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Projects
I like to work on things, with my hands and with my mind. Since 2000 I have been an amateur woodworker, and since we moved in to our house in 2002 I have been doing a good deal of carpentry as well. Also, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about computer programming, and occasionally do some human-directed writing and translation.
So a few weeks ago I had an idea for the beginning of a story... I've been working on it for a little while and am still not totally sure where it's going; if any of you would like to take a look at it and tell me your thoughts about it, I'd be glad to have your feedback on where to go with it. I'm not sure what it means that I am revising and reworking this piece more heavily than I have worked with any other writing I've done that I can think of, besides maybe the review of Death with Interruptions; this is already the third or fourth revision of the story's beginning. The story is going to be called "Silent Rain" -- I'm trying to capture the psychological/linguistic conditions and sensations created by absence and by the perception of absence. Comments welcome.
There’s a thin line between what you are and what you aren't.
I'm afraid of loving you, and you're afraid I can't.
I’m falling now, I’m falling.
I’m falling now, I'm falling.
Take it away.
Nearly every line of Altazor that I have read so far is just screaming for me to quote it -- I am going to go ahead and lay out some blocks of quotation; my idea here is to be doing a parallel translation of the poem (based loosely on Eliot Weinberger's) and (in the other direction, at the same time) of my own writing. Here is a section that immediately follows the speech by God that I quoted in the previous post -- a second great soliloquy, this time by Altazor (and/or by the author, there is a great deal of confusion between his voice and his character's):
Con casi cada uno de los lÃneas que yo acabo de leer del poema Altazor, sentÃa el deseo de citarlo, repetirlo, traducirlo. Adelante, voy poner unos palabras citadas; tengo aquà la idea de traducir simultaneamente el poema (siguiendo vagamente la traducción de Eliot Weinberger) y mi propia escritura. Con esto, una pasaje que sigue directo el discurso de Dios citado en mi post anterior: es un segundo grande soliloquio, por Altazor mismo (o quizás por el autor, hay una gran confusión entre los dos).
"Or discendiam qua giù nel cieco mondo," cominciò il poeta tutto smorto. "Io sarò primo, e tu sarai secondo."
'Now let us descend into the blind world down there,' began the poet, gone pale. 'I will be first and you come after.'
In Borges' lecture on the Commedia, he says that his experience of reading the Italian text with a parallel, line-by-line translation taught him that "a translation cannot be a replacement for the original text: the translation may however serve as a means, a stimulus to bring the reader closer to the original." This seems arguable to me as applied to translations in general,* though I'm pretty sympathetic to the thought; but I think there's no arguing with the idea that this is the proper role for a bilingual edition of poetry, to bring the reader closer to the original, foreign text.
Last night Borges' lecture on Nightmares sent me off to review Canto IV of Inferno; I was reading it in the Princeton Dante Project's bilingual edition, and finding to my happy surprise that I could follow the Italian pretty well, using Borges' method of reading a tercet at a time slowly in Italian, then in English, then in Italian... This evening I wanted to take another look at the canto and sat down with Pinsky's translation (which is published as a bilingual edition), and discovered that a poetic translation does not serve the function of a parallel translation. Not recommended -- I am finding it strange that Farrar, Straus & Giroux thought it would be a good idea to print the original and Pinsky's translation side by side. Back to the bare-bones parallel translation for me, thanks. Below the fold is Vittorio Sermonti reading Canto IV -- his reading is slow enough and clear enough that I was able to follow along in the text and have a fair idea which word was which...
What is B reading? Detective stories in French -- a language he scarcely understands, which makes the novels even more interesting. And even so, he always figures out who was the killer before he reaches the last page.
This is from Bolaño's "Wandering in France and Belgium" -- I like the way he points out that not fully understanding the language can make the reading experience (even) more interesting. This ties in very nicely with B getting interested in Altmann's asemic writing later in the story.
And a longer passage, from Borges' lecture on Dante published in Seven Nights -- Borges is talking ("now that we are among friends") about his own introduction to the Comedia:
Fate (except of course there is no Fate, of course what we call Fate is our failure to understand the complex machinery of causality) led me to three slim volumes... the books of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, rendered in English by Carlyle (not by Thomas Carlyle, of whom we will speak later). They were lovely little books, published by Dent. They fit in my pocket. On one page would be the Italian text and facing it, the text in English, rendered literally. Picture this modus operandi: first I would read a verse, a tercet, in English; then I would read the same verse, the same tercet, in Italian; and I went on this way until I reached the end of the canto. ...
I have read the Comedia many times. But the truth is, I don't know Italian, I don't know any more Italian than what Dante has taught me, and what Ariosto taught me later, when I read the Furioso.
