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Sunday, March 15th, 2009
I've been meaning to post this passage from The Amber Spyglass, which I found deeply moving and which I think sums up the entire trilogy in a couple of paragraphs. I don't have much to say about it beyond that, so will just quote. (Note: if you are reading or planning to read the series and do not like spoilers, don't read this entry.) The setting is the world of the dead; Lyra and Will are planning to create an opening which will allow the ghosts of the dead to escape into the world of the living, that they might be annihilated, allowed truly to die. Long quote below the fold.
↷read the rest...
posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 5 responses
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 How I come to be reading The Hobbit now: Sylvia and I are pretty close to finishing up The Amber Spyglass now; I was casting about for what book to read next and realized that His Dark Materials is reminding me in some key ways of Tolkien's trilogy. That made me think about how much I had loved The Hobbit as a kid -- if memory serves I loved it much more deeply than the trilogy, it seems like I read The Lord of the Rings less whole-heartedly, with an eye mostly toward keeping up with my D&D-enthusiast friends... Anways -- so I asked Sylvia if she would like to read this next, she said she would (unsurprising -- she's really getting into fantasy novels nowadays), and I thought I would look through it beforehand.
And I'm falling in love all over again. I had forgotten how attractively witty and cultured Tolkien's narrative voice is -- it reminds me a lot of Grahame's voice in The Wind in the Willows. I wonder if this is true of the trilogy as well -- I expect it is, and suddenly I'm looking forward to rereading those books, and thinking I might get a lot more out of them than I did back in my childhood.
posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 4 responses
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Friday, March 13th, 2009
 My memory of reading The Hobbit (which happened about 30 years ago) has always been a very positive one, of being into the book in a pre-analytical way and just loving it, and I was always scared to pick it up to reread for fear that quality of the experience would be gone. I am happy to report (a few chapters in) that the quality is not only present but is augmented by seeing the page with a little more experienced (hopefully wiser but certainly more familiar with the world) eye.
 Don't miss Tove Jansson's illustrations for a Swedish edition of The Hobbit. (And it just occurs to me, oh yeah! Hobbits and Moomins have certain distinct similarities! Also Hobbits and Hemulens.)
posted evening of March 13th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March 8th, 2009
Saramago posts today about International Women's Day:
I've just been watching the TV news, demonstrations by women all over the world, and I'm asking myself one more time what disgraceful  world this is, where half the population still has to take to the streets to demand what should be obvious to everyone...
They say that my greatest characters are women, and I believe this is correct. At times I think the women whom I've described are suggestions which I myself would like to follow. Perhaps they are just models, perhaps they do not exist, but one thing I am sure of: with them, chaos could never have established itself in this world, because they have always known the scale of the human being.
I'm not completely sure about the translation in that last paragraph; it sounds pretty stilted the way I have written it. Possibly this is true of the original as well -- "chaos could never have established itself in this world" strikes me as a very strange thing to say, when the world is fundamentally chaotic -- and I don't see Saramago's women as imposers of order on natural chaos. This may be a clue into Saramago's understanding of the universe; I could see a reading of The Stone Raft in which the world is understood as an inherently ordered structure, and the characters (male and female, but particularly Joana) are keyed in to this natural order in opposition to humanity's chaos. Alternately I could be mistranslating, always a possibility.
posted evening of March 8th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, March 6th, 2009
 I got in touch with the friend to whom I loaned Blindness; she sent me the authorized translation of the epigraph I've been wondering about for the past few days.
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe. This is just right -- "If you can see" makes much better sense as an opening phrase than "If you can look"; and then on the second line, "If you can look" reads alright because you already have the structure set up to understand it in.
 Saramago attributes this line to the "Book of Exhortations", which if I'm understanding right is Deuteronomy. It would be interesting to find out where it is in that book and see how e.g. the King James translation renders it. ...Looking further, it seems like "Book of Exhortations" is a pretty generic term -- it can refer to a lot of different prophetic writings. I wonder what Saramago's source for this line is. Update: Further investigation of the source here.
posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Saramago takes another look at the epigraph, and makes me understand that I had been misreading it in a key way:
In a conversation yesterday with Luis Vázquez, closest of friends and healer of my ailments, we're talking about the film by Fernando Meirelles, just premiered in Madrid, even though we could not be in attendance, Pilar and I, as we intended to be, for a sudden bout of chills obligated me to retire to my chamber, or confined me to bed, in the elegant phrasing in use not so long ago. The conversation soon turned to the public's reactions during the exhibition and afterwards, highly positive according to Luis and to other trustworthy witnesses... We moved from there, naturally, to talking about the book and Luis asked me if we could look over the epigraph which opens it ("Si puedes mirar, ve, si puedes ver, repara"), for in his opinion, the action of seeing [ver] encompasses the action of looking [mirar], and therefore, the reference to looking could be omitted without bias to the meaning of the phrase. I could not come up with a reason to give him, but I thought that I should have other reasons to consider, for example, the fact that the process of vision occurs three stages, successive but in some manner autonomous, which can be stepped through as follows: one can look and not see, one can see and not observe, according to the degree of attention which we pay to each of these actions. We know the reaction of a person who, having just checked his wristwatch, returns to check it when, at that moment, somebody asks him the time. That was when light flooded into my head concerning the origin of the famous epigraph. When I was small, the word "observe", always supposing I already knew it, was not for me an object of primary importance until one day an uncle of mine (I believe that it is Francisco Dinis of whom I am speaking in this brief memoir) called my attention to a certain way of looking that bulls have, which almost always, he then demonstrated, is accompanied by a certain way of raising the head. My uncle said: "He has looked at you, when he looked at you, he saw you, and now it is different, he is something else, he is observing." This is what I told Luis, which immediately won the argument for me, not so much, I suppose, because it convinced him, but because the memory made him remember a similar situation. A bull looked at him as well, and again this movement of the head, again this looking which was not simply seeing, but observation. We were at last in agreement.
