'Was it an intuition that made me select -- I think at the beginning of my adolescence - a form
of approach to life linked to English literature through Shakespeare? And can one talk in this
case of literature? I think not I think that even though it was made concrete in a regular
reading of the Stratford genius in the middle of the night it had to do with a study of the
possibilities of the human soul and the different models offered us. I would identify with male
and female characters and Hamlet and Ophelia seemed close to me. In the case of Ophelia - I a
child cloistered within a garden always loved by the way a rose with that name -- probably
because of the rejection I felt and the resulting lunacy evident in the flower scene. Since
childhood I had felt rejection abandonment and separation as something tragic and fundamental
to life without realizing that this feeling was caused by the irrevocable reality of death:
the definitive separation. Each rejection is a death. But each approximation brings with it the
opposite possibility as in the book its hero its reason for being the Czech poet Vladimír
Holan remains identified with Orpheus.' Clara Janés
