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Saturday, January third, 2009
Genesis 12: 5 Abram Tomó a Sarai su mujer, a Lot su sobrino y todos los bienes que HabÃan acumulado y a las personas que HabÃan adquirido en Harán; y partieron hacia la tierra de Canaán. Después llegaron a la tierra de Canaán,
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y Abram Atravesó aquella tierra hasta la encina de Moré, en las inmediaciones de Siquem. Los cananeos estaban entonces en la tierra.
Interesting -- the KJV translation has "the plain of Moreh" at the text I've emphasized; RSV has "the oak of Moreh". But this Spanish translation is calling it "encina", which means "holm oak", more specific than either of these. Blue Letter Bible's concordance doesn't show "holm oak" occurring in any English translation. Now I'm wondering what the source term is -- is encina a common tree in Spain as oak is in England, and the reference is just to a generic tree?I remember in The Stone Raft there were a couple of references to "holm oak", which I skipped over without really getting. I think Joana Carda's stick was described as being witch-hazel rather than "even" holm oak; I took this vaguely to be a way of minimizing how strong of a wood it was. Possibly a reference to this passage was intended here, though if the tree is common in Spain and Portugal, probably not.
 A bit wrong -- "Holm oak" appears four times in The Stone Raft; the one I was thinking of is on p. 106: Joana Carda responded with silence, after all, there is no law to prohibit guests from taking even a branch of holm oak into their room, much less a thin little stick, not even two meters long... At the beginning of the book there is a suggestion that Joana's branch was elm, or possibly wych-elm.
posted morning of January third, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, January second, 2009
The last time I read Genesis must be about ten years ago now, around the time I read the books of Samuel. This time around I am a bit surprised by how much is happening in so little space -- my memory is of quite a bit more filler material like patrilineages -- and by how familiar I am with the material. (This familiarity is a very good thing as I'm reading the text in Spanish -- knowing the story is most helpful for understanding the words.) I am finding it much easier to read attentively when the words are foreign to my ears. My method has been to read verse by verse and chapter by chapter: read the line for its sense, then look up any words I'm unfamiliar with, then go back and read it over until I really understand it. At the end of the chapter, go back and reread until I've got the whole thing well in hand. I'm figuring I'll keep with this for another week or two, probably til the end of Genesis, and then start on some Spanish text I'm more interested in for itself. Cien Años de Soledad? That might be a good pick -- I'm pretty familiar with it in translation and I don't remember the grammatical constructions being difficult. Every time I look at the Garden of Eden story I have a similar reaction, which is to feel outraged, initially, at the way Adam and Eve are treated, angry at Jehovah; and then to remember this is a parable created by humans to describe and justify their position in the world; and to go off on a tangent trying to figure out what made them want to view the world this way.* (Also, "Damn! If only they would have eaten from the other tree first!")
* (Step 4 in this dialectic is, Remember that this worldview is my own cultural heritage, and feel disatisfied.)
posted afternoon of January second, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
 Remember how Sylvia and I differed on the merits of the Despereaux movie as compared with its book? Well on the subject of The Golden Compass we're more in agreement -- the book is a gem, the movie not worth the time spent watching it. Sylvia's review: "Whoever directed that movie, they didn't make it good."
For about the first half of the movie, I was thinking about writing a long post detailing every divergence with the book and for each one, explaining how it was to the detriment of the movie. But better I think, to tell what these differences have in common: in every case, the mystery in the book is discarded and replaced with clear, dry explication. Ambiguities are absent. What I loved about the book was Lyra's development from total innocence -- here at every step of the story she connects the dots like she had been expecting the solution all her life. And maybe the worst offense is not to show Lord Asriel's treachery -- the whole ending was trimmed off, I guess because the movie was running over-long -- without this the story doesn't go anywhere. It's funny in a way -- I guess I think of the merits of this movie as being about the same as the merits of Despereaux, a fun visual romp with some sentimentality, and nothing like greatness -- but I would never recommend it the way I would recommend the mouse movie. It ought to be a great movie, a majestic movie. Falling short of that, it is not worth bothering with.
posted evening of December 31st, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Last week, Saramago posted a Christmas Message:
Several years ago, no less than in 1993, I wrote in the Lanzarote Notebooks several words which were the delight of some theologians from this part of the Peninsula, especially Juan José Tamayo, who since then has generously given me his friendship. They were these: "God is the silence of the universe, and man is the scream which imparts sentience to this silence." I recognized that this idea was not poorly stated, with its "quantum satis" of poetry, its gently provocative intention and its subtext that atheists risk much in venturing onto the rough paths of theology, even those that are elemental. In these days when one celebrates the birth of Christ, another idea has occurred to me, perhaps even more provocative, it could even be called revolutionary, which can be enunciated in just a few words. Here. If it is true that Jesus, at the last supper, said to the disciples, showing them the bread and the wine which they found on the table: "This is my body, this is my blood," then it would not be illegitimate to conclude that the innumerable suppers, the Pantagrueline gluttonies, the Homeric bellyfuls with which millions and millions of stomachs have risked the dangers of a fatal bout of indigestion, would be nothing more than multitudinous copies, at the same time actual and symbolic, of the last supper: believers nourish themselves with god, devour him, digest him, eliminate him, until the next nativity, until the next supper, with the ritual of a material and mystical hunger forever unsatisfied. Let's see now what the theologians say.
