READIN

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

🦋 Cronicas Marcianas

Opening up Borges' Prólogos, one of the first things that caught my eye was his foreword to the Spanish edition of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, first published in 1955. I don't think of Borges as a science-fiction author though some of his stories certainly fit in the genre. Have not read Martian Chronicles since I was 15 or something!-- but I remember reading it a couple of times as a young kid... Perhaps it's worth revisiting.

In the first Century of our era, Lucian composed a True History, which contained among other things, a description of the Selenites, who (according to the truthful historian) spin and card metals and glass, remove and replace their eyeballs, and drink juice of air or fresh-squeezed air; at the beginning of the 16th Century, Ludovico Ariosto imagined a knight discovering on the moon all that had been lost on earth: the tears and sighs of lovers, time wasted in play, unsuccessful projects, unsatisfied longings; in the 17th Century, Kepler published his Somnium Astronomicum, presented as the transcription of a book read in a dream, whose prolix pages reveal the forms and habits of the moon-dwelling serpents -- they shelter themselves from the heat of the day in deep caverns, and emerge at dusk. Between the first and second of these imaginary voyages, one thousand three hundred years elapse; between the second and the third, some hundred -- the first two are, essentially, free, irresponsible invention, while the third seems weighted down by an effort at verisimilitude. The reason is clear: for Lucian and for Ariosto, a journey to the moon is the symbol or archetype of the impossible; for Kepler, it is already a possibility, as it is for us. Wouldn't universal language inventor John Wilkins soon publish his Discovery of a World in the Moone: a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable world in that planet, with an appendix entitled, Discourse on the possibility of a voyage? In the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, one reads that Arquitas, the Pythagorean, built a wooden dove which could fly through the air; Wilkins predicted that a vehicle of analogous mechanism would carry us one day to the moon.

In its anticipation of a possible or probable future, the Somnium Astronomicum prefigures (though I would not confuse one for the other) the new narrative genre which the Americans of the north term science-fiction or scientifiction* and of which these Chronicles are an admirable example. They deal with the conquest and colonization of the planet. This arduous enterprise of future men seems meant for epic treatment; Ray Bradbury prefers (without enunciating this choice, perhaps; the secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. The Martians, who at the opening of the book are horrific, merit pity by the time we reach their extinction. Humanity wins; the author does not rejoice in this victory. He speaks with mourning and disappointment of the future expansion of the human lineage over the red planet -- which his prophecy reveals to us as a vast desert of blue sand, checkered with the ruins of cities and yellow sunsets and ancient ships which sailed over the sand.

Other authors choose a date in the future and we do not believe them, for we know we're dealing with a literary convention; Bradbury writes 2004 and we feel the weight of it, the fatigue, the vague, vast accumulation of the past -- the dark backward and abysm of Time of Shakespeare's verse. Already it was heard in the Renaissance, from the mouths of Giordano Bruno and of Bacon, that we are the true ancients, not the men of Genesis or of Homer.

What did this man from Illinois do, I'm wondering, as I close the pages of his book, that these episodes of the conquest of another planet fill me with such terror and loneliness?

How can these fantasies touch me, and in such a close, intimate manner? All literature (I will dare to venture) is symbolic: there are a few fundamental experiences, and it makes little difference whether an author, in communicating them, chooses the "fantastic" or the "real," chooses Macbeth or Raskolnikov, chooses the invasion of Belgium in 1914 or the invasion of Mars. What is important about the novel, the novelty, of science-fiction? On this book, this apparent phantasmagoria, Bradbury has stamped his long, empty Sundays, his American tedium, his solitude, just as Sinclair Lewis stamped his on Main Street.

Perhaps The Third Expedition is the most troubling story in this volume. Its horror (I suspect) is metaphysical; the uncertainty over the identity of Captain John Black's hosts insinuates -- uncomfortably -- that we can know neither who we are nor how God sees us. I would like also to point out the episode entitled The Martian, which contains a pathetic variation on the myth of Proteus.

Around 1909 I read, with fascination and fear, in the darkness of an old house which is no longer standing, The First Men in the Moon, by Wells. These Chronicles, though very different in conception and in execution, have given me the opportunity to relive, in the last days of autumn of 1954, those delicious terrors.

