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Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
El último cuento de la colección nueva de Zupcic, Médicos taxistas, se dramáticamente diferencia del resto -- todos los son muy elegantes y lúcidos pero no (a excepción tal vez del hermoso "Tescucho, Italia") me inquietante cogen como los padre-ausente-y-criminal cuentos de sus colecciones jóvenes. Éso sà y hace una conexión bonita a los cuentos anteriores. (Los nuevos son indudablemente más fácil traducir, no estoy seguro de cómo esto interpretar.)
Cada uno de los cuentos en Médicos taxistas es a su manera excéntrico, es difÃcil clasificarlos juntos. El cuento titular me encuenta y en segunda lectura me deja pensando que es otra cosa detrás de la historia pero no puedo ver qué es. "El Barbero de DalÃ" me ha riendo y rascándome la cabeza. "Doble Chávez" me da un sentido no del todo bienvenido de la identificación. Una lectura muy divertida.
"Amor que a otro puerto pertenece," el último cuento y el más largo, reexamina a otra manera la tema de Zlatica Didic y su hijo Zlatko Didic que Zupcic (Slavko el hijo de Slavko Zupcic) visitó por primera vez en su "Cartas hacia una novela". Zlatko comienca aquÃ, "Comencé a escribir este relato hace casi veinte años..." y de repente tengo una imagen más claro y más estimulante del (sin duda pequeño) cuerpo de su obra. Todo se junta.
 The last story in Zupcic's new collection Médicos taxistas differs dramatically from the rest -- all of them are elegant and clear but none of them (except perhaps the beautiful "Tescucho, Italy") seizes me in the disquieting way that the absent/criminal-father stories in his juvenile collections do. This one does, and it creates a nice link to his earlier stories. (The new ones are indubitably easier to translate, I'm not quite sure what to make of this.)
Each of the stories in Médicos taxistas is oddball in its own way, I would have a hard time grouping them together. The title story enchants me and on second reading makes me feel I'm missing some element behind the story -- but certain that the unknown element is present behind the story. "The Barber of DalÃ" ("DalÃ's Barber" is probably a closer translation but I like the rhythm of this title) leaves me laughing and scratching my head. "Chávez Double" gives me a not completely welcome rush of identification. All in all a lot of fun to read.
"A Love Which Belongs to the Other Door," the last story and the longest, takes another look, through a different glass, at the subject of Zlatica Didic and his son Zlatko Didic, whom Zupcic (Slavko son of Slavko) first visited in his story "Letters Towards a Novel". Zlatko starts off by saying, "I began writing this story almost twenty years ago..." and suddenly I get a much clearer, more moving vision of the (to be sure small) body of his work -- it all comes together.
↻...done
posted evening of January 25th, 2012: Respond
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Juan Gabriel Vásquez took part in a live chat at the Guardian's Books section today -- here is what he has been thinking about recently:
For three whole days I have been thinking about Conrad's novels. Three in particular: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. I wrote a small text trying to suggest how amazing it was that those three novels, published between 1899 and 1907, anticipate every major issue the world had to deal with during the â…©â…© century.
 Oh and also: " I have a tendency to trust translators, mainly because nobody does it for the money."
posted evening of January 25th, 2012: Respond
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Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Dora was hurrying now and wanting her lunch. She looked at her watch and found it was tea-time. She remembered that she had been wondering what to do; but now, without her thinking about it, it had become obvious. She must go back to Imber at once. Her real life, her real problems, were at Imber, and since, somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all. There was a connexion; obscurely she felt, without yet understanding it, she must hang onto that idea: there was a connexion. She bought a sandwich and took a taxi back to Paddington.
Reading Murdoch's The Bell lately, I have been conflicted as to how I feel about the characters. I identify with them at points; but they have an air of falseness around them, the characters and plot elements seem almost like scenery for Murdoch's philosophizing and fable-telling. Not sure I mean this as a point against the book -- I am liking the book a lot -- but it does seem like an important stylistic element.
Then again I got a similar vibe from The Little Stranger, which was pretty clearly not written for philosophical argument.
posted evening of January 19th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, January 15th, 2012
I rode my bike down Muntaner to Diagonal. Parked it in front of the Dau al set gallery and rang Valerie's doorbell.
—When you come to the door, so you won't have to tell me who it is, ring three times in a row: ta, ta, ta. That way I'll know it's you. —that's what she had told me, the first day.
