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Sunday, November 14th, 2010
Reading Rivera Letelier is putting me in mind of Faulkner or Saramago. His sentences have a dense lushness, a gentle rhythm that allows the mind to wander and then pulls it back in to the flow of the syntax. (This effect is really heightened for me by the sentences being in a language I don't fully understand -- I find myself reading over several times, first to establish the rhythm, then slower, to get a fuller understanding of the meaning, then over, slowly the rhythm and the narrative come into sync for me.)
posted afternoon of November 14th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
Doing a little more research about Rivera Letelier's book: I was apparently imprecise in calling it an homage to Parra's poem. It looks like both the poem and the book are based on the life of a real historical figure named Domingo Zárate Vega who preached imminent apocalypse in the Elqui Valley of the 1930's. (I am hedging a bit because I'm not finding much primary source material about Zárate Vega on the internets. But multiple pages about the book and about the poem make reference to their being based on real history. An article in the Patagonia Times states that Rivera Letelier "researched the actual existence of the Christ of Elqui for his book and includes a bibliography at the end to avoid accusations of plagiarism" -- I am not finding this bibliography in my copy, which is disappointing and confusing.) From the same Patagonia Times article, a beautiful anecdote about how Rivera Letelier, who grew up in a lower-class family and initally worked as a miner, came to his writing career:
Rivera Letelier began to write when he was 21 years old “because of hunger.†Listening to the radio with an empty stomach, he heard the announcement of a poetry competition whose award was a dinner in a luxurious hotel. He wrote a four-page love poem and won the meal.
I'd love to read that poem, and I wonder if Rivera Letelier has written an autobiography...
 Update: a little information about Zárate Vega in this post from Loruka, who lives in La Serena.
posted afternoon of November 10th, 2010: 1 response
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Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
Another Saramago epigraph from El libro de los consejos -- at the front of his Small Memories is the line, "Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste/(roughly) Allow the child you were to carry you." The first time I've been able to find a lead suggesting affirmatively that these quotations are actual quotations from somewhere else, not invented by Saramago -- this line takes me to Juan Pedro Villa-Isaza's blog
Casi un objeto, which gives some context for it:
Mientras no alcances la verdad, no podrás corregirla. Pero si no la corriges, no la alcanzarás. Mientras tanto, no te resignes.*
Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste.
As long as you do not know the truth, you will not be able to alter it. But if you do not alter it, you will never be able to reach it. Still, do not resign yourself. Allow the child you were to carry you.
 (Also, Googling for the original Portuguese rendering of this quote "Deixa-te levar pela criança que foste" leads me to a 2006 interview with Saramago, where he talks about his life and his writing process.) ..."llevar/levar" can also mean "to lead" -- indeed that appears to be the primary meaning in Portuguese; a better rendering of this line might be "Let yourself be led by the child you were." *... and now I am remembering that this line is the epigraph for The History of the Siege of Lisbon... and am back to thinking the whole thing is Saramago's invention.
posted evening of November 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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 I bought a book last night on the strength of its cover -- The magnificent cover photo (a still from Buñuel's Simon of the Desert) made me pick it up and read the back cover, made me buy the book and start reading... It is an homage to NÃcanor Parra's Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui, about a young man from Chile's Elqui Valley who discovers that he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Very dry humor and lovely prose.
Here is a bit of linguistic confusion I found entertaining -- early in the novel the narrator is talking about Christ's difficulties with his good-for-nothing apostles, who are always stuffing themselves, guzzling liquor and smoking -- he compares this with the Messiah's ascetic ways using a quick shift from third to first person, which is made more subtle and confusing by Spanish's imperfect tense. In Spanish, the first person singular imperfect and the third person singular imperfect are usually (maybe always?) the same. So when Letelier writes
Él, por su parte, que debÃa ser luz para el mundo, no fumaba ni bebÃa. Con un vaso de vino al almuerzo, como exhortaba en sus prédicas, era suficiente. Y apenas probaba la comida, porque entre mis pecados, que también los tengo, mis hermanos, nunca figuró la gula. Tanto asà que a veces, por el simple motivo de que se olvidaba de hacerlo, se pasaba dÃas completos sin ingerir alimentos.
The first sentence is obviously the narrator speaking, because its subject is "Él". The second sentence is still referring to Christ in the third person, speaking of "sus prédicas". The beginning of the third sentence looks like it is still doing so until we get to "mis pecados" and "los tengo", and realize Christ is speaking now. Then in the fourth sentence we are back to third person as evidenced by the use of "se" instead of "me" -- I found it surprising what a small proportion of the words in this passage distinguish between the two voices.
posted afternoon of November 9th, 2010: 3 responses
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Thursday, October 28th, 2010
Versos sin sentido por Jeremy Osner
Esas palabras se dicen a mà mismo
Como los ecos que vibranse entre las nubes
Pero también debéis escuchar, escuchad
al voz de vuestra Diosa propia.
Cuando vos sentÃs familiar me decid.
Vamos mañana tal vez al paisaje de nuestras ilusiones
o a una ruina postapocalÃptica similar, nos
desaparezcase la iglesia, la iglesia de los padres, la iglesia de ayer.
from Criminalby José Cárdenas Peña
If only it were just the scream
the water's scream,
the rolling stone
abandoned, with no place to lay its head
against the storm.
If only it were just
the wound, corrosive wound,
the nameless passage,
flow of dead time:
the soft procession of the hours,
sentinels of fear.