* Scientifiction is a monstrous word in which the adjective scientific and the substantive fiction are amalgamated. Jocosely, the Spanish idiom generates analogous formations; Marcelo del Mazo speaks of gríngaro orchestras (gringos + zíngaros), and Paul Groussac of the japonecedades which obstruct the museum of the Goncourts.

(I'm noticing as I work my way through this piece, my reluctance to divide a sentence where the original has a single sentence. I'm happy to change punctuation -- it seems to me like Spanish frequently reads better in English with stronger punctuation, semicolon where there is a comma or "and" in the original, dash where there is a semicolon -- but I am averse to putting in extra periods. Similarly -- even moreso -- with paragraph divisions.)

posted afternoon of April 11th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, April 10th, 2010

🦋 Faith and mountains

While I'm thinking of it, another story I really enjoy from The Black Sheep and other fables:

At first, faith moved mountains only as a last resort, when it was absolutely necessary, and so the landscape remained the same over the millennia.

But once faith started propagating itself among people, some found it amusing to think about moving mountains, and soon the mountains did nothing else but change places, each time making it a little more difficult to find one in the same place you had left it last night; obviously this created more problems than it solved.

The good people decided then to abandon faith; so nowadays the mountains remain (by and large) in the same spot.

When the roadway falls in and drivers die in the collapse, it means someone, far away or quite close by, felt a light glimmer of faith.

posted evening of April 10th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 The monkey who wanted to write satire

This is the second story in The black sheep and other fables -- the story of which Isaac Asimov says (and I'm dying to know now whether this book has been published in translation, or if Asimov reads Spanish...)* that after reading it, "you will never be the same again."

In the jungle there once lived a monkey who wanted to write satire.

He studied hard, but soon realized that he did not know people well enough to write satire, and he started a program of visiting everyone, going to cocktails and observing, watching for the glint of an eye while his host was distracted, a cup in his hand.

As he was most clever and his agile pirhouettes were entertaining for all the other animals, he was received well almost everywhere; and he strove to make it even moreso.

There was no-one who did not find his conversation charming; when he arrived he was fêted and jubilated among the monkeys, by the ladies as much as by their husbands, and by the rest of the inhabitants of the jungle too, even by those who were into politics, whether international, domestic or local, he invariably showed himself to be understanding -- and always, to be clear, with the aim of seeing the base components of human nature and of being able to render them in his satires.

And so there came a time when among the animals, he was the most advanced student of human nature; nothing got by him.

Then one day, he said: I'm going to write against thievery, and he went to see the magpies; and at first he went at it with enthusiasm, enjoying himself and laughing, looking up with pleasure at the trees as he thought about what things happen among the magpies -- but then on second thought, he considered the magpies who were among the animals who had received him so pleasantly -- especially one magpie, and that they would see their portrait in his satire, however gently he wrote it.. and he left off doing it.

Then he wanted to write about opportunists, and he cast his eye on the serpent, who by whatever means (auxiliary to his talent for flattery) managed always to conserve, to trade, to increase his posessions... But then some serpents were friends of his, and especially one serpent; they would see the reference. So he left off doing it.

Then he thought of satirizing compulsive work habits, and he turned to the bee, the bee who works dumbly and without knowing why or for whom; but for fear of offending some of his friends of this genus, and especially one of them, he ended up comparing them favorably to the cicada, that egotist who will do nothing more than sing, sing, who thinks himself a poet... and he left off doing it.

Then it occurred to him, he could write against sexual promiscuity, and he directed his satire against the adulterous hens who strut around all day restlessly looking for roosters; but then some of them had received him well, he feared hurting them, and he left off doing it.

In the end he came up with a complete list of human failings and weaknesses, and he could not find a target for his guns -- they were all failings of his friends who had shared their table with him, and of himself.

At that moment he renounced his writing of satire, and began to teach mysticism and love, this type of thing; but this made people talk (you know how it is with people), they said he had gone crazy, they no longer received him as gladly or with such pleasure.

* Yep, looks like it was published in English in 1971.

posted evening of April 10th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

🦋 Translations: a statement of purpose

I've been posting here and there lately (and for the past 7 years!) under the label Translation, without ever really defining very clearly what I am trying to do with that. So here is a little gesturing in that direction.

