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Ensaio: Uma conversa com J.K. Rowling

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Tradução: Bruno Radcliffe
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Time Magazine staff. “Essay: A Conversation with J.K. Rowling; A Good Scare,” Time Magazine, October, 30, 2000

The wizard of Harry Potter explains what kids need to know of the dark side

At the approach of Halloween, we asked the author of the Harry Potter books what she thinks children should know about good and evil, magic and mayhem. Why did her series take a dark turn in this year’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury), for example? Rowling plans to spend Halloween at home in Scotland with her daughter Jessica, 7, who wants to dress as the broomstick-riding hero. Says the author: “Halloween, you’d not be surprised to know, is my favorite holiday.” Her comments:

I consciously wanted the first book to be fairly gentle-Harry is very protected when he enters the world. From the publication of Sorcerer’s Stone, I’ve had parents saying to me, “My six-year-old loves it,” and I’ve always had qualms about saying, “Oh, that’s great,” because I’ve always known what’s coming. So I have never said these are books for very young children.

If you’re choosing to write about evil, you really do have a moral obligation to show what that means. So you know what happened at the end of Book IV. I do think it’s shocking, but it had to be. It is not a gratuitous act on my part. We really are talking about someone who is incredibly power hungry. Racist, really. And what do those kinds of people do? They treat human life so lightly. I wanted to be accurate in that sense. My editor was shocked by the way the character was killed, which was very dismissive. That was entirely deliberate. That is how people die in those situations. It was just like, You’re in my way and you’re going to die. It’s the first time I cried during the writing of a book, because I didn’t want to kill him. It was the cruel-artist part of me who just knows that’s how it has to happen for the story. The cruel artist is stronger than the warm, fuzzy person.

My daughter has read all the books now, and I said to her about the ending of Goblet of Fire, “When you reach Chapter 30, Mommy’s going to read it to you, all right?” Because I thought, I’m going to have to hug her, and I’ve got to explain the stuff. And when the character did die, I looked at her to see if she was O.K., and she went, “Oh, it’s not Harry.” She didn’t give a damn. I was almost thinking, “Is this not scary at all?” She was just like, “Harry’s O.K., I’m O.K.” She’s a feisty little thing. In some ways, I think younger children tend to be more resilient. It’s kids who are slightly older who really get the scariness of it. Possibly because they have come across more intense stuff in their own lives.

Is evil attractive? Yes, I think that’s very true. Harry has seen the kind of people who are grouped around this very evil character. I think we’d all acknowledge that the bully in the playground is attractive. Because if you can be his friend, you are safe. This is just a pattern. Weaker people, I feel, want that reflected glory. I’m trying to explore that.

It’s great to hear feedback from the kids. Mostly they are really worried about Ron. As if I’m going to kill Harry’s best friend. What I find interesting is only once has anyone said to me, “Don’t kill Hermione,” and that was after a reading when I said no one’s ever worried about her. Another kid said, “Yeah, well, she’s bound to get through O.K.” They see her as someone who is not vulnerable, but I see her as someone who does have quite a lot of vulnerability in her personality. Hermione is me, near enough. A caricature of me when I was younger. I wasn’t that clever. But I was that annoying on occasion. Girls are very tolerant of her because she is not an uncommon female type-the little girl who feels plain and hugely compensates by working very hard and wanting to get everything just so.

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Harry Potter na Morning Edition do NPR Radio

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Tradução: Bruno Radcliffe
Revisão: Virág
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Adler, Margot. “Harry Potter,” Morning Edition, NPR Radio, 27 October, 2000

Transcript courtesy of Sugarquill’s Transcription Project
Audio: Offsite NPR Radio

BOB EDWARDS, host: Harry Potter has cast a magic spell on the publishing industry. The latest book about the young wizard in training, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” still is a best-seller, even though it came out over the summer. “Goblet of Fire” and the first three books in the series have sold more than 40 million copies in the U.S. A Harry Potter movie is due out next year. Author J.K. Rowling already is working on the next installment of the seven-part series. She spoke with NPR’s Margot Adler.

MARGOT ADLER reporting:

I know that when I read books as a kid, the characters became part of my fantasy life. And you’ve lived with Harry Potter for more than 10 years.