The door opened and I went upstairs. Valerie went over to the sofa with me as soon as I came in, she was moving her hands slowly in front of me, telling me her mother had been in the hospital since that afternoon, she feared the worst, that she had only come away from there to meet me, so that I would not come to an empty apartment and be scared.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek, paid me, and we left the apartment. Of course I didn't tell her any of what I'd been thinking about. I wasn't going to be seeing her anymore, surely; but I had left the mobile -- the lizards, the Gaudi mobile, on her sofa.
 I have made a couple of revisions and have submitted the story to Words Without Borders. The biographical note I submitted:
Jeremy Osner is a computer programmer living in New Jersey. He came to Spanish translation late in life and has been learning the language as he learns the voices of the authors he has translated. Notable among these is Venezuelan Slavko Zupcic, a psychiatrist now living in Valencia, Spain, whose stories examine the gaps in understanding at the borders between people.
This story is from Mr. Zupcic's recently published collection, Médicos Taxistas.
posted evening of January 15th, 2012: Respond
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 I have been struggling for a couple of weeks with translating a trilogy of stories by Zupcic about his character Vinko Spolovtiva... took a break from that to work on "Tescucho, Italia" from his new book Médicos taxistas and I was able in just a few days to get a working version together that I think reads quite well. You can listen to me reading it if you like; and hopefully soon you will be able to read it published somewhere!
posted afternoon of January 15th, 2012: 1 response
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Saturday, January 14th, 2012
Zoe Leonard's political wishes (found at towleroad.com, and thanks for the link, ragebunny!):
I want a dyke for president. I want a person
with aids for president and I want a fag for
vice president and I want someone with no
health insurance and I want someone who grew
up in a place where the earth is so saturated
with toxic waste that they didn't have a
choice about getting leukemia. I want a
president that had an abortion at sixteen and
I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two
evils and I want a president who lost their
last lover to aids, who still sees that in
their eyes every time they lay down torest,
who held their lover in their arms and knew
they were dying. I want a president with no
airconditioning, a president who has stood on
line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare
office and has been unemployed and layed off and
sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported.
I want someone who has spent the night in the
tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and
survived rape. I want someone who has been in
love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has
made mistakes and learned from them. I want a
black woman for president. I want someone with
bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has
eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who
crossdresses and has done drugs and been in
therapy. I want someone who has committed
civil disobedience. And I want to know why this
isn't possible. I want to know why we started
learning somewhere down the line that a president
is always a clown: always a john and never
a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker,
always a liar, always a thief and never caught.
(Check out this group reading of the piece, in English and in Danish!)
posted afternoon of January 14th, 2012: Respond
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According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
—William Carlos Williams
posted morning of January 14th, 2012: 6 responses
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Thursday, January 12th, 2012
I saw this poem on a poster on the train today:
IF THERE IS A SCHEME
Charles Reznikoff
If there is a scheme,
perhaps this too is in the scheme,
as when a subway car turns on a switch,
the wheels screeching against the rails,
and the lights go out—
but are on again in a moment.(source)
Nice! I tried reading it being conscious of its meter, of where the stresses fall in the cadence, and discovered that I want to insert the word "up" between "screeching" and "against", went over the line with a couple of different stress patterns to see if there's one that works better with the existing wording.It turns out that in my first reading, I was reading "the wheels screeching" without pause, placing "whee" and "scree" on downbeats/stresses, whereas I think a pause is intended after "wheels" - this gives the rhythm a syncopated quality. If you hold a pause *(cæsura? I am not sure, just, what this term means but I think it might be applicable) here long enough you can elide from "screeching" to "against" and keep to the poem's rhythm. This in effect substitutes the pause, the absence, for the syllable that I was interpolating. Wondering now if this poem could be expanded into a lyric -- it seems to have a lot of possibilities in it. Thinking that the insight about pauses standing in for syllables might help me clean up my wordy lines a bit.
posted evening of January 12th, 2012: 1 response
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Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed," and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never win an argument.
Digging The Corrections, finding Franzen's voice fits my psyche like a glove. I'm finding all of his characters easily inhabitable, Chip's anxiety, Denise's frustration, Gary's irritable paranoia... even the parents are easy to understand, identify with.
posted evening of January 11th, 2012: 2 responses
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Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
 I was translating (just starting to translate, I was on the first page) into English a translation into Croatian of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. It seemed like it was going to be a magnum opus...
posted morning of January 10th, 2012: Respond
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