I really enjoy reading books in languages that I'm not fluent in -- not sure exactly what it is, but somehow the neural pathways that light up when I read a page of German or Spanish*, repeat the words under my breath, and transform them internally into words and concepts I understand, are pleasurable ones. And I frequently admire translations that I read, the best ones and the lesser as well, and enjoy picking them apart and seeing where and why they diverge from the original. So translation seemed like a pretty natural thing for me to try my hand at.

I'm certainly not going for any kind of authorative version in my translations -- sometimes I spend some time on refining them and getting them to sound good, other times I try and leave them raw; but generally what I'm trying to do is to get across my experience of reading the text -- this is after all a blog about reading -- and to intensify the act of reading. I remember seeing somewhere a statement that translation is a form of reading, and liking it.

I've been emboldened lately by Andrew Hurley's statement, in his Note on the Translation of Borges' Collected Fictions, that there is no such thing as a definitive translation of a text -- I'm familiar with this sentiment but it moved me to see it voiced by Hurley, whose translations seem to me some of the best I've ever read. Hurley cites Borges' "Versions of Homer" and "The Translators of the 1001 Nights" -- "The very idea of the (definitive) translation is misguided, Borges tells us; there are only drafts, approximations."

* (And I ought to start learning another language to be not-fluent in...)

posted evening of March 30th, 2010: 5 responses
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Sunday, March 28th, 2010

🦋 Zahir/mantra

Años depsués, Taylor visitó las cárceles de ese reino; en la de Nithur el gobernador le mostró una celda, en cuyo piso, en cuyos muros, y en cuya bóveda un faquir musulmán había diseñado (en bárbaros colores que el tiempo, antes de borrar, afinaba) una especie de tigre infinito. Ese tigre estaba hecho de muchos tigres, de vertiginosa manera; lo atravesaban tigres, estaba rayado de tigres, incluía mares e Himalayas y ejércitos que parecían otros tigres. El pintor había muerto hace muchos años, en esa misma celda; venía de Sind o acaso de Guzerat y su propósito inicial había sido trazar un mapamundi.

Years later, Taylor visited the prisons of this district; in the one at Nithur, the governor showed him a cell on whose walls, on whose floor, on whose vault a Muslim fakir had laid out (in barbarous colours which time, not yet ready to wipe them clean, was refining) a sort of infinite tiger. This tiger, this vertiginous tiger, was composed of many tigers; tigers ran across it and radiated outward from it; it contained seas and Himalayas and armies which appeared as other tigers. The painter had died many years before, in this same cell; he came from Sindh or perhaps from Gujarat, and his initial intention had been to draw a map of the world.

"The Zahir"

Más de una vez grité a la bóveda que era imposible descifrar aquel testo. Gradualmente, el enigma concreto que me atareaba me inquietó menos que el enigma genérico de una sentencia escrita por un dios. ¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? Consideré que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero; decir el tigre es decir los tigres que lo engendraron, los ciervos y tortugas que devoró, el pasto de que se alimentaron los ciervos, la tierra que fue madre del pasto, el cielo que dio luz a la tierra. Consideré que en el lenguaje de un dios toda palabra enunciaría esa infinita concatenación de los hechos, y no de un modo implícito, sino explícito, y no de un modo progresivo, sino inmediato. Con el tiempo, la noción de una sentencia divina parecióme pueril o blasfematoria. Un dios, reflexioné, sólo debe decir una palabra, y en esa palabra la plenitud. Ninguna voz articulada por él puede ser inferior al universo o menos que la suma del tiempo.

More than once, I screamed at the vaulted ceiling that it would be impossible to decipher this testament. Gradually, the immediate riddle confronting me came to trouble me less than the general riddle: a sentence written by a god. What sort of sentence (I asked) would an absolute consciousness construct? I reflected: even in the languages of humanity there is no proposition which does not imply the entire universe; to speak of the tiger is to speak of the tigers which begot it, the deer and turtles which it ate, the pasture on which the deer nourished themselves, the earth which was mother of the pasture, the heavens which gave forth light onto the earth. I reflected: in the language of a god, every word must bespeak this infinite concatenation of things, not by implication, but explicitly; not in a progressive manner, but in the instant. With time, the notion of a divine sentence came to appear puerile, blasphemous. A god, I reasoned, would only be able to say a single word, and in this word would be everything. No voice, no articulation of his could be inferior to the universe, could be less than the sum of all time.