Ms. J.K. ROWLING (Author): Yeah.

ADLER: And I’m wondering, is he less with you now, more with you now? Does he sit on your shoulder? You know what I’m talking about.

Ms. ROWLING: Still very with me, always. Of course. I mean, this is a very, very all-consuming project, a seven-novel series. I have 127 characters. That’s a lot of characters to keep in play. It’s an increasingly complex plot, as I always planned it. Obviously it’s the focus of an enormous amount of my time and energy and a huge part of my life.

ADLER: I keep on being at war with a desperate desire to see the movie…

Ms. ROWLING: I know. I think, you know…

ADLER: …and that feeling of, `Oh, will they destroy my own imagination, my own Harry Potter in my head?’ You know…

Ms. ROWLING: It’s my belief, you know, people who have stayed with Harry for four years now, I doubt that seeing the movie could harm their imagined Harry or Hogwarts. But I know what you mean. I mean, I think a lot of people are going to feel that. They really want to see it. I met a really clever reader the other day, and this is what’s wonderful about books; she said to me, `I really know what Neville looks like.’ And I said, `Describe Neville for me.’ And she said, `Well, he’s short and he’s black, and he’s got dreadlocks.’ Now, to me, Neville’s short and plump and blond, but that’s what’s great about books. You know, she’s just seeing something different. People bring their own imagination to it. They have to collaborate with the author on creating the world.

ADLER: Now you still have at least three years to go to write five, six and seven of the series.

Ms. ROWLING: Yeah.

ADLER: And given that Harry Potter was–What?–10 years in the making, are there other projects that are beginning to percolate? I’m not saying you have to tell us those, but that are beginning to sort of percolate in your head for sort of beyond Harry?

Ms. ROWLING: There are ideas, but as I say, it’s 127 characters in this very long–I’m not eager to finish Harry. I don’t want to lose the momentum, so I’m not about to take time off from writing it, in the sense that I don’t want to walk away from it and come back. It’s going to be like a bereavement to finish the books; they’ve been such a huge part of my life. And I neither want to hasten towards it, nor do I want to extend the series unnecessarily.

ADLER: And you said that with book five, you’re going to be a little more relaxed about it, right?

Ms. ROWLING: A little bit more, and I’m only saying that because book four–and this was no one’s fault. It wasn’t my publisher’s fault, and it wasn’t my fault. It was one of the–blame my muse. My muse went wrong. She led me up a blind alleyway, and I had to scrap out of the book, and I went back and I rewrote and I still loved the writing of it, but it was very pressured at one point. And that was really pressure I was putting on myself. Obviously I wanted to finish the book to my satisfaction, and I also didn’t want to disappoint people by missing the deadline. We made the deadline, but I did do that by putting in very, very long days and working in a far more pressured way than I normally work. You know, I’m writing book five now. It will be ready when it’s ready.

ADLER: Is there anything about book five, any little piece, that you can relate to our audience?

Ms. ROWLING: I could give you the title.

ADLER: Mm-hmm.

Ms. ROWLING: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

ADLER: “The Order of the Phoenix.”

Ms. ROWLING: Uh-huh. But I’m not telling you anything else.

ADLER: That’s fine. How are you protecting yourself from all the celebrity in order to have time to write?

Ms. ROWLING: Mostly, it’s really not that difficult. You know, people ask me, “Can you still walk down the street without being recognized?” Very easily. The more difficult aspect is that you do find everyone wants something, and loads of the people who want something want it for very, very good causes, but there has to be a cut-off point because I will not produce any more work if I do everything that people are asking of me. So there are charities I do work for, but obviously I have to turn a lot of it down. Quite apart from wanting to continue to be a novelist, I want to see my daughter. I don’t want to–you know, she comes first, Harry comes second.

ADLER: You want to have a life.

Ms. ROWLING: Yeah, a life would be nice. I didn’t even think of that. I remember having a life. I was right…

ADLER: You remember having a life?

Ms. ROWLING: Yes. It was fun.

ADLER: But has there been an upside for all this renown?

