Dear Chief Minister,
Dear Dolors Olle

Salman Rushdie
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Dear Friends,

It´s not only a good opportunity to say thanks to the government of Catalonia and to the City of Barcelona for hosting our session here.

It is also a chance to stress the Catalan merits in the long history of PEN - an organization that represents writers as a difficult task in the difficult age.

You know, we have been founded after the hecatombs of the first world war as an institution of leniency well recognized that the sloughter absolved between 1914-1918 was so to speak based on zelotic writing in all countries that took part on this conflict. The value of the word was understood monomanic and exclusive. As the only one word, our word, our truth, class, rase or faith, a word mutable in a satanic verse of what ever divinity.

Excuse me this allusion to a great author among us - Salman Rushdie - then I was really glad to hear about his election as president of American PEN. He is a man whose metaphor is valid regardless religions, ideologies or convictions.

It describes the oldest LACK of LITERATURE - its prophetic instrumentalisation. But the value of the word - we believe in - does mean not the sense of history, it means consensus of stories, narration more than salvation.

And the leniency, I think of is a very hard one. Then what else is our freedom of expression as the patience by hearing of different fairy tales?

For we the authors have authority not so much due to militant speaches as due to creative idioms in various languages as a source of energy which defies the cold-blooded nomenklatures! What sort of ever.

And what a marvelous coincidence that this kind of reflection led us to a fruitful result and again here in Barcelona. Your city was 1996 the birthplace of Declaration of linguistic rights - a document which combines the specific attitude of each Self with the common goals and communication. This universal message crowned one another event - the congress of PEN international 1992. You are the city of communicative competence.

Coming from a small country that hardly saved its small language to write in it later great books. I can imagine how important it is for all the people trying the same.

Has Barcelona have a similar succes in 1935 hosting a meeting of our predecessor they tried to warn against the outcoming dictators - we all had spared ourselves the dirties years of Europe.

And we Czechs supporting at that time that initiative hadn´t lost more than 100 writers and so many members of PEN - with its 1. president Karel Capek at the head. He was the founder and ardent advocate of freedom of expression. But we got dictators, once brown, once red for more than two generations. And it was the literature who spoke as the politics have been silent. Or oppressive - or even criminal.

It was the literature who preserves the polyvalent philosophy of life. Who gave us prospects, and perspektives. Instead of ludness of POWER the lenience of poems. This lenience was and will be a hard job. We have - namely - stepped in a century which could be worse than that we have left. The pretentions once characterized this continent are coming back. The four most dangerous of them:
- the hegemonial striving
- nationalistic pride
- the faith in a historical mission
- and heroic blabs about it.

They are back - becoming to be the accepting thing elswhere. They have produced already a lot of demage. And the people who name them should be nameless again, should be slanderer and a show-offs, thinking about future they should be - they are already sentenced as liars, trators and people of the past. They are injailed, expatriated - yes - killed.

But they are inextinctable like my Cuban friends I met las week in Prague by the book fair.

Like the young writers, I met in Instanbul two months ago, pleased about their new personal freedom and shocked about punishments - they had served in prisons. Twenty times higher than my Czech one once.

These writers are not only our members - they are - in my eyes surrelly - the citizens of a further POLIS, the world city of polyvalence and politness. Civitas homini, civitas mundi. Let us build it up with the help of words and colorful values like AUNG SAN SUN KY from Burma who suffers because she does it. Let us free her!

Let us support the letter iniciated by two old dissidents they became presidents - HAVEL and me! There is some hope, isn´t it? And let me thank to the 16 Nobel-Price laureates they have signated this appeal!

Then… they represents the civitas mundi. I´ve mentioned. The value of the word - understood now as the aestetics of liberty as something that unifies ETHOS and Beauty. The courage and mildnes bringing the freedom from hatred in our world.

Thank you for attention!