"The God's Scripture"*

What I remembered about "The Zahir" before I reread it today, was the broad arching theme of it, the object which is a manifestation of God, which cannot be forgotten, which drives people mad; I had totally forgotten what a great story it is, the characters, the local flavor of Buenos Aires.

* Update -- Thinking further, I would rather translate this story's title -- "La escritura del dios", which Hurley renders literally as "The Writing of the God" -- simply as "Scripture".

posted evening of March 28th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, March 27th, 2010

🦋 First conversation

Creo que mi amistad con Borges procede de una primera conversación, ocurrida en 1931 o 32, en el trayecto entre San Isidro y Buenos Aires. Borges era entonces uno de nuestros jóvenes escritores de mayor renombre y yo un muchacho con un libro publicado en secreto y otro con seudónimo. Ante una pregunta sobre mis autores preferidos, tomé la palabra y, desafiando la timidez, que me impedía mantener la sintaxis de una frase entera, emprendí el elogio de la prosa desvaída de un poetastro que dirigía la página literaria de un diario porteño. Quizá para renovar el aire, Borges amplió la pregunta: —De acuerdo —concedió—, pero fuera de Fulano, ¿a quién admira, en este siglo o en cualquier otro? —A Gabriel Miró, a Azorín, a James Joyce. —contesté. ¿Qué hacer con una respuesta así? Por mi parte no era capaz de explicar qué me agradaba en los amplios frescos bíblicos y aun eclesiástios de Miró, en los cuadritos de Azorín ni en la gárrula cascada de Joyce, apenas entendida, de la que levantaba, como irisado vapor, todo el prestigio de hermético, de lo extraño y de lo moderno. Borges dijo algo en el sentido de que sólo en escritores entregados al encanto de la palabra encuentran los jóvenes literatura en cantidad suficiente. Después, hablando de la admiración por Joyce, agregó: —Claro, es una intención, un acto de fe, una promesa. La promesa de que les gustará —se refería a los jóvenes— cuando lo lean.

I believe my friendship with Borges stems from our first conversation, which occurred in 1931 or 32, in transit between San Isidro and Buenos Aires. Borges was at that time one of our best-known young authors; I was a boy with one book published in secret and another one pseudonymously. Asked a question about my favorite authors, I took the floor and (defying the shyness which was making it difficult for me to get a coherent sentence out), set off on an unfocussed panegyric in praise of the poetaster who edited the literary supplement of a Buenos Aires newspaper. Perhaps to clear the air, Borges expanded his question: -- Certainly -- he admitted -- but outside of Fulano, whom do you admire, in this century or some other? -- Gabriel Miró, Azorín, James Joyce. -- I replied. What to do with such a response? For my own part, I would not have been able to explain what appealed to me in the cool, spacious, biblical -- even ecclesiastical -- works of Miró, in the rustic tomes of Azorín, nor in the garrulous cascade of Joyce -- even given, as I was taking for granted, like a rainbow in the air, all the prestige of the hermetic, the strange and modern. Borges said something to the effect that only in authors committed to the bewitching effect of the word do young people encounter literature in sufficient quantity. Later, speaking of my admiration for Joyce, he added: -- Clearly, it's an intention, an act of faith, a promise. The promise that they will like it -- referring here to young people -- when they read it.

I had not realized Bioy Casares was so much younger than Borges; had always assumed they were about the same age. (I have not yet read anything by Bioy Casares either by himself or in collaboration with Borges; I know him mainly from mentions in Borges' stories.) When they met in 1931, Borges would have been in his early thirties and Bioy Casares a teenager -- Borges was a mentor more than a peer -- this totally changes my picture of the dinner at the beginning of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," where Bioy Casares recalls the teaching of a heresiarch of Uqbar, the first intrusion of Tlön into the life of the narrator.

