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Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Wow, this is unexpected and kind of exciting: Googling around for information about Benito Pérez Galdós reveals that Buñuel's Viridiana was (loosely) based on his novel Halma, and another of Buñuel's movies, Nazarín -- which I have not seen but sounds great -- is also based on a text by Pérez Galdós. Slant magazine describes Viridiana as "noticeably derivative of the similarly-themed Nazarín," which it calls "Buñuel's 1958 masterpiece." Not sure how much use this knowledge will be for me; Halma does not appear to be translated into English and I don't even know what the title of the source text for Nazarín is. Still: interesting.
 (Looks like the title of the source text for Nazarín is Nazarín -- Biblioteca Nueva published an edition of it and Halma bound together a few years back. No luck looking for translations though.) Update: Dr. Rhian Davies of the University of Sheffield has compiled a list of Pérez Galdós's works in translation. Jo Labanyi's translation of Nazarín was published in '96. No translation of Halma apparently. Dr. Davies also let me know that Buñuel's Tristana (1970) is an adaptation of Perez Galdós' work of the same title. Tristana appears in translation in Colin Partridge's book Tristana: Buñuel's Film and Galdós' Novel: A Case Study. I have pulled an essay that deals with Tristana in some detail from Google's cache.
posted afternoon of November 12th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
I'll try my hand at translating another entry from Saramago's blog. (I am working from the Spanish translation.) Today he is writing about skepticism.
Some people say that skepticism is an infirmity of old age, an ailment of recent times, a sclerosis of the will. I don't dare to say this diagnosis is completely wrong, but I will say that it would be too comfortable to try to escape all difficulties through this door, as if the actual state of the world were a simple consequence of the old being old... The dreams of the young have never succeeded, at least until now, in making the world any better, and the rejuvenated bile of the old has never been enough to make it worse. Clearly the world -- poor world -- is not to blame for the evils afflicting it. That which we call the state of the world is the state of the unlucky humanity that we are, inevitably composed of old people who were young, young people who will be old, others who are not young and are not yet old. Whose fault? I hear it said that everyone bears the blame, that nobody can be presumed innocent, but I find that these sort of declarations, which appear to distribute justice evenly, are no more than spurious recurring mutations of the so-called original sin, which serve only to dilute and obscure, in an imaginary collective guilt, the responsibilities of the authentically culpable. The state, not of the world, but of life.I write this on a day in which there have arrived in Spain and in Italy hundreds of men, women and children in the fragile vessels which are used to reach the imagined paradise of a wealthy Europe. On the island of Hierro, in the Canaries, for example, there arrived such a boat, carrying inside it a dead child, and some castaways who declared that during the journey, twenty shipmates died and were cast into the sea in martyrdom... So do not speak to me of skepticism, please.
 Saramago links to Sara Prestianni's web site (in French) documenting migrants' stories, and to the NoBorders gallery on Flickr.
posted evening of November 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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Monday, November 10th, 2008
And now our attention must shift to the Dauphin's visit to his family's friend and humble servant, for if Juanito Santa Cruz had not paid that visit, this story would not have been written. Another story would surely have been written, because wherever man goes he carries his novel with him; but it would not have been this one. The narrator in Fortunata and Jacinta is an interesting case -- he refers to himself in the first person and makes reference to having met some of the characters, but he's an omniscient narrator. I'm hoping he will turn out to play a role in the story, besides as the person relating it -- it seems kind of unlikely but it would be nice.
posted evening of November 10th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
As I started reading the second section of Fortunata and Jacinta, "Santa Cruz and Arnáiz: A Historical View of Madrid's Business World," I got kind of spaced out -- this is looking like a long bit of dry exposition that would give me a flavor of the novel's setting maybe, but without contributing much to my understanding of the characters -- this is what I said to myself and I started reading from a distance, not engaging myself in the text. (It did not help that there's been a long break since I read the first section, so I had to be skipping back to remind myself of characters' names.) The text is certainly very dense, and requires a good bit of effort to maintain engagement with. But a few pages in, something just clicked when I realized Barbarita was going to grow up to be Juanito's mother. (Again, I would have known this right off if I'd been paying better attention.) Suddenly all the relationships start making sense, and I'm looking at the characters as individuals rather than as representatives of families. I want to quote a long piece from Chapter 2 of this section, but will put that below the fold. The description of the (newly bourgeois) families' economic lives is holding my attention a lot better now; I'm anxious to find out why Don Baldomero will bequeath his business to his two nephews rather than to his son. Also very nice: Galdós' digression lamenting the disappearance of bright primary colors from Spanish fashion as the Spanish economy comes under the sway of the northern model -- "We're under the influence of northern Europe, and the blasted North imposes on us the grays that it gets from its smoky gray sky." Read on for a picture of Barbarita's childhood.