So, reparar is not "fix" as I had been thinking, but "observe" or "contemplate". The dictionary entry confirms that the word can be used in this sense. I'm still (like Luis) a bit dissatisfied with the relationship between mirar and ver in the first part of the epigraph.
posted evening of March 5th, 2009: 1 response
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Tuesday, March third, 2009
Saramago is looking back on writing the epigraph for Blindness: Si puedes mirar, ve.
Si puedes ver, repara.
I wrote this for Blindness, already a good couple of years ago. Now, when the film based on this novel is making its debut in Spain, I've encountered the phrase printed on the bags of the 8½ bookstore and on the inside front cover of Fernando Meirelles' making-of book, which this same bookstore's publishing arm has edited with skill. At times I have said that by reading the epigraph of any of my novels, one will already know the whole thing. Today, I don't know why, seeing this, I too felt a sudden impulse, felt the urgency of repairing, of fighting against the blindness. [links are my additions -- J]
I'm curious about how to translate that epigraph. (And surprised that I don't remember this epigraph from when I read Blindness, and annoyed that I cannot go check how Pontiero translated it, because I lent it to a friend...) The sense of it is, "If you can see, see. If you can see, repair." -- Obviously this does not sound good in English because the distinction between mirar and ver is missing, and the transitive structure is lost. The literal translation of the first sentence would be "If you can look, see" -- but I'm guessing the sense of Si puedes mirar is something more like "if you are able to see", i.e. if you are not blind. It seems like ve has a more transitive sense, "see something, some injustice" (although the object is omitted, as it is with repara) -- where mirar is intransitive.
(There is an important misreading in this post, as regards the verb reparar -- see later post for the correction.)
posted evening of March third, 2009: 4 responses
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Sunday, March first, 2009
Saramago recommends as "one of the most skilled and original" of Portugal's new generation of novelists, Gonçalo M. Tavares. Doesn't look like Sr. Tavares has any works published in English yet (this might be wrong -- his translations page lists rights for most of his works having already been bought for "English in India only" -- but it's not clear that those translations have been published) but definitely someone to keep an eye out for. When he received the Saramago Prize in 2005, Saramago said "Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!"
posted evening of March first, 2009: 5 responses
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Borges categorizes 5 of Poe's stories as detective stories, I just wanted to list them with links to sources: If I'm reading him correctly, he thinks that detective stories are spoiled if you know the solution going in*, and that Poe's stories have been spoilt because we all know how they're going to turn out. But this solution [the end of "Murders in the Rue Morgue"] is not a solution for us, because we all know the outcome prior to reading Poe. This, of course, takes away much of its power....
Not sure how to react to this -- I think I remember being surprised by the ending of "Murders in the Rue Morgue", which I read as a child; but it was so many years ago, I could be wrong. Borges goes ahead in the next sentence and spoils the ending for any of his listeners who do not already know it, which seems a little mean-spirited.
 * This is a little curious taken side-by-side with his assertion in "The Book", that re-reading is more important than reading -- it seems like an inescapable conclusion from these two statements, that detective fiction is not important literature...
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2009: Respond
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I'm trying to understand what Borges thought of Poe -- there are different, and conflicting, levels of his opinion to take into account. As I said yesterday, he is pretty dismissive of the poems and stories themselves -- he spends a few pages addressing Poe's detective stories one by one, and none of them comes off very well. But he still believes Poe to be a genius, and one of the most important authors influencing modern literature.
I have said, Poe was the creator of an intellectual temperament in literature. What happened after Poe's death? He died, I believe in 1849. Whitman, his other great contemporary, penned an obituary* of him, saying that Poe was a performer who only knew how to play the low notes of the piano, who did not represent American democracy -- a claim which Poe had never made for himself. Whitman did him an injustice, and so did Emerson.There are critics, today, who underestimate him. But I believe that Poe, if we take his works in aggregate, has the œuvre of a genius, even if his stories (excepting the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) are defective. Nonetheless, taken together they construct a character, a character more vividly present than the characters he created, more vividly present than Charles Auguste Dupin, than the crimes, than the mysteries which fail to scare us.
This seems to be his final judgement of Poe -- the rest of the lecture he spends discussing the flourishing of the detective story in Britain and its abasement in the US. So he gives Poe credit for inventing a genre, for inventing a style of reading, for inventing Borges himself -- at one point he says "we ourselves" read differently by virtue of having Poe's invention as part of our heritage. I guess he believes Poe to be a literary genius but not a great author.
* I haven't been able to find the source for this obituary on the web. Update -- found it!
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2009: 3 responses
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