Cool! Borges learned to read Dante the same way I learned to read Borges!
I'm interested in the point about not knowing "any more Italian than what Dante has taught me" -- I think that this method of learning to read a foreign language teaches a particular voice before it teaches the language in a more general sense. I am at this point extremely comfortable with Borges' voice, and pretty comfortable with Bolaño's; but opening up a book in Spanish by some other author, I may understand it (like Soldados de Salamina, which I picked up yesterday and have just been breezing through), or it may be like reading Greek (like Hernández' La paloma, el sótano y la torre, which I opened a few days ago and could not make head or tail of).
So we all think we don't want genre, we want to be anti-genre or perhaps hybrid, but since these are genres too, let us think about what it means to really go genreless. To go genreless in our contemporary publishing environment is to make a work without a ‘document map', without a diagram, without a blueprint. Without a sales category. A work such as this has no overview or topography. It can't be nicely summarized. It cannot be publicized, because it lacks ‘publicity'. In place of publicity it has secrecy, distortion, obscurity, waste. It is a waste product.
Así pensamos todos que no queramos gnero, queremos ser contra-género, tal vez híbrido. Pero como esas también son géneros, consideramos qué significa él, actualmente sin género. Ser sin género en la industría editorial contemporanea es escribir una obra sin «mapa de documento» o programa, sin diagrama. Sin categoría de venta. Tal texto no tiene ningún descripción topográfica. Y no se puede buen reducir. No se publica porque la «publicidad» lo falta. En lugar de publicidad tiene silencio, deformación, oscuridad, desperdicio. Es basura.
Looking at Christopher Higgs' post today at bright stupid confetti led me along to this essay, "Problems after genre" by Jovelle McSweeney, and somehow hit on the idea of rendering it in Spanish. I wonder if this will improve my ability to speak and compose in Spanish. The first effort sounds a little strained, not such a natural tone. More of the essay below the fold.
Así pensamos todos que no queramos género, queremos ser contra-género, tal vez híbrido. Pero como esas también son géneros, consideramos qué significa, actualmente sin género. Ser sin género en la industría editorial contemporanea es escribir una obra sin «mapa de documento» o programa, sin diagrama. Sin categoría de venta. Tal texto no tiene ningún descripción topográfica. Y no se puede buen reducir. No se publica porque la «publicidad» lo falta. En lugar de publicidad tiene silencio, deformación, oscuridad, desperdicio. Es basura.
Ser sin género no tiene por supuesto ningún lugar acerca de la editorial tradicional, convencional; y es también afuera de la rúbrica formalista que gobierna la publicación de la más prosa «vanguardista.» Esquematicia es lo que da «rigor» lógica al escrito vanguardista. Sin género es sin rigor, claro. Salvo el rigor mortis. Muchos de los sinónimos con los cuales la vanguardia se llama arreglanselas con coger el movimiento sobre la basura, limitado a los intersticios confusos de la mente. Aún la hibridación trae con si un sabor muy ordenado, un sabor exonorando del corporate-scientismo verde y izquierdo.
Todo quieren un género, aunque uno novelo, sobre todo uno novelo. Género parece un equipo; puedes batear para tú género.
Ser desfallecendo, siendo sin forma y sin género -- comer la placenta, mierda en las cejas obtener... ahora te metes de verdad en líos. Para obtener un número ISBN, la editorial debe a ti un género marcar. La falta de género significa que tus obras no se venden. Para tener lugar en los catálogos y indicias debes parecido algún género realizar. Uno sin género no entra nunca en el registro. Para pedir una estación en la conferencia AWP, debes marcar a cuál género pertenece la lectura. Sin género no puedes hablar. Solicitud de trabajo requiere una prueba de algún competencia genérica. La falta de género expone incompetencia.
Pero ¿qué es la escritura sin género? ¿Qué puede ser? Se ve el más fácil un montón de escritura tenienda género, género tan excesivo, tan plural que es sencillamente desordenado y incoherente. Es decir, «it's whack, like crack», como nos asegura Whitney Houston. Y (como ella también afirma) si era adicta, ¿dónde estan los recibos? No cuadrandose las cuentas, faltan los recibos. Ahora se hace uno un tipo adicto. Solipsismo y retardación reemplazan la forma ortodoxa. Vergüenza, deterioración, decadencia. Y sin embargo ese problema diagnosticar requiere usar palabras de finanza: tal cuentas son desequilibradas. No pueden explicarse. No se ganan compensación; o peor, no tienen ninguna compensación propia. Pierden tiempo, pierden el tiempo del público.
