When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.
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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.
Something you will occasionally see in books translated from a foreign language and published in America, is that metric units of measurement are rendered as English units*, with no conversion of the number next to the units, e.g. "cinco kilogramos" is rendered as "5 pounds". I'm not sure how often this happens, I have noticed it a couple of times and it's driven me just batty. (Also have seen it with monetary units, "cien francs" being translated as "100 dollars" which does not make much sense either.) I believe the thinking behind it is something on the order of, someone reading this story in the original language would get an immediate sense of what 5 kg means, where a US reader would need to pause and convert it mentally -- at the very least it seems to me every time I notice this that it at least ought to be rendered as "ten pounds" or whatever, to keep the meaning the same.
Well: when Saramago was writing The Elephant's Journey he faced a similar issue in terms of translating archaic units of distance into metric, and he came up with a very tidy, winning solution. Check this out -- on the first day of the journey, Subhro is reckoning how far they have travelled:
How far have we traveled, a league, possibly two, he wondered. ...Let us consider the league, which was the word used by subhro, a distance that was also composed of paces and feet, but which has the enormous advantage of placing us in familiar territory. Yes, but everyone knows what leagues are, our contemporaries will say with an ironic smile. The best answer we can give them is this, Yes, everyone did in the age in which they lived, but only in the age in which they lived. The old word league, or leuga, which should, one would think, have meant the same to everyone at all times, has in fact made a long journey from the seven thousand five hundred feet or one thousand five hundred paces of the romans and the early middle ages to the kilometers and meters with which we now divide up distance, no less than five and five thousand respectively. It's the same with other measurements as well. ...Now, having presented the matter with such dazzling clarity, we can make an absolutely crucial, almost revolutionary decision, namely this, while the mahout and his companions, given that they would have no other means at their disposal, will continue to speak of distances in accord with the uses and customs of their age, we, so that we can understand what is going on in this regard, will use our own modern itinerary units of measurement, which will avoid constantly having to resort to tiresome conversion tables. It will be as if we were adding subtitles to a film, a concept unknown in the sixteenth century, to compensate for our ignorance or imperfect knowledge of the language spoken by the actors. We will, therefore, have two parallel discourses that will never meet, this one, which we will be able to follow without difficulty, and another, which, from this moment on, will remain silent. An interesting solution.
*Ooh and look! I did not know anything about this; but until the mid-19th C. there used to be an entirely separate Portuguese system of measurement units.
↻...done
"And I created the mouth and the lips of the mouth, to imprison ambiguous smiles; and the teeth of the mouth to keep watch on the absurdities that enter our mouths.
"I created the tongue of the mouth, the tongue which man tore from her proper role, making her learn to speak... She, she, the gorgeous bather, torn forever from her proper role, aquatic, purely sensual."
My parachute began to fall vertiginously. Such is the force of the attraction from death, from the open sepulchre.
You must believe it, the tomb holds more power than the eyes of my beloved -- the open tomb and all its charms. And I'm saying this to you, to you who when you are smiling, you make me think about the beginning of the world.
My parachute became entangled with an extinguished star, one which went conscientiously about its orbit as if it were not aware of the futility of its efforts.
And making good use of this well-earned respite, I proceeded to fill in, with my profound thoughts, the blank squares of my gameboard:
"Authentic song is arson. Poetry weaves herself through every thing, she lights the way for her consumations with her shivers of ecstasy, of agony.
"One must write in a tongue which is not one's mother tongue.
"The four cardinal points are three: the South and the North.
"A poem is a thing which is coming into being.
"A poem is a thing which never exists, which must exist.
"A poem is a thing which never has existed, which could never exist.
"Flee from the sublime external, unless you want to die brought low by the wind.
"If I did not commit some madness at least once every year, I would surely go mad."
In Canto V of Altazor it seems like Weinberger is really coming in to his own -- this is the first Canto where I can really read the translation without constantly looking back to the original to see what rhythm and meaning Huidobro was getting at, the point at which Weinberger's poem becomes a poem of its own.
Here begins the unexplored land
Round on account of the eyes that behold it
Profound on account of my heart
Filled with likely sapphires
Sleepwalking hands
And aerial burials
Eerie as the dreams of dwarfs
As the branch snapped off in infinity
The seagull carries to its young
There is one point though, where I think his translation could really be improved upon. The long repetitive, chanting section that begins
Jugamos fuera del tiempo
Y juega con nosotros el molino de viento
Molino de viento
Molino de aliento
Molino de cuento
Molino de intento...
Weinberger renders as,
We play outside of time
And the windmill plays along
The wind mill
The mill of inspiration
The mill of narration
The mill of determination
The mill of proliferation...
(and keep in mind that this goes on for another 200 or so lines) -- I love his word choice but think it would flow much better together if every line is turned end-to-end, thus:
We play outside of time
And the windmill plays along
Ventilationmill
Inspirationmill
Narrationmill
Determinationmill
Proliferationmill...
With that singsong rhythm set up I can plow full steam ahead through the pages filled with just Exaltationmill/ Inhumationmill/ Maturationmill/ etcetera etcetera...
A couple of lovely lines from earlier in the canto, in my own translation:
So let us light a pyre beneath the oracle To placate destiny Let us feed solitude's
miracles With our own flesh
So in the cemetery, sealed off And beautiful, like an eclipse The rose
breaks its bonds and blossoms beyond the grave ...
Laugh, laugh, before fatigue arrives.