If only it were the handful of herb
the herb which mates with blood
winnowed through memory
now it can say:
it is over,
the statue, the labyrinth,
angel's shadow, world which never is.
But behind this silent
anguished nostalgia,
behind you yourself
o wounded shadow who calls me,
swells the violence
the destruction over cliffs
over conquered ragged armies, ashes, dust.
And still I know the damage,
in this moment of my hapless lineage;
this ghost or god who from my birthplace
from my rubble rises up
this dove of the final flood,
and around me your words
your tongues of fire
baptismal conch
pouring out on your mirror of drunkenness
handful of naked salt
of biblical questions:
the mud, the signal, seed of man
your voice, your name, your sorrow;
the shape of just one tear
wept out for the dead
for fallen moorish idols
blood which teaches me to feel,
who cannot catch it, fend it off
as the sky fends off his luminous abyss,
the sea her piscene stigmata.
...
posted evening of October 28th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Today's post at Saramago's Other Notebooks quotes one of his oldest novels.
La libertad no es mujer que ande por los caminos, no se sienta en una piedra esperando que la inviten a cenar o a dormir en nuestra cama el resto de la vida.
-- Levantado del suelo, Alfaguara, 2003, p. 422
Liberty is not a woman walking the streets, she is not sitting on a bench outside waiting for an invitation to dinner, to come sleep in our bed for the rest of her life.
-- Raised up from the soil, 1980
posted evening of October 26th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, October 25th, 2010
Another poem from Los contados dÃas.
At times I bear
as an enormous cross, love
mounted on this coffin, my corpse.
Shipwrecked and alone,
I crash like a thunderbolt, like a star.
Reborn from my anterior dyings,
to go on dying all around,
dying in a tree's ear
or at the hand of a dream.
I fell from void, just
like oblivion falls among the ruins,
I was thrust
into the beauty of the earth:
was clay before the brightness and the joy.
...
I pass from the bird to the rose,
by blood and by fæces,
between forgetfulness and dust.
My soul cries out for its species of pride,
its desolate labyrinth,
its universe of shadow.
But my mind won't stop
measuring out the ashes from my eye
...
And that the world remains the world
and that the land is bathed
in the purple of blood;
the flood's diluted in another flood,
the Gods break away from our grasp
our prayer is trapped
trapped in our throats
a nail, a catastrophe.
And still it's beautiful
raising up this cathedral of sighs
...
posted evening of October 25th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
Stranger Here Below is a little devious in its rendering of characters in the shifts of focus, Hinnefeld likes to lull you in to thinking of the other characters as fitting comfortably into the  background of whatever character's story is currently in focus. Here is a switch of focus reminding the reader suddenly that Maze is still in the foreground, when you've gotten used to tracking Mary Elizabeth's story:
The bus ride up from Lexington had been miserable. Endless and miserable. By the time she got to Indianapolis, she had a sharp, stabbing pain that ran up her right side, from her ankle to her armpit, and no matter how she shifted in the crowded seat, she couldn't get comfortable. Sciatica. Vista'd had it, too, she'd said, when she was pregnant. But Maze wouldn't touch any of the herbal remedies Vista or Georgia tried to get down her. She didn't trust either of those disappointed women.
That reminder of the complexities in her relationships with her mother and Georgia brings her suddenly into focus -- this is the beginning of one of the most dramatic confrontations of the novel (in which much of the conflict has been repressed or sub rosa), between the Pilgrim and the Stranger.
posted afternoon of October 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Here is a poem by a Mexican poet named José Cárdenas Peña, "Los contados días".
This wandering groping
like I'm walking into ruins:
this turning my face to the wind
without expecting a response from the wind;
instinctive phrasing, to live and to hope
without contact:
this clamour to God,
this doubt and this love, this blasphemy;
this dread of being lonely,
of the death that is not death;
it hurts me, hurts like a wound,
like my own native land,
like an angel's wing --
like my crime, like her bleak silence...
And when at last I scream Here! Here I am!,
so cleaves in two my naked, naked heart.
I really like the rhythm of the poem in Spanish and am trying to get a similar rhythmic thing going in the translation.
 (I posted the original of this poem in the comments to a LanguageHat entry about free verse and memorization.)
posted evening of October 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Saramago seems almost to be picking at a linguistic scab in his consciousness in these first few sentences of "Chair", the first story in An Object, Almost. If I'm understanding right the chair he is talking about is to some approximation the government of Salazar, though I'm not sure how explicit he makes that.
The chair begins to fall, to come down, to capsize, but not, in the strictest sense of the term, to come unleashed. Speaking strictly, coming unleashed means losing one's bonds. And of course, one can't say that a chair is chained or in bonds, if it had for instance a couple of lateral arm rests, you would say the armrests of the chair are falling, not that they have been unleashed. But truthfully, storms can be unleashed, I would say, or better I remember having said, so as not to fall into my own traps: if cloudbursts can be unleashed, which is just another way of saying the same thing, could not, in short, chairs likewise be unleashed, even without having bonds? As at least a poetic liberty? At least as the simple artifice which proclaims itself style, voice? Let's accept that chairs can come unleashed, even if it ultimately proves preferable that they should only fall, should capsize, should come down.
I finished a couple of revisions of "Ebb-tide" and sent a copy of it to the editor who accepted my translation of "Requiem" -- I'm starting to fantasize about publishing a translation of this collection of stories, not sure if that means I have to learn Portuguese or if it's legit to translate from the Spanish translation -- what I have done so far sounds very nice to my ear so I am sticking to the Spanish for now.
posted evening of October 21st, 2010: Respond
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