I didn't know about the Cuadernos de Lanzarote before, this looks like just my cup of tea.
posted afternoon of December 30th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, December 29th, 2008
Saramago is starting his next book. He knows what the title will be, but he's not telling:
I am turning to a new book. When, in the middle of a conversation, I let fall this news, the inevitable question is put to me (my nephew Olmo asked me last night): and what will the title be? The most convenient solution for me would be to answer that I don't have one yet, that I have to get to the end in order to decide between the possibilities which are going to present themselves to me (assuming that they are going to) over the course of the work. Convenient, without a doubt, but false. The truth is that not even the first lines of the book had been written and I already knew, since nearly three years beforehand, what it would be called. Someone could ask: why this secrecy? Because the word of the title (it's only one word) contains, by itself, the complete story. I usually say that whoever doesn't have the patience to read my books, should pass his eyes at least over the epigraphs, because then he'll know the whole thing. I don't know if the book I'm working on will bear an epigraph. Maybe not. The title will suffice.
In other news, I'm thinking the best way for me to learn Spanish might just be to practice reading. Specifically I'm going to practice reading blogs like Saramago's and Jorge López', and find some more Spanish-language blogs to read, and reading the Bible. Hi to any new readers showing up from Edmond Caldwell's Contra James Wood project. I don't have anything against Wood -- wouldn't really have recognized the name prior to reading Mr. Caldwell's piece -- but the criticism seems (at first reading) well-founded.
posted evening of December 29th, 2008: Respond
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75 pages in I find that What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is starting to come into focus, starting to cohere. I am finding it frustrating not to know things like how old Paulo was when his father died, when he was committed to the hospital, how old he is at the point in time when he's telling the story, ... But the book seems to work best if I just read and allow these details to emerge in their own due course. Speaking at the ceremony where Lobo Antunes received the Juan Rulfo award this year, Robert Weil said, "Lobo Antunes presents life just as the brain really perceives things." This seems wrong to me -- the stream-of-consciousness in in this novel is just as much an artifice as is the structure of more conventional prose. It seems like it will be an interesting artifice, certainly, if I can ever get my head around it; for now I find it worrying, like I am not going to be able to recall the plot points when I need them a few hundred pages hence, when they are being presented in such a chaotic fashion.
posted evening of December 29th, 2008: Respond
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"Without books, joy rots away."-- Elias Canetti,
The Human Province: Notes 1942 - 1972 Among her selection of libri indispensabili, Marina Taffetani lists two books (the two earliest books) by Elias Canetti, of whom I had never heard before. Looks to be a really worthwhile author.He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981; in his speech before the Nobel banquet, he said, "Heute, seit Hiroshima, weiss jeder, was Krieg ist, und dass jeder es weiss, ist unsere einzige Hoffnung." -- "Today, since Hiroshima, everyone knows what war is; and that everyone knows this is our only hope."
posted afternoon of December 29th, 2008: 4 responses
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Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Lobo Antunes does not use standard construction of language in What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? -- the story is being told in an extremely cryptic sort of stream of consciousness. I am interested in knowing whether there is a story being told. I know there are characters because Paulo (the narrator) refers to them by name and I can piece together what entity each name refers to even without the help of the Dramatis Personæ at the front of the book. There is a setting -- Paulo is in a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon, and is thinking about Lisbon. There appear to be events as well -- he returns again and again to a scene of himself laughing leaning against his father's coffin, and to (I think) his intake interview at the hospital, and I'm assuming for now that these things happened in the world outside his stream of consciousness. But Lobo Antunes is giving me precious little to hold onto in justifying that assumption. The work is reading much more like poetry than like a novel. I am wishing for a supporting framework of some kind that would allow me to make sense of Paulo's ravings. Particularly it would be nice to have some syntactic clues: some paragraphs begin with em dashes, which appears to indicate a character is speaking; but some other paragraphs which do not begin with a dash sound a lot like dialogue as well. Some paragraphs are italicized, but there's as yet no clue how these are different from the non-italicized text.
posted evening of December 28th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, December 26th, 2008
What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is dedicated to the Renaissance poet Francisco Sá de Miranda, who Lobo Antunes says supplied the title of his book. Interesting! Sá de Miranda's work does not appear to be available online so tracking down the source is going to take a little legwork. The book is also dedicated to "Marisa Blanco for her pitiless friendship".
 Aha! Found the sonnet in question, courtesy of blogger Gonçalo Figueirdo Augusto (whose blog incidentally shares its title with another of Lobo Antunes' novels -- and which he also publishes in English): Desarrazoado* amor, dentro em meu peito,
Tem guerra com a razão. Amor, que jaz
E já de muitos dias, manda e faz
Tudo o que quer, a torto e a direito.
Não espera razões, tudo é despeito,
Tudo soberba e força; faz, desfaz,
Sem respeito nenhum; e quando em paz
Cuidais que sois, então tudo é desfeito.
Doutra parte, a Razão tempos espia,
Espia ocasiões de tarde em tarde,
Que ajunta o tempo; em fim, vem o seu dia:
Então não tem lugar certo onde aguarde
Amor; trata traições, que não confia
Nem nos seus. Que farei quando tudo arde?
* this is spelled "desarrezoado" on Sr. Figueirdo Augusto's blog and several other pages I've found; however I can only find "desarrazoado", "unreasonable", in the dictionary; and some pages have this spelling. So I don't know whether it's a typo or an obsolete spelling. "Unreasonable love" is definitely the correct meaning here.
posted evening of December 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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Jorge López has been recommending Coetzee since I've been reading his blog; nothing has made me as interested as this sentence, from his review today of Disgrace: "It [Coetzee's narrative style] is able to create personalities so lovable, their complexity and imperfection make it difficult not to feel a sensation of identity." I'm happy to see this trope of identification with a novel's characters invoked. Adding Disgrace to my list, moving Elizabeth Costello up in priority.
posted morning of December 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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