Pierre

PIERRE WITTMANN

Pierre : the Writer

I always loved books, I have thousand of them, one part are in France, the other in Thailand. I feel well in their company. Was it written in my genes? My paternal grandfather was a printer, and my father a writer – a man of letters as he liked to call himself. He has also been journalist, a corrector, a translator and theatre producer.

Books, I not only love to read them, but also look at them, touch them, leaf them through, buy them, write them, illustrate them, translate them, create them, compose them, print them… What I like less is to distribute them and sell them, the commercial aspect is not my strength.

At school, I write always with pleasure essays and dissertations. My first big writing job is the redaction of my architecture thesis. It is just after May 1968, and it is fashionable, at this time, to write architecture as much as to draw it. My diploma partner, more inclined than me on drawing, traces the blueprints and I write and compose the texts. It is an opportunity to learn to type, a skill that will be very helpful for me later.

I receive my diploma during the first economic crisis of the after war. Construction projects are suspended and architects are unemployed. Then, a little by chance, I throw myself in the Graphic Arts. I create, with a painter friend, a company for composition and text processing for offset printing. This new technology, using the first computers, is going to replace lead composition. It is only the beginning, but it is going soon to be very successful. To complete the composition service – at that time the computer is only producing rough texts – we create a graphic and advertising design department, and, in the following years, a publishing house and a printing house.

For five years I become familiar with all aspects of Graphic Arts, but I realise that the role of a business manager is not my vocation. I sell my parts of the company and settle in the countryside to devote myself to painting and to take up with architecture again.

During the following years, my passion for books turns towards art and architecture books. And I find time again for the pleasure of reading.

During my stay in Arizona, from 1982 to 1984, I create my first book, Rocks, with my girlfriend of the time, who is a poet. She writes the texts and I paint a series of paintings on the rocks, canyons and geological formations of Arizona. But we separate before we could get our book published. In Arizona I start to read in English, a good way to become more fluent in this language, which will also be very useful for me later.

Arriving in Tahiti in 1984, I decide to learn Chinese. It is the Chinese writing that attracts me, and will lead me later to Seoul and Taipei to study Chinese calligraphy. In Tahiti I discover spirituality, and in particular Buddhism, an inexhaustible source of new readings. I buy and devour hundreds of works on these new subjects. I start at the same time to write a journal, my confident since more than twenty years. Externally I am always a painter, but internally the books and the writings take their place.

In 1988, I settle in Thailand, spend time in Buddhist monasteries, meet new spiritual friends and several monks. Tan Santikaro, the translator for Ajahn Buddhadasa, a Theravada master of the forest tradition, proposes me to illustrate the covers of the master's books with my new paintings on Buddhist themes. Then, in a Buddhist group in Bangkok, I meet Erika Dias, a poet from Sri Lanka. We create a publishing house, Wisdom Gift, and publish together two books of poems illustrated with my paintings.

At that time, I notice the lack of Buddhist translations in French, find a passion for this task and translate a series of works, which by the way will not all be published. I discover then the functioning of the book market, the commercial interests of the publishing world and the control of books distribution by the big companies. I understand that it is not enough to write or translate books to get them published. And that if they are published, they often don't look anymore much like the manuscripts handed to the publisher.

So far I have participated in many books projects, published or not, but I have still not written and published my first book. This idea is on its way and, in 2002, comes out Le guide du bonheur pour le troisième millénaire, written, published and printed in Thailand. The next year I translate it in English and publish A Guide to Happiness for the Third Millennium. Both books sell well in Thailand. But the difficulties to distribute them and sell them in the West, and in particular in France, discourage me a little in my new role of author and publisher. And the other books projects undertaken on the stride find themselves in a drawer.

But the writing demon still dwells in me and is not satisfied with this chuck out. In 2006, I start to write a novel, that progress at its own rhythm, and in 2007 I take up and correct several notebooks of the journal, the year 1988, when I leave Tahiti and settle in Thailand.

I always love to write, and I aspire, perhaps an utopian dream, to weave direct and magic links between my writings and their potential readers…