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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
A warning at the top: this post is trying to tie together a couple of disparate strands of thought, and is going to read like a rough draft. I may rewrite it later. I am finding it hard to praise or condemn any of the characters in Of Love and Other Demons, though their actions and thoughts are certainly ones I can find worthy of praise or condemnation. What I mean to get at here: this novel is written from a fatalistic viewpoint. The characters are acting without free will, because they have to perform their parts. This sounds (when I read it) like a criticism of the novel -- like I am saying García Márquez cannot draw characters who I believe to be "fully human," since "fully human" includes "possessed of free will" -- characters who unchoosingly act out parts written for them, are puppets. That is not my intention however. The characters do read as fully human individuals, people I can sympathize with, can imagine myself as being. The Bishop's insistence that Sierva María is possessed -- based on acta written up by the Abbess which he knows to be worthless, and in the face of Father Cayetano Delaura's affirmation that she is sane -- is completely inexplicable to me except as malevolence; but instead of trying to explain it and calling it malevolent, I find that I'm accepting it as the way the world is in this book. I'm wondering how strongly tied in this is to the sensual quality of García Márquez' prose that I identified earlier. Another author whose writing I would characterize as sensual is William Faulkner, and I do remember a similar feeling of fatalism in reading his novels. I don't want to go too far with this though because it can make me feel like a poseur -- I'm not a critic, my understanding of literary style is guesswork cobbled together with stray bits of memory -- and I've gotten the sense that using Faulkner as a point of comparison is easy and meaningless without further explication.
posted morning of January 24th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
The excellent movie we watched yesterday evening was The Crime of Padre Amaro -- not much to say about it other than it was a great movie, I recommend it highly -- I am thinking about it right now while reading Of Love and Other Demons's description* of a highly religious (and seemingly to me, sincerely so) bishop, and contrasting this with the hideous portrait of the bishop who appoints and conspires with Amaro:
"Come in, Ygnacio," he said. "My house is yours."The Marquis wiped his perspiring hands on his trousers, walked through the door, and found himself under a canopy of yellow bellflowers... The Bishop extended his soldier's hand in a meaningful way, and the Marquis kissed his ring. Asthma made his breathing heavy and stony, and his phrases were interrupted by inopportune sighs and a harsh, brief cough, but nothing could affect his elopuence. He established an immediate, easy exchange of trivial commonplaces. Sitting across from him, the Marquis was grateful for this consolatory preamble, so rich and protracted that they were taken aback when the bells tolled five. More than a sound, it was a vibration that made the afternoon light tremble and filled the sky with startled pigeons. "It is horrible," said the Bishop. "Each hour resonates deep inside me like an earthquake. The phrase surprised the Marquis, for he had responded with the same thought at four o'clock. It seemed a natural coincidence to the Bishop. "Ideas do not belong to anyone," he said. With his index finger he sketched a series of continuous circles in the air and concluded: "They fly around up there like angels."
So -- in a sense he seems detached in a monklike way (or a way that I think of in association with monks and ascetics) from ownership of the world around him -- and earlier he was described as "sincere in his poverty." My initial reaction to that is wait, but he's not poor, he lives in a mansion with his needs attended to, and to think about the Church in a villainous context. But then I find a very sympathetic portrait of the Bishop. (Initially at any rate -- the character has just been introduced. Who knows, what the story will bring -- and see update below.)
 A line in the movie that gave me pause was when Padre Benito said to Amaro, in regards to its being unimaginable that the Vatican would ever drop the requirement of celibacy from the priesthood, that "there will sooner be a Mexican Pope." Huh! Well I can't offhand think of a non-European Pope and I reckon there probably has never been one from Mexico or Latin America. I would not have thought of it as a basis for comparison -- of course I am neither Latin American nor Catholic. Is this exclusion a common point of reference? Or is it being used as a common point of reference among Churchmen -- to emphasize that Benito and Amaro are priests and are concerned with Church politics? (Here is an article from Pacific News Service on the need for a non-European Pope, dated 2005.)
(Update: Hm, well García Márquez' depiction of the Bishop very quickly takes on a negative cast -- a few pages after we meet him he is proposing exorcism of a rabies patient and implying it's all down to the Jews. This is at least a different failing from greed or hypocrisy...)
* And besides this: the number and frequency of points of similarity between the movie and the book are making me wonder if there was conscious imitation going on, either on the part of the movie makers or on García Márquez' part with reference to the novel that was source for the film, which dates from 1875.
posted afternoon of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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I had my first-ever His Dark Materials-based dream last night! Can't remember it other than that it was extremely involved and plotted out in detail. I did not have a dæmon, most of the people I interacted with did, so I'm guessing I was a person from this world who had passed through into Lyra's world. (Note: Is Will's world "this world," the world of the reader? It certainly seems to be -- nothing about it seems unfamiliar, in the limited view of it we have gotten.) Many characters from the books were in the dream but interestingly they were all adult characters, where the main characters of the books are children. That reminded me of something I had been meaning to write about The Subtle Knife -- I don't remember this being the case as much in The Golden Compass* -- which is that there's just a ton of exposition. I haven't been keeping track exactly, but so far there have been at least three occasions of a character speaking for multiple pages, narrating the story-so-far to another character and, obviously, to the reader. Not sure what to make of this -- some of the narration is filling in needed plot points, some of it is confirming stuff I had already figured out from reading the book-so-far... I had a thought that maybe this was "because HDM is children's lit" -- that the intended audience won't have made all the connections, so Pullman is bringing them out explicitly. Maybe that's right, I don't know -- I'm finding it a bit of a distraction.
