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Readings
I like to read, and I read a lot of books -- the primary impetus for starting this site was to give myself a way of keeping track of what I am thinking about the books I am reading, and to remember the thoughts as time passes.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
I want to try posting a rough translation of the first canto of Gerbasi's "My Father the Immigrant". The loose rhythm and magical language of the poem are seeming to come across into English pretty naturally.
My father, Juan Batista Gerbasi, whose life inspired this poem, was born in a winemaking region on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy; he died in Canoabo, a tiny Venezuelan village hidden away in the wilderness in Estado Carabobo.
We come from the night; and into the night we go.
We leave behind the earth, enveloped in her vapors;
the dwelling place of almond grove, of child and of leopard.
And leave behind our days: lakes, snowstorms, reindeer,
dour volcanoes, enchanted forests
where the blue shadows of fear live.
And leave behind the graves beneath the cypress,
lonely like the grief of distant stars.
And leave behind our glories, torches blown out by secular gusts.
And leave behind our doors, muttering darkly in the wind.
And leave behind our anguish in celestial mirrors.
And time we'll leave behind, time with man's drama:
Progenitor of life, progenitor of death.
Time, which raises up and wears down columns,
Which murmurs from the ocean's multitude.
And leave behind the light which bathes the mountains,
which bathes our children's parks, our altars white.
But also the night with its mournful cities,
quotidian night, no longer even night,
that brief respite, trembling with lightning bugs,
or passing through our souls in savage strokes.
Night which falls again against the light,
awakening the flowers in moody valleys,
remaking the waters' lap among the mountains,
launching horses into clear blue streams;
meanwhile eternity, gleaming golden,
makes its silent way through heavenly fields.
What fire of darkness, what circle of thunder,
Fell over your visage when you beheld this land?
(making no claims for the quality of that translation/transliteration; I have not read the rest of the poem yet so I don't have any context) -- Gerbasi, a key figure of Venezuelan poetry in the 20th Century, was a son of Italian immigrants; Zupcic's father is an immigrant from Croatia. Several of the stories in this collection are told from the point of view of a Venezuelan named Vinko Spolovtiva, concerning his (absent) Croatian father.
* Dragi is Croatian for "Dear", the salutation at the top of a letter. The story "Letters toward writing a novel" consists in part of letters written by Zlatica Didic to his siblings, and his son, narrating, comments, "There is a word which opens most of the letters: Dragi. According to Bozidar, who translated them, this means something like "dearest". I decided not to translate it: it has a sweet sound, a nice sound. Nigmar thinks it looks like a sunstone -- that seems right to me."
posted afternoon of September 4th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
One of the most arresting passages in Feeding on Dreams -- and one which incidentally made me think of Saramago's All the Names -- is this distinction between official, archival memory in the First World and in Latin America:
Memory is important throughout this book, shading into and conflicting with nostalgia, being lost and refound and disputed and defended; in one of the diary entries from Dorfman's 1990 return to Chile which make up the core of the book, a MAPU comrade of his is telling about a reunion dinner with his Pinochetista parents —
...His mother noticed that he was dragging his left foot slightly as he shuffled towards the living room. "What happened to you, hijo?" she asked. "Did you hurt yourself?"
"You know perfectly well why I'm limping, Mamá. I was tortured, that's why. I'll never walk normally again, you know that."
Tortured? His mother looked at the other members of the family as if to excuse the wayward child and his pranks. Of course the boy hadn't been tortured, hasta cuándo was he going to engage in that sort of political propaganda, let's not dwell on such unpleasant topics...
Ariel Dorfman's saga of exile in Feeding on Dreams is also a saga of language, language lost and rediscovered. Heinrich Böll puts into words the younger man's predicament when the two authors meet in Paris, a few years after the coup in Chile:
What he shared with me was the problem that German writers had faced after the Third Reich. "Hitler contaminated the language," he said. "We could no longer write the word comrade, the words joy and exultation and brotherhood. It was kidnapped, the language itself, by the Nazis. That was the task we could not avoid, that is what you must worry most about. Not allowing them to control the language with which you will tell the story of your times. This is something that needs to be done now, before you overthrow Pinochet. It cannot wait till tomorrow or it may be too late."
posted evening of September first, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Ariel Dorfman
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by
his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
The Compagnia de' Colombari theater company is going to be performing "More or Less I Am" around the city next week -- it is a musical theater piece based on Whitman's Song of Myself. The Times has a schedule, and you can read a review of an earlier performance at the New Yorker. All performances are free of charge. We're going to the show at The Calhoun School on Friday and looking forward to it!
posted evening of September first, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
This post is inspired partly by a conversation I had with Ellen last night. I asked what she thought of the poem I had posted about writing poetry, and she said she thinks that kind of writing is worth while mostly for working it out of your system in order that you can write more immediate poetry... I'm finding interesting that much of Spring and All, at least the prose sections of it, is just this kind of writing about writing, about what I can write and how I can expect the reader to respond to it.
