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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I was complaining to a friend recently about how the New Yorker had printed its translation of "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" split up into paragraphs where the original was a single paragraph, and he did not really get where I was coming from -- if it was more readable in paragraphs, isn't that the way to go? As I'm reading the first sentence of Queen Isabel was singing rancheras, I'm wondering why it seems so important to me that this block be preserved as a single sentence, thinking I ought to justify that somehow. If it's more readable broken up, why not break it up?
In the flow of a book or story I do not slavishly follow the syntactic boundaries in the source text -- well perhaps I err a bit on the side of slavishly following them; still. There are certainly points where a period in English seems like the correct translation of a comma or a y in Spanish. But these long paragraphs and long sentences in Spanish seem to me to fill more than a syntactic role; they are communicating a rhythm and pacing which splitting them up has a tendency to spoil. And not only in Spanish -- being a single paragraph seems to me like a fundamental quality of (for instance) "Ein Landarzt"; it pulls the reader insistently into the driving rhythm of the story, will not let go.
posted evening of May 12th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation
John couldn't make it over to Lonesome Nickel studios this weekend; Dress Rehearsal Rags will resume in a couple of weeks.
Seemed like it would be a good idea, this sunny Sunday morning on Meeker St., to mash up a couple of old country tunes together which don't really have that much in common. Here's the Carter Family + Ernest Tubb, for your delectation:
Thanks to Ellen for the wonderful camerawork -- thanks to Pixie for sitting and listening!
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So, wow; the first sentence of Queen Isabel Was Singing Rancheras is seven pages long... I enjoyed the challenge of getting the multipage paragraphs in Resurrection across with a sense of the driving rhythm of the original, and communicating the sense of it. This is kind of ridiculous! Those paragraphs had maybe page-long sentences at some points, but 7? Gorgeous though. I'm having trouble believing he was able to do this on page one of his first novel (1994) and have it be successful -- a popular novel! It seems audacious and intimidating.
Forever is ending today (Ernest Tubb -- this is a special moment for me, I have been wanting to cover Tubb for a long time.)
Serpent at the gates of Wisdom (Robyn Hitchcock, to whom happy 60 years! Sorry we missed the big show in San Francisco -- and very happy to have been present at the big show in NYC.)
Snake Doctor Blues (or a few bars from it anyways)
Spring is without question here; and we got a ping-pong table! Here are Ellen and Sylvia volleying.
Sylvia and I put it together yesterday afternoon; but we took a break so John and I could do some jamming. A new setup means I'm not sure yet where to set up the camera; and the upshot is that I'm mostly just out of the frame, a disembodied Stroh fiddle. Shades of February! We ran out of tape at what seems to me like a pretty opportune moment.
Robyn Hitchcock has released on Spotify a version of Love from London with commentary tracks à la Spectre. Magnificent. (...And more! The commentary trax are available as videos at you tube!)