↷read the rest...
posted afternoon of November 9th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Chapter 7 of The Golden Compass is a trip. When Sylvia and I were reading it this afternoon there was a lot of talk back and forth -- "Oh, so that's what was happening!" "Oh, so that's why Lyra was at Jordan!" etc. This is a really nice trick -- there was a lot in the first part of the novel that we were just accepting on faith without really understanding, the exposition is placed so that you've just about gotten used to not being sure what's going on in the plot -- you're just reading and enjoying the characters and the action, and suddenly you turn a corner and much of the mystery is laid bare. (Not all -- there's still the central mystery of what the G.O.B. is using the kidnapped children for, and what's the city in the sky, and why is Asriel being held prisoner.)
posted evening of November 8th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, November third, 2008
Chapter 5 of The Golden Compass -- now things are starting to get really interesting. Sylvia and I are both on the edge of our seat. I really like the way Pullman drops hints about what's going on -- very graceful, they are not so cryptic you can't easily pick up on them, but they are not hammered into your ears either. A bit like reading a good whodunit. And at the end of the cocktail party scene, the transition to Lyra fleeing from Mrs. Coulter's house was handled very well. This book just feels elegant.
(Note from an adult reading a kids' book -- it was such an eerie feeling I had, to be identifying with Mrs. Coulter as I read her cruel disciplinarian lines to Lyra before the party. I can't recall ever feeling this way though I've read many children's books with authoritarian adult figures in them.)
posted evening of November third, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November second, 2008
Saramago posts today on the subject of politics. On the eve of the presidential elections in the United States, this brief observation does not seem out of place. Some time back, a Portuguese politician*, who at that time bore the responsibilities of prime minister, declared for whomever would like to hear it that politics is, in the first place, the art of not speaking the truth. The problem is that since he said that, there has not been, to my knowledge, a single politician, from the left to the right, who would correct him, who would say no sir, the truth is going to be the sole and ultimate objective of politics. For the simple reason that only in this manner can the two be saved: truth by politics, politics by the truth. (I'm pretty uncertain about the translation of the last sentence: I'm translating the preposition "con", which usually means "with", as "by", because I'm not sure how else to make sense of the sentence.** Please let me know in comments if you know better.)
 * The politician in question is António Guterres, as near as I can tell (based on a reference in this editorial from Lusopresse). I am tentatively translating Saramago's "governo" as "prime minister", since that was Guterres' position.
** Update -- Never mind, now I looked at the Portuguese source of the post (which I had been reading in Spanish) -- the preposition translated as "con" is "pela", which is Portuguese for "by". This makes me more confident in my translation of the Spanish.
posted evening of November second, 2008: Respond
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In Hovering Flight, Chapters 15 and 16 -- as Addie struggles with cancer and with chemotherapy I feel like she is finally starting to come through as a character -- still very much an odd bird, but I'm starting to understand her well enough to identify with her, and with Tom. And in parallel I'm thinking that Scarlet (who is now grown up) is beginning to understand her parents as people rather than just as cryptic "parents". By that token the writing in these chapters strikes me as more mature, more fully developed than the writing in Chapters 7 and 8 -- Scarlet is again (mostly) absent from the story, but there is no drought of character. I wonder if it would be possible (and if it would be worthwhile) to argue that the narrator "grows up" in parallel with Scarlet -- that Scarlet getting to know her parents enables the reader to know them with a fulness of human character. Would it be appropriate to call this a Bildungsroman?
(And a nice bit of continuity at the end of Chapter 16: at the party celebrating Addie's newfound artistic success, "And there was Scarlet, watching them all and smiling...")
posted morning of November second, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Chapter 4 of The Golden Compass: Sylvia and I are both, separately, trying to figure out why the Master sends Lyra off with Mrs. Coulter,  who is obviously a Bad Guy. Sylvia laid out her hypothesis to me: Sylvia: Dad? What is that thing the Master gave Lyra? What did he say it could do? Me: The Alethiometer you mean? He said it was a machine that would tell her the truth. Sylvia: ...I think it's going to tell her that she's a Gobbler. He knows it and he wants it to tell her. Me: Hm, that sounds like it could be...
(A minute later) If he knows though, why doesn't he just tell her? Sylvia: Because she would probably just refuse.
That's a good thought. I also am working on an idea where maybe Mrs. Coulter's kid-stealing activities are actually benign, or serving a greater good, and we've been misled by the children's talk of Gobblers. The distinction between Good Guys and Bad Guys is not as clear in this book as in most of the other stuff we've read before. But I think Sylvia's idea is probably closer to right.
posted evening of October 30th, 2008: Respond
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In his playlist today, Dave Barber includes a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading the first stanza of the Inferno, in every English translation found in the British Library.
I've assembled a playlist of Bergvall readings so they're all in one place. You can download it from box.net. (Click "download folder" to get all tracks zipped, for a faster download.) The tracks are:  - "The Host's Tale"
- "The Summer Tale"
- "The Franker Tale"
- "The Not Tale"
- Inferno, first stanza
- "Mont Blanc", by Percy B. Shelley
- "Pervaded with that ceaseless motion": a reading of "Mont Blanc" in collaboration with composer Mario Diaz de León.
A note about her Chaucer project can be found in issue 32 of Jacket.
posted morning of October 30th, 2008: Respond
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