Ms. ROWLING: Oh, huge upside. The huge upside is meeting kids and meeting readers. That’s hugely enjoyable. There’s absolutely no negative in meeting the readers, none. Really none. I mean, I’ve never met a child who was anything less than delightful, really. It’s wonderful. I love giving readings. I love answering kids’ questions. In fact, this is very difficult, but journalists have been asking me for the title of book five, and I finally–this morning, I cracked and told an eight-year-old boy because I just wanted to see the look on his face when I told him. But only occasionally do I think, “What have you done?” And normally that’s on a day when some journalist has come and banged on my front door, and I never expected that, and I can’t say I particularly enjoy that. But most of the time, it is really wonderful.

ADLER: Knowing what you know now about the last four years you’ve experienced, is there anything that you’d do differently?

Ms. ROWLING: In retrospect, only fairly trivial things. Overall, no, not really. In terms of the writing, you always look back at your work, your books, and think, “Why did I say it that way? Why did I do it that way?” I think the urge to tinker remains even after the books are in print. In other ways, in sort of handling everything that’s happened, I’m still learning on the job. But by and large, you know, I’m a happy person. I think I’d be enormously ungrateful if I said I wasn’t. This morning I met the winners of a competition Scholastic ran. They had set essays: “How Harry Potter changed my life.” They had 10,000 entries. Can you believe that?

ADLER: Ten thousand?

Ms. ROWLING: Mm-hmm. That was a humbling experience. You go through an experience like that, suddenly the journalist banging on your front door doesn’t seem that important anymore.

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Jovens brincam de jornalistas com Rowling

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Tradução: Bruno Radcliffe
Revisão: {patylda}
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“Teens play journalist with Rowling,” The Globe and Mail, 26 October 2000

VANCOUVER — Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling worked her magic on an enthusiastic group of fans yesterday, turning the youngsters into journalists trying to extract her deepest secrets and hold her accountable for her work.

At times, the group of 10 young teenagers and preteens appeared to have backed her into a corner.

Asked if there would be a war in the books she has yet to write, Ms. Rowling sounded more like U.S. President Bill Clinton — who avoided a question during the Monica Lewinsky affair by quibbling about the meaning of ‘is’ — than a children’s author.

“It depends on how you define ‘war,'” Ms. Rowling said. “That’s all I’m going to say. That’s it.”

But at other times, she was not so tough. She was asked about what would happen to Harry at the end of the series. The youngsters were aghast when she suggested she might kill him off.

Anxious to calm the questioner’s jitters, she quickly backtracked. “No, no, not that,” she said. “Now I feel, ‘Oops, I upset the girl.’ ”

She also appeared to be touched by the depth of enthusiasm displayed by the young journalists. “That’s the nicest thing a writer could hear, that the characters are as real to you as they are to me,” she said.

In an unprecedented feat in the world of books, Ms. Rowling, a former French teacher, has gained rock-star status, and become one of Britain’s highest paid women with an income of $47-million in the past year.

Her Harry Potter series has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and more than 1.5 million in Canada, where 5,000 copies are enough to rank as a best seller. More than 20,000 fans turned out out for a reading in Toronto’s SkyDome earlier this week.

While in Vancouver, hometown of her Canadian publisher Raincoast Books, Ms. Rowling held a press conference with the youngsters, conducted media interviews and gave two readings for more than 10,000 fans at the Pacific Coliseum, former home of the Canucks, Vancouver’s hockey team.

At the press conference, the 30-minute-journalists were thrilled just to be in the same room as Ms. Rowling.

“It was the best, so cool, so great to be here,” said 12-year old Ashley Badyal from Hamilton Elementary School in Richmond, B.C. “It was so interesting, so terrific. She talks to us, not just to adults.”

Yet the youngsters, with strong opinions about their favourite characters and the twists in the plot line, were exacting critics. “They’re excellent books, with interesting plots and unexpected character development,” said Grade 7 student Alexander Biron of Vancouver’s Lord Kitchener School.

But the third and four books in the series were better than her earlier works, he added.

Emma Crandall, 10, from Lord Tweedsmuir Elementary School in New Westminster pressed the author on her choice of a male central character. Ms. Rowling acknowledged she did not think much about gender when she began to write.

“I did not have to stop and think too hard about my hero. He just came to me, almost fully formed,” she said.

“By the time I stopped and wondered why is it a boy, it really was too late.”

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