There is a bit of meat in this brief exchange. I'm not sure what to make of Borges' statement about the "bewitching effect of words" -- sounds a bit like hand-waving to keep his young interlocutor from having to explain himself and feel embarrassed. I don't know Miró or Azorín at all; I'm wondering if the trio of authors Bioy Casares names here is meaningful or if it is just the first three names that come to mind as he is struggling to master his timidity. Totally unsure about my reading "like a rainbow in the air," I don't know what the meaning is here. The picture of Borges here is very pleasing; and it's such an exciting thing to imagine this meeting, in 1931, with the whole history of their literary collaboration as yet unborn.

posted morning of March 27th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, March 25th, 2010

🦋 Forms of address

There is a tricky bit of translation at the beginning of Woyzeck:

HAUPTMANN: Langsam, Woyzeck, langsam; eins nach dem andern! Er macht mir ganz schwindlig. Was soll ich dann mit den 10 Minuten anfangen, die Er heut zu früh fertig wird? Woyzeck, bedenk Er, Er hat noch seine schönen dreißig Jahr zu leben, dreißig Jahr! Macht dreihundertsechzig Monate! und Tage! Stunden! Minuten! Was will Er denn mit der ungeheuren Zeit all anfangen? Teil Er sich ein, Woyzeck! WOYZECK: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. H: Es wird mir ganz angst um die Welt, wenn ich an die Ewigkeit denke. Beschäftigung, Woyzeck, Beschäftigung! Ewig: das ist ewig, das ist ewig - das siehst du ein; nur ist es aber wieder nicht ewig, und das ist ein Augenblick, ja ein Augenblick - Woyzeck, es schaudert mich, wenn ich denke, daß sich die Welt in einem Tag herumdreht. Was 'n Zeitverschwendung! Wo soll das hinaus? Woyzeck, ich kann kein Mühlrad mehr sehen, oder ich werd melancholisch. W: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. H: Woyzeck, Er sieht immer so verhetzt aus! Ein guter Mensch tut das nicht, ein guter Mensch, der sein gutes Gewissen hat. - Red er doch was Woyzeck! Was ist heut für Wetter? W: Schlimm, Herr Hauptmann, schlimm: Wind! H: Ich spür's schon. 's ist so was Geschwindes draußen: so ein Wind macht mir den Effekt wie eine Maus. - [Pfiffig:] Ich glaub', wir haben so was aus Süd-Nord? W: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. H: Ha, ha ha! Süd-Nord! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, Er ist dumm, ganz abscheulich dumm! - [Gerührt:] Woyzeck, Er ist ein guter Mensch --aber-- [Mit Würde:] Woyzeck, Er hat keine Moral! Moral, das ist, wenn man moralisch ist, versteht Er. Es ist ein gutes Wort. Er hat ein Kind ohne den Segen der Kirche, wie unser hocherwürdiger Herr Garnisionsprediger sagt - ohne den Segen der Kirche, es ist ist nicht von mir. W: Herr Hauptmann, der liebe Gott wird den armen Wurm nicht drum ansehen, ob das Amen drüber gesagt ist, eh er gemacht wurde. Der Herr sprach: Lasset die Kleinen zu mir kommen. H: Was sagt Er da? Was ist das für eine kuriose Antwort? Er macht mich ganz konfus mit seiner Antwort. Wenn ich sag': Er, so mein' ich Ihn, Ihn -

CAPTAIN: Slowly, Woyzeck, slowly; one thing at a time! You make me dizzy. What am I going to do with the 10 minutes that you'll save by the time you're done? Woyzeck, think of it, you've been alive a good thirty years already, thirty years! That's three hundred sixty Months! and Days! Hours! Minutes! What are you going to do with all that monstrous time? Pace yourself, Woyzeck! WOYZECK: Yes sir, Captain sir. C: I get scared for the world when I think about eternity. Pay attention, Woyzeck! Forever: that's forever, that's forever -- you understand; but it's also not forever at all, it's just the blink of an eye -- Woyzeck, it frightens me, when I think of how the world goes around in a day. What a waste of time! What's going to come of that? Woyzeck, I can't even look at a mill-wheel any longer, without becoming melancholy. W: Yes indeed, Captain. C: Woyzeck, you always have such a hunted look! A good man wouldn't look that way, a good man with a clean conscience. -- But speak up, Woyzeck! How is the weather today? W: Bad, sir, bad: wind! C: I can feel it already. There's something blowing out there, such a wind sounds like a mouse to me. -- [whistles] I believe it's a South-North wind we have? W: Yes sir, Captain sir. C: Ha, ha, ha! South-North! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, you're a dummy, such a shameful dummy! - [turns] Woyzeck, you're a good man -- but -- [grandiose] Woyzeck, you have no morality! Morality, I mean like when somebody is moral, you understand. It's a good word. You have a child without the blessing of the Church, as our estimable chaplain says -- without the blessing of the Church, it's not just me saying that. W: Captain sir, blessed God won't hold it against the little thing, whether somebody said Amen over it before it was made... The good lord said: Let the little children come unto me. C: What are you saying there? What kind of a weird answer is that? You're confusing me with your answers. When I say "You", I'm talking about you, you...