Each Canto of Altazor gets a little faster, a little more frantic. In Canto III (which Weinberger says in his preface, is where the fireworks really start), the rhythm is getting insistent, begging you to follow along:
Break all one's ligaments and veins
The loops of breathing and the chains
Of our eyes, our paths to the horizon
Flower projected on uniform skies
The soul paved with memories
Like stars, emblazoned by the wind
The sea, a rooftop shingled with bottles
Dreams in the sailor's memory
Sebastian Ramirez and Tomislav Definis of V Producciones have filmed a spell-binding reading of this Canto, paired with Bach's piano concerto #9. (Be sure to keep watching til the end!)
I'm feeling on a bit of a roll with reading and translating the prologue to Altazor. Here is another section, in which Huidobro/Altazor lays out the manifesto of the poem. There is some tricky pronoun-switching here; but I think the way I'm reading it makes sense.
Oh: how beautiful... how beautiful.
I see the mountains, the rivers, the jungles, the sea, the ships, the flowers, the seashells.
I see the night and the day, the axis where they converge.
Oh, oh,-- I am Altazor, great poet, without a horse who eats birdseed, nor who warms his throat in the moonlight; with my little parachute, like a parasol above the planets.
From each drop of sweat on my forehead are born stars; I will leave you the task of baptizing them, like so many bottles of wine.
I see it all, my brain was forged in tongues of prophecy.
See the mountain as the breath of God, climbing its swollen thermometer until it touch the feet of my beloved.
Am that one who has seen all things, who knows all the secrets, without being Walt Whitman -- I have never had a white beard, white like lovely nurses, like frozen streams.
That one who hears at night the counterfeiters' hammers, just busy astronomers.
That one who drinks from the warm glass of wisdom after the flood, paying heed to the doves, who knows the path of fatigue, the seething wake behind the ships.
That one who knows the storehouses of memory, of lovely forgotten seasons.
He: he, shepherd of airplanes, who conducts lost nights and masterful winds to the matchless poles.
His moan is like a blinking web of unseen meteors.
The day rises in his heart; he lowers his eyelids to make night, the farmer's respite.
He washes his hands under the gaze of God, he combs his hair like light, like he's harvesting slender raindrops, satisfied.
The screams are more distant now, like a flock across the hills, when the stars are sleeping afer a night of continuous labor.
The beautiful hunter, looking at the heavenly watering-hole where the heartless birds drink.
(The as-yet-nameless stars will make another very satisfying appearance early in Canto I.)
Veo las montañas, los rÃos, las selvas, el mar, los barcos, las flores y los caracoles.
Veo la noche y el dÃa y el eje en que se juntan.
Ah, ah, soy Altazor, el gran poeta, sin caballo que coma alpiste, ni caliente su garganta con claro de luna, sino con mi pequeño paracaÃdas como un quitasol sobre los planetas.
De cada gota del sudor de mi frente hice nacer astros, que os derea la tarea de bautizar como a botellas de vino.
Lo veo todo, tengo mi cerebro forjado en lenguas de profeta.
La montaña es el suspiro de Dios, ascendiendo en termómetro hinchado hasta tocar los pies de la amada.
Let's look at the next bit of Altazor's prologue. So far there have been two brief, pointed soliloquies, by God and by Altazor; the next to speak will be the Virgin. I am dying to know whether the Spanish word "aureola" is a pun for "aureola/halo" -- as an English speaker reading the Virgin saying "look at my aureola" has a different meaning from "look at my halo"... [...argh, never mind, this was based on a confusion on my part between "aureola" and "areola".]
I take my parachute; running off the edge of my star I launch myself into the atmosphere of the final sigh.
I circle endlessly above the cliffs of dream, I circle among the clouds of death.
I meet the Virgin, seated on a rose; she says to me:
"Look at my hands: they are transparent, like electric bulbs. Do you see the filaments where the blood of my pure light is running?
"Look at my halo. Cracks run through it, proving my antiquity.
"I am the Virgin, the Virgin with no taint of human ink, the only one who is not only halfway there; I am the captain of the other eleven thousand, who have been to tell the truth overmuch restored.
"I speak a language which fills the heart, according to the law of clouds in communion.
"I am always saying goodbye, and I remain.
"Love me, my child, for I adore your poetry. I will teach you aerial prowess.
"I need, so strongly do I need your tenderness; kiss my locks, I have washed them this morning in the clouds of the dawn. I want to lie down and sleep, on my mattress, the intermittent mist.
"My glances are a wire on the horizon, where the swallows can rest.
"Love me."
I knelt in that circular space. The Virgin rose up and seated herself on my parachute.
I slept; I recited my most beautiful poems.
The flames of my poetry dried out the Virgin's hair; she thanked me and then slipped away, seated on her soft rose.
"The flames of my poetry"! -- remember, true song is arson.
I am not able to make much sense of the third paragraph of the Virgin's speech -- who are the other 11,000? Who has been restoring them? What is everyone else only halfway? [Jorge López supplies some good ideas toward an answer in comments.]
»Mira mi aureola. Tiene algunas saltaduras, lo que prueba mi ancianidad.
»Soy la Virgen, la Virgen sin mancha de tinta humana, la única que no lo sea a medias, y soy la capitana de las otras once mil que estaban en verdad demasiado restauradas.
»Hablo una lengua que llena los corazones según la ley de las nubes comunicantes.
»Tengo tanta necesidad de ternura, besa mis cabellos, los he lavado esta mañana en las nubes del alba y ahora quiero dormirme sobre el colchón de la neblina intermitente.
»Mis miradas son un alambre en el horizonte para el descanso de las golondrinas.
»Amame.»
Me puse de rodillas en el espacio circular y la Virgen se elevó y vino a sentarse en mi paracaÃdas.
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...