 * (Just remembered one instance of this in The Golden Compass -- it was integrated really nicely into the story there, where these feel a bit more patched-on.)
posted morning of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Coincident with my interest in learning to read and understand Spanish, I find that I'm reading a little differently these past few weeks, more sensually and in a less plot-directed way. (This may also have a lot to do with What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?, which in its strangeness has sort of knocked me for a loop...) This is nice because it makes me able to listen to recordings of spoken and sung Spanish which I understand only in a very limited sense, and get the cadences and flow without knocking myself out about the meaning. And I'm finding that I can get a similar thing going with English, of course I understand the meaning of it much better, but I can focus on the sound of the text and the visual/sensual qualities of the scene, rather than on characters and plot, which have been my main focus over the last few years. Today I started rereading Garcia Marquez' Of Love and Other Demons (tr. Edith Grossman), and this is a fantastic book for sensual reading. I'm taking it slow, reading it like poetry -- glad I picked it up. Take a look at the first paragraph for a sense of the story's lushness:
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the only child of the Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
A few notes about it: The epigraph is from the supplement to Part III of Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Question 80: Article 2, which addresses whether hair and fingernails will be resurrected along with the rest of the human body. Huh, I thought as I read this, that's a strange subject -- Garcia Marquez explains in a note at the front of the text, how this book got started. In 1949, as a reporter for El Universal in Cartagena, he covered the destruction of the historic Convent of Santa Clara and the disinterment of the bodies in its graveyard. One of the bodies was a young girl's, and yards of red hair were growing from its skull -- the grave marker said "Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles," and he associated this name with a folk tale he had heard from his grandmother about a girl who died of rabies and was credited with miracles. So 45 years later, in 1994, Garcia Marquez wrote a novel about a red-haired girl of that name dying of rabies. This is an interesting take on historical fiction -- mixing history and myth/folklore freely and without apology.
(Note that the author's note is part of the fiction, like the dedication of The White Castle -- I wonder though what part of it is true. I'm assuming with no proof that it is true except for the detail about the red hair.)
posted afternoon of January 17th, 2009: 2 responses
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Argentine author Sergio Chejfec, whose Mis dos Mundos was recommended by Enrique Vila-Matas as one of the best books he read in 2008, will be reading from the translation My Two Worlds in NYC Thursday the 29th, two weeks from tomorrow. His translator Liz Werner will also be there; this is Chejfec's first book to appear in English. The event is a party for the 10th anniversary of BOMB Magazine. If you're coming, drop me a line. (via 3%.)
Update: A misreading -- Chejfec's translator is Margaret Carson.
posted morning of January 14th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 12th, 2009
Listening to the Colombian band Musicalizando sing Neruda's poem "Plenos Poderes" is, well, fun. I'm not quite connecting with the music -- it doesn't really move me -- but the poem is just lovely and I'm glad to be able to hear it recited rather than just reading it on the page and trying to figure out the cadences for myself. And also, it's just a nice feeling to see pop musicians rooted in the literary tradition like that. I wonder (with reference to El Laberinto de la Soledad) if this is more common in Latin America than it is here. The lines Y no me canso de ir y de volver;
no me para la muerte con su piedra,
no me canso de ser y de no ser.
seem like a disavowal of his earlier Sucede que me canso de ser hombre. (from "Walking Around"). I suppose without knowing, this might be connected to the political situations of the times when he wrote these two poems. The lines from "Plenos Poderes" work nicely as a response to Hamlet's question.More Neruda-based pop music below the fold.
posted evening of January 12th, 2009: 5 responses
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The bolano-l mailing list is hosting a group read of 2666, starting today. I'm sitting this one out, but if you're meaning to read the book I'm guessing this will be a very useful resource. (via The Howling Fantods.)
posted afternoon of January 12th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 11th, 2009
There seems to be a lot written about translating Neruda's poetry. Here are a couple of things I've found this morning.
posted morning of January 11th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 10th, 2009
So on the one hand I feel like who am I to criticize Reid's translations -- he surely knew Spanish better than I and was more familiar than I with the literature he was translating. Still I'm seeing a lot of lines in Neruda's poems that look poorly translated to my eye. But one in particular is kind of knocking me for a loop, because it just seems wrong, in a very basic and easy way. From "El desnudo": Esta raya es el Sur que corre,
este círculo es el Oeste is translated asThis ray is the running sun,
this circle is the East when obviously the ray is "the South which runs" and the circle is "the West" -- why would you change "the South" to "the sun" and lose the parallelism between these two lines? Why would you make the West into the East? I'm missing something, or else this is just a botched job.
posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: 3 responses
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The poems in Fully Empowered are kind of perfect for me to read in Spanish -- short stanzas, short lines, so I can hold them in my head while I go over Reid's translation and back over the original. And lots of repetition of words, so I can maybe get some of them into my vocabulary -- building vocabulary has always been the most difficult part of language study for me. The repetitions seem meaningful -- certain words occur in almost every poem, like "línea" (in various senses), "caer" (in various forms), words relating to the water like "mar," "océan," "ola," "espuma,"... There are also frequent references to geography and geometry, to birds,  to movement, to towers... I haven't quite put all this together yet -- the references to water make me think about Neruda being Chilean, seems like the ocean must be a pretty important part of life in Chile. (Jorge, can you speak to this?) The many repetitions of "línea" are making me think about geometry and language and again, the sea, and tying them together. I just love the rhythm of this passage, which totally does not come through in the translation; I haven't been able to make a lot of sense of the passage, with or without the translation, but the sound of it is wonderful. From the second stanza of "Pájaro":
Cuando volví de tantos viajes
me quedó suspendido y verde
entre el sol y la geografía:
vi cómo trabajan las alas,
cómo se transmite el perfume
por un telégrafo emplumado
y desde arriba vi el camino,
los manantiales, las tejas,
los pescadores a pescar,
los pantalones de la espuma,
todo desde mi cielo verde.
posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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