The captain's soliloquies here are very clearly staged -- Dan Schneider presents that as a shortcoming of the movie; but it seems pretty charming to me.

posted evening of March 25th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010

🦋 Character sets

At work, I've been involved in a project to support the full Unicode character set in a more-than-cursory way*, getting to understand wide characters and utf-8 much more fully than I ever did before; and finally I am thinking I want to encode READIN in utf-8. All this time it has been in ISO-8859-1, which works ok as long as I escape unsupported Unicode characters; but it seems like time to get with the program.

My question is, what's the easiest way to convert my data? A lot of posts have got characters like äöüæ... which are going to show up as garbage if I just change the encoding of the blog. I was thinking I would use mysqldump and use iconv to convert the data. But somehow the output from mysqldump is already encoded with utf8. Does this mean I can just rebuild the database from this output and I'll be good to go? I'm a little confused why mysqldump is not respecting the encoding in the database...

Well, restoring from the output of mysql-dump does not have the desired effect; characters that were ISO-8859-1 in the original db, that were UTF-8 in the dump, are converted back to ISO-8859-1 in the restore.

After further investigation, it seems like my original idea will work: although it looks to me like iconv is essentially double-encoding the characters that were transformed to utf-8 by mysqldump, when I load them back into mysql I get utf-8 characters. Not totally comfortable with this yet...

* (Previously our support for Unicode had consisted of walking through utf-8 strings looking for high-order characters we recognized, and flattening them to 7-bit ASCII.)

posted morning of March 13th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, February 7th, 2010

🦋 Dos cuentos argentinos

At 3% today, I read about the forthcoming Op Oloop, which will be the first of Juan Filloy's 27 novels to appear in English. Nice! It was also the first I had heard of Filloy, who appears to have had a long and important career. In honor of the occasion, I will try my hand at translating his short story "La vaca y el auto."

The cow and the car

by Juan Filloy

The rain has firmed up the unpaved road's surface. The recently rinsed atmosphere is fresh and clean. The sun's glory shines down at the end of March.

A car comes along at a high velocity. Beneath the pampa's skies -- diaphanous tourmaline cavern -- the swift car is a rampaging wildcat.

The moist fields give off a masculine odor, exciting to the lovely young woman who's driving. And accelerating, accelerating, until the current of air pierces her, sensuous. But...

All of a sudden, a cow. A cow, stock-still in the middle of the roadway. Screeching of brakes, shouting. The horn's stridency shatters the air. But the cow does not move. Hardly even a glance, watery and oblique, she chews her cud. And then, she bursts out:

-- But señorita!... Why all this noise? Why do you make such a hurry, when I'm not interested in your haste? My life has an idyllic rhythm, incorruptible. I am an old matron who never gives way to frivolity. Please: don't make that racket! Your clangor is scaring the countryside. You do not understand why; you don't even see it. The countryside flies past, by your side; your velocity turns it into a rough, variegated visual pulp. But I live in it. It is where I hone my senses, they are not blunt like yours... Where did you find this morbid thirst which absorbs distance? Why do you dose yourself with vertigo? You subjugate life with urgency, instead of appreciating its intensity. Come on! lay off the horn. Time and space will not let themselves be ruled by muscles of steel and brass. Speed is an illusion: it brings you sooner to the realization of your own impotence. The signifier of all culture is the intrinsic slowness of the unconscious, which unconsciously chooses its destiny. But you already know yours, girl: to crash into matter before you crash into materialism. So, good. Don't get mad! I'm moving. Let your nerves once again become one with the ignition. Reanimate, with explosions of gas, your motor and your brain. The roadway is clear. Adiós! Take care of yourself...

The car tears away, muttering insults in malevolence and naphtha.

Parsimonious, chewing and chewing, the cow casts a long, watery gaze. And then a lengthy, ironic moo, which accompanies the car towards the curve of the horizon...

