes on the handsome Hüsrev is also our uncertainty: which is the true Hüsrev? Like Şirin, we ask ourselves, Is it in reality that the truth lies, or in the image? Which one affects us more deeply, handsome Hüsrev's picture or the man himself?

(...)

Before reading Dante, I heard funny stories inspired by Inferno. Before I saw Chaplin's The Great Dictator, I saw it copied in a Turkish film series known as Vanished Ibrahim. I came to know and love the Impressionists from reproductions torn from magazines and displayed on the walls of barbershops and greengrocers. I came to know the world through Tintin - as with most books, in the Turkish translation. I acquired my taste for history from countries whose histories do not resemble our own. I have gone through live convinced that the buildings in which I have lived and the streets I have walked are bad imitations of streets and buildings somewhere in the West. The chairs and tables at which I sat were copies of originals in American films; it was only much later, after I saw the films again, that I realized this. I have compared a great many new faces with those I have seen in films and in television, and I have confused them. I have learned more about honor, courage, love, compassion, honesty, and evil by reading about them than by knowing them in real life. I cannot say how much of my joy or my seriousness of purpose, my way of standing or speaking, is innate and how much I have unwittingly copied from other examples. Nor do I know how many of those examples are themselves copies of another original or copy. The same can be said of my own words.

(...)

But what we have in hand now are endless fragments.

(...)

The truth we once believed to be hiding far, far away, behind the curtains and the shadows, has perhaps vanished altogether. if the truth exists anywhere, it lies among our memories."
Pamuk em Other Colors.