This is from the opening section of Spring and All (perhaps what Williams needs to work out of his system before he can move on to poetry) --
The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day ! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do ? and what do I care ?
I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him : endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways -- but he doesn't exist ! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way.
...
And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed -- To the imagination -- you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force -- the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.
In the imagination, we are henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say „ I ” I also mean „ you ”. And so, together, as one, we shall begin.
Well, this seems great. I can picture myself saying this, can identify fully with Williams, as he is quite explicitly inviting me to do. Of course my project is not complete there -- I want to say something of my own, that's why I'm writing...
(A side note: the introduction to this edition (New Directions, 2011), written by C.D. Wright, is just great.)
The poem I posted this morning started out as a response to William Carlos Williams' Spring and All -- I've been reading it in fits and starts over the past week or so and loving the physical and the auditory texture of the words, but far from sure they are making any semantic impact on my consciousness -- when I turn the page, the words I was reading do not seem to persist much as imagery or meaning. This is a common response of mine to long poetry and to dense prose, and the answer always seems to be, just enjoy the sounds and let the meaning follow if it will.
I got interested in this book when I realized that after so many years of pastiching "Red Wheelbarrow" and "This is just to say" on Making Light, I still don't have much knowledge of Williams beyond those two poems. In the interests of repeating the text, here are a few passages I am enjoying. (Generally I am pretty psyched and amazed by the use here of paragraphs within poetry.)
If anything of moment results -- so much the better. And so much the more likely it will be that no one will want to see it.
There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.
Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here. ...
The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank fields, with hands in pockets, in his head the harvest already planted.
o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable ! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays -- and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls -- our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure !
Ah -- here's the excerpt I was looking for -- the one that initially, when I was reading it, made me want to write this post, but which, when I went back to look, I could not find.
Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow -- that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide.
That or the imagination which in this case takes the form of humor, is known in that form -- the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quantity of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating: quite plainly we have no appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves -- by acknowledging a new situation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast -- but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quantity of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind.
Nørretranders spends quite a bit of space in Chapter 9, "The Half-Second Delay", dealing with the experiments of Kornhuber and Deecke and of Benjamin Libet and with their indications that the consciousness of a decision to act is epiphenomenal -- that the volition to act arises out of unconscious processes, the conscious decision is a back-formation, a way for consciousness to explain the volition to itself. The result seems pretty clear from the experiments as they are described;* according to Nørretranders it causes a big problem for believers in free will. If volition is pre-conscious/unconscious/non-conscious, the argument goes, then the notion of our acting out of our free wills is illusory.
It is not completely clear; but I don't think that Nørretranders is expounding his own belief here, but rather explaining a debate that is going on. It's difficult to tell because he does not attribute to anybody the argument that Libet's results negate free will; he just states it as a common-sense difficulty with the results. But it doesn't seem so clear-cut to me, and I'm interested to see where he goes with it. My gut sense is that free choice can be exercised without necessarily being a conscious act; that innate urges and instinctual volitions are not necessarily mechanical or deterministic. If consciousness is an epiphenomenon of one's brain state, why shouldn't the conscious decision process -- the back-formed story of a conscious decision process -- be epiphenomenal to processes in the brain state which are indeed deciding to act?
*Though note, these results from Trevena and Miller call Libet's results into question.
At Political Animal, Steve Benen reflects on shifting cultural perceptions of labor on this labor day. He looks back to Abraham Lincoln's declaration 150 years ago that "Labor is prior to and independent of capital," and wonders for how much longer America will celebrate the hands and backs which build her up and keep her whole.
Keith Houston's latest post at Shady Characters takes him into new territory: today he is examining the history of a mark (or group of marks) that never gained mainstream acceptance, punctuation for indicating irony.
Ariel Dorfman's saga of exile in Feeding on Dreams is also a saga of language, language lost and rediscovered. Heinrich Böll puts into words the younger man's predicament when the two authors meet in Paris, a few years after the coup in Chile:
This is a 