And while I'm doing this: I get a lot of misdirected Google hits by people looking for "a translation of El dios de las moscas" or similar phrases -- I had never heard of this story until people started coming to my site looking for it; but I like it. (But do your own homework, people!) It is by Marco Denevi. Dare I say, a little bit in the manner of Borges.

The god of the flies

by Marco Denevi

The flies imagined their god. It was another fly. The god of the flies was a fly, sometimes green, sometimes black and golden, sometimes pink, sometimes white, sometimes purple, an unrealistic fly, a beautiful fly, a monstrous fly, a fearsome fly, a benevolent fly, a vengeful fly, a righteous fly, a young fly, an aged fly, but always a fly. Some of them augmented his size until he was enormous, like an ox, others pictured him so tiny he could not be seen. In some religions he had no wings («He flies, he sustains himself, but he has no need of wings»), in others he had an infinite number of wings. Here his antennæ were arranged like horns, there his eyes consumed all of his head. For some he buzzed constantly, for others he was mute, but it meant the same thing. And for everyone, when flies died, they would pass in rapid flight into paradise. Paradise was a piece of carrion, stinking, rotted, which the souls of dead flies would devour for all eternity and which was never consumed; for this celestial offal would continually be replenished and grow beneath the swarm of flies. --of the good ones. For also there were evil flies; for them there was a hell. The hell of the condemned flies was a place without shit, without waste, without garbage, without stink, with nothing at all, a place clean and sparkling and to top it off, illuminated by a dazzling light; that is to say, an abhorrent place.

posted evening of February 7th, 2010: 1 response
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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

🦋 Vision

Aquella noche Jacinta vio a Zacarías de nuevo en sueños. El ángel ya no vestía en negro. Iba desnudo, y su piel estaba recubierta de escamas. Ya no le acompañaba su gato, sino una serpiente blanca enroscada en el torso. Su cabello había crecido hasta la cintura y su sonrisa, la sonrisa de caramelo que había besado en la catedral de Toledo, aparecía surcada de dientes triangulares y serrados como los que había visto en algunos peces de alta mar agitando la cola en la lonja de pescadores. Años mas tarde, la muchacha describiría esta visión a un Julián Carax de dieciocho años, recordando que el día en que Jacinta iba a dejar la pensión de la Ribera para mudarse al palacete Aldaya, supo que su amiga la Ramoneta había sido asesinada a cuchilladas en el portal aquella misma noche y que su bebé había muerto de frío en brazos del cadáver. Al saberse la noticia, los inquilinos de la pensión se enzarzaron en una pelea a gritos, puñadas y arañozos para disputarse las escasas pertenencias de la muerta. Lo único que dejaron fue el que había sido su tesoro más preciado: un libro. Jacinta lo reconoció, porque muchas noches la Ramoneta le había pedido si podía leerle una o dos páginas. Ella nunca había aprendido a leer.

That night, Jacinta again saw Zacarías in her dreams. The angel was no longer clothed in black. He was nude, and his skin was covered with scales. And he was no longer accompanied by his cat; instead a white serpent twined around his torso. His hair had grown down to his waist, and his smile -- the caramel smile which she had kissed in the cathedral of Toledo -- appeared to be cut through by triangular teeth, serrated like those she had seen in some fish of the high seas, their tails writhing at the fish market. Years later, the girl would describe this vision to a Julián Carax eighteen years old, remembering that on the day when Jacinta was leaving the Ribera boarding house to move to Aldaya's mansion, she learned that her friend Ramoneta had been murdered, stabbed in the doorway that same night, and that her baby had died of exposure in the corpse's arms. On learning the news, the tenants of the boarding house got in a screaming fight, throwing fists and scratching in a row over the dead woman's meager possessions. The only thing left was what had been her most cherished treasure: a book. Jacinta recognized it, for on many nights Ramoneta had asked if she'd read a page or two. Herself, she had never learned to read.

Maybe the most striking thing is, the construction of the book is getting less transparent -- in the first half of the book, it has often been too blindingly obvious, just where Ruiz Zafón is going with each detail of the plot. As Daniel and Fermín move through Santa Lucía and listen to Jacinta's story, it is refreshingly hard to see where they're going.

* Or, well, nix that -- I was reading too much into the ellipses. But they kissed passionately, which for the purposes of this story seems to come to about the same thing.

posted evening of January 31st, 2010: Respond
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