Perante a pertinente pergunta

"não será a escrita uma outra forma de fotografar o real?", importa recordar toda a tradição de diálogo entre a palavra e a imagem, nomeadamente aquela virtualidade da palavra de reproduzir com vivacidade o objecto, a que os gregos chamavam enargeia.

Deixo-vos hoje uma outra vertente de Welty, a do diálogo com prosadores de outras paragens, os sempre clássicos Jane Austen e Chekov:

"INTERVIEWER
You wrote somewhere that we should still tolerate Jane Austen’s kind of family novel. Is Austen a kindred spirit?
EUDORA WELTY
Tolerate? I should just think so! I love and admire all she does, and profoundly, but I don’t read her or anyone else for “kindred- ness.” The piece you’re referring to was written on assignment for Brief Lives, an anthology Louis Kronenberger was editing. He did offer me either Jane Austen or Chekhov, and Chekhov I do dare to think is more “kindred.” I feel closer to him in spirit, but I couldn’t read Russian, which I felt whoever wrote about him should be able to do. Chekhov is one of us—so close to today’s world, to my mind, and very close to the South—which Stark Young pointed out a long time ago.
INTERVIEWER
Why is Chekhov close to today’s South?
WELTY
He loved the singularity in people, the individuality. He took for granted the sense of family. He had the sense of fate overtaking a way of life, and his Russian humor seems to me kin to the humor of a Southerner. It’s the kind that lies mostly in character. You know, in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, how people are always gathered together and talking and talking, no one’s really listening. Yet there’s a great love and understanding that prevails through it, and a knowledge and acceptance of each other’s idio- syncrasies, a tolerance of them, and also an acute enjoyment of the dramatic. Like in The Three Sisters, when the fire is going on, how they talk right on through their exhaustion, and Vershinin says, “I feel a strange excitement in the air,” and laughs and sings and talks about the future. That kind of responsiveness to the world, to whatever happens, out of their own deeps of character seems very southern to me. Anyway, I took a temperamental delight in Chekhov, and gradually the connection was borne in upon me."

Podereis lker a entrevista na íntegra em
http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4013_WELTY.pdf

Boas leituras!