Si una obra era infestada por género hasta que no tiene género, tal vez no puede mantenerse. Puede suicidarse muchas veces, pero cada vez despierta y descubre que aún existe -- lo cual le da asco, y tambíen a todos otros.
This beginning is fairly characteristic of the stories in Brodie's Report -- the narrator (who is often identifiably Borges) distances himself from the story he is telling. He introduces it as a story he heard years ago, that he doesn't remember, quite, and is embroidering with his own inventions -- sometimes (eg "Unworthy") the character who is telling the enclosed story explicitly expects Borges to weave a story out of it, to decorate it with knife fights and lawlessness.
In two or three pieces in Alma del suburbio, Carriego approached the epic; others were closer to social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
-- Borges, foreword to Versos de Carriego
Here are Carlos Gavito and Marsela Duran, tangoing to Eduardo Rovira's "A Evaristo Carriego." The orchestra is the Boston Pops.
* (or "omnipresent sacred rabble" maybe? di Giovanni renders it "cosmic holy rabble".)
On the hot February morning when Beatriz Viterbo died ..., I noticed that the iron billboards in Plaza Constitución had been cleared of their advertisement for blonde cigarettes (or whatever it had been)... The matter caused me some pain, when I understood that the vast, incessant universe was detaching itself from her memory; this change would be the first in an infinite series.
Esa obra era un escándolo, porque la confusión y la maravilla son operaciónes propias de Dios y no de los hombres.
This work [the building of a labyrinth in Babylon] caused outrage; for chaos and miracles are acts proper to God, not to mortals.
-- "The two kings and the two labyrinths", which Borges attributes to an inauthentic edition of the 1001 Nights.
In the foreword to Brodie's Report, Borges claims to be attempting ("I don't know how successfully") the composition of direct narratives, stories which do not mislead -- the implicit counterpart being that his previous volumes of stories have been labyrinths, mazes for the reader to lose himself in. (He draws a parallel to Kipling's work which I don't fully understand, need to look into that a bit more.) This is an interesting claim and I think it bears some thinking about...
One way of treating this foreword is as itself a clever bit of misdirection. I have only read Brodie's Report once, in the course of reading Collected Fictions this Spring, did not blog about it at all; my impression was that the stories in this volume would be, after I read them some more and got comfortable with them, my very favorite of Borges' stories, and that while there was a good deal of potential for the reader to get lost in the mazes of these stories, one would need to pull in the themes and storylines of his earlier fictions to make that happen -- that the stories appeared to be straightforward narrative but contained secondary levels in which the path of plot was not as obvious. I'm embarking on a second read now, to try and confirm some of this and to see how they hold up on rereading. Here is some beautiful prose from the foreword:
I have made an attempt, I don't know how successfully, at the composition of direct narratives. I am not claiming that they are simple; there is not a single page on earth -- a single word -- that is simple; for every word must assume the entire universe, whose most noteworthy attribute is complexity.* I would only like to clarify that I am not -- I have never been -- what was once called a fabulist, a preacher of parables, what is now called an "engaged" author. I have no desire to be Æsop.
Reading further, he is talking about his political beliefs in a slightly combative way, or perhaps in a resigned tone with a bit of self-justification about it. He says, his writing does not contain his personal political views -- except for once, in the case of the Six Days War -- this almost sounds like a response to (or an anticipation of) people who think he was denied a Nobel prize which he deserved, on the basis of being considered too conservative. The Six Days War thing would be useful to read up on... not finding quickly what writing he's got in mind, though I see a reference to it in this MartÃn Zubieta piece at leedor.com.
posted morning of June 26th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
On my birthday last month, the Saramago Foundation started updating the man's blog a few times a week with quotations from his work, from his books and his articles and his speeches. I'm not sure how I feel about this -- the entries are worth reading and it's nice to be introduced to some of his work that I didn't know about (and it did seem like a nice birthday present), while OTOH I had been identifying the blog (naturally) closely with him, and it's unsettling for him to be in the ground and the blog to continue. They have retitled it Saramago's Other Notebooks, which could help in identifying it as a new blog.
Today's entry comes from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:
La palabra es lo mejor que se puede encontrar, la tentativa siempre frustrada para expresar eso a lo que, por medio de palabra, llamamos pensamiento.
The Word
The word is the greatest thing you will ever meet, the always frustrated effort to express that which, by means of the word, we call thought. [Vastly improved translation contributed by Rick in comments]
(Speaking of notebooks, I have ordered a copy of the Lanzarote Notebooks and am looking forward to reading it! though it will be my first posthumous Saramago...)
Jennifer Egan writes up Tom McCarthy's new novel C for the New York Times Book Review. "C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result."
social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
