Many thanks for the translations. I found this section to be the most interesting:
VANGUARDIA: At what point of the trip are you right now?
SONTAG: In a reflection about the United States. America has always been the place of dreams, the place all Europeans went to looking for their dream, the place where all was possible. And inside of America, Americans have at the same time their own America: California.
And what is the America of Susan Sontag?
This question … Oh, it is good! Because… it is Europe! What an idea: My America is called Europe. It is my place of dreams.
Since when?
Since I was a little girl: I had a solitary youth, in small rural towns in the south of Arizona and the south of California. My magic carpet was the world of books. And they carried me to Europe. I read from the classics…I dreamt of leaping from my childhood to be able to get out of there. I lived my infancy as an obstacle. I didn’t enjoy it. And today I’m sorry for that…but it’s just that my dream was to be a foreigner.
And did you realize your dream?
Yes: I’ve lived a lot in Paris and in various countries of Europe. I’m attracted by its culture, its disposition for debate … Most of the things I like are in Europe.
And what do you dislike about the United States?
That all that primordial fantasy was subjected to consumerism, the ideology of “living to buy.” That is the current ideology. It dumbs down the people, makes their main values be those of buying and enjoying themselves.
I have read that because of that you have said that you’re ashamed to be an American.
No, that is an incorrect journalistic headline, and I appreciate your letting me clarify it: what shames me is not to be an American, but that the Northamerican foreign politics are so aggressive! This exercise of political power of the Bush Administration, so bellicose!
This is helpful, isn’t it? Underlying Sontag’s thought really is a somewhat tired anti-Americanism, rooted in a leftwing critique of bourgeois culture. But here’s one question I’d like someone to ask Sontag. She supported president Clinton’s military intervention in the Balkans. He did so without U.N. approval. Yet Bush is acting entirely under U.N. auspices with regard to Iraq. If Bush is an imperialist, why wasn’t Clinton?
The Dish 