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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archæologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time."That's the introduction," said the bookdealer and started leafing through it. "And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archæologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence." He translated: Given that we live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?
Aha! No wonder Night Train to Lisbon has been seeming familiar in structure to me -- it is built on a similar foundation to The White Castle. It is going to be way less cryptic though, a third-person narration and we have access to the Book that Gregorius is reading. (I wonder how it is going to work out, for Gregorius not to understand Portuguese?)* This is going to be fun...
 * Ah: he is buying a Portuguese textbook.
posted evening of February 17th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, February 16th, 2009
Drawn! links to a collection of children's dreams with illustration and narrative: El Monstruo de Colores no tiene Boca. (Thanks for sharing this, badger!)
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: 4 responses
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A passage from Night Train to Lisbon that has me thinking about AWB's post about relating to texts -- it's an interesting sentiment and I'm trying to figure out what kind of person would hew to it. Not something I can imagine myself believing. Spanish -- that was her territory. It was like Latin and completely different from Latin, and that bothered him. It went against his grain that words in which Latin was so present came out of contemporary mouths -- on the streeet, in the supermarket, in the café. That they were used to order Coke, to haggle and to curse. He found the idea hard to bear and brushed it aside quickly and violently whenever it came. Naturally, the Romans had also haggled and cursed. But that was different. He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn't make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages -- people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them. When Florence spoke Spanish on the phone, he shut the door. That offended her and he couldn't explain it to her.
Sort of a romantic view of languages and of classicism. I'm really liking Mercier's composition, and Barbara Harshav's translation. I haven't found any entry point for self-identification -- for "relating" -- with the text yet; but it is still very early in the book.
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: 4 responses
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Some of the most moving writing at Saramago's blog has been about the plight of immigrants attempting to reach Europe (or the Canaries) from Africa. Today he writes about a group whose boat capsized almost within reach of safety: At the door in Lanzarote, at the house door which, if fortune helps, maybe will come to be the door of the new house. Twenty meters from the coast, on the Teguise Coast, when certainly laughter and words of happiness have already been exchanged at having succeeded in reaching the good port, the boat has tipped. They have crossed the hundred kilometers which separate the island from the coast of Africa, and end up dying twenty meters from salvation. Of the more than thirty immigrants whom extreme necessity obliged to confront the dangers of the sea, for the most part young men and teenagers, twenty-four were drowned, among them a pregnant woman and some children of few years. Six were saved thanks to the valor and selflessness of two surfers who hurled themselves into the water and freed them from a death which, without their intervention, would have been inevitable.
This is, in the most simple and direct words I have been able to find, the square story [?] of what has happened here. I do not know what more I could possibly say. Today words fail me and only emotion remains. Until when?
Here is a recommendation: watch the video I've linked to. It attempts a style which others have used on YouTube, that of a magnificent program about the drama of immigration, which Marisa Márquez has directed on Spanish TV. The fragment which is circulating on the Internet is owing to the intervention of Pilar, who sympathized with the victims and pointed out those responsible.
Video is at the link. CNN reports the story here; they say 19 were drowned rather than 24. I am unsure about some of this translation -- the first sentence is a little shaky and "the square story of what has happened here" is a total guess. But I think it is sufficient to get the idea of the post across.
posted evening of February 16th, 2009: Respond
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...his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name "Guermantes," with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van's artistic vanity.Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen's late hand).
AWB (in the course of an amusing story about the film rights to Ada) calls it "the least filmable story in the history of fiction" -- she is probably right; but I am thinking it would work really well as a reader's theater. The sentences have such a vibrant energy, such rhythm, it would be a treat to hear them read aloud, with feeling. It seems like pacing is a crucial element of this story -- like wandering off in thought will detract from the reading.
posted afternoon of February 16th, 2009: Respond
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A White Bear's post on re-reading Ada has got me sufficiently intrigued, I just pulled my copy off the shelf, thinking "I'm between books right now, why not take a look?" (I had been thinking of reading The Counterlife, but the opening pages turned me off sufficiently, I don't think I'm up for it.) A beautiful volume, I'm thinking as I open it. Folded inside the front cover is a family tree of characters from Anna Karenina -- in my hand, though I have no memory of creating it.* It was originally given as a birthday present from one person with a Russian name to another person with a Russian name, with a wish on the inside cover that the recipient might "someday find your Ada", which seems a little perverse given the incest angle. (I bought it used in NYC, I would say in about 1990.) The bookmark is a Foreign Exchange receipt from Bank of Jamaica, in the name of the person to whom the birthday wishes are addressed. These are nice details for drawing me in, before I've even begun to read.
* This is a little strange, honestly -- Ada makes plenty of reference to Karenina to be sure; but if memory serves, I read Karenina much later, in at least the mid-90's.
posted afternoon of February 16th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, February 15th, 2009
From GarcÃa Lorca's "Ansia de Estatua",
Rumor.
Aunque no quede más que el rumor.
Aroma.
Aunque no quede más que el aroma. is translated (in New Directions' 1955 Selected Poems of Federico GarcÃa Lorca, various translators) as:Rumor.
Though nothing may remain but the rumor.
Odor.
Though nothing may remain but the odor. It seems strange to me not to use "aroma" to translate "aroma", keeping the look of the poem closer to the original. A possible objection is that "aroma" in English connotes a pleasant smell, I'm not sure it does in Spanish; but by the same token, "odor" connotes an unpleasant smell -- if I were looking for a neutral term I would use "scent". The rest of this sweet, sweet poem is below the fold.
Pero arranca de mà el recuerdo
y el color de las viejas horas.*
Dolor.
Frente al mágico y vivo dolor.
Batalla.
En la auténtica y sucia batalla.
¡Pero quita la gente invisible
que rodea perenne mi casa! * I'm not sure why but these two lines make me think about Borges' The Circular Ruins every time I read them.
↻...done
posted morning of February 15th, 2009: 2 responses
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GarcÃa Lorca's poetry (in snippets) makes Sylvia giggle. We're sitting together, I'm skipping around reading some of his lines in Spanish while she looks at the Spanish and at the translation, identifying some words she knows (verde, caballo, negro...) and putting forth silly interpretations for the lines and groups of lines.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de frÃa plata.
"But why would someone's eyes be cold?..." (Note: I just found a pretty sweet flamenco version of this poem, "Romance Sonambulo", on Spanish TV.)Los caballos negros son
Las herraduras son negras Leads to lots of talk about black horses.La aurora de Nueva York tiene
cuatro columnas de cieno
y un huracán de negras palomas
que chapotean las aguas podridas. "That means four of the five boroughs have mud, and one out of five has black doves and water -- birds from the other four have to go to that one to get water." (And wow! there are just a ton of GarcÃa Lorca-inspired performances on YouTube. Here is an Andalusian jazz ballet interpretation of "Aurora de Nueva York.") She is very taken with "cieno", which is translated in a subsequent poem as "slime", and here as "mud". "If they're talking about four boroughs, it means mud, if they talk about one it means slime."
 Also: La aurora de Nueva York gime
Por las inmensas escaleras
buscando entre las aristes
nardos de anguistia dibujada "That means four of the five boroughs have stairways. I want to be in the one with elevators."
posted morning of February 15th, 2009: Respond
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Yesterday I was talking with Ellen about Elizabeth Costello, how Elizabeth is herself a novelist and there is a lot of discussion of reading and writing in the book; Sylvia interjected, "It would be cool if there was a book that had someone reading the book that had someone reading the book that had..." Nice!  We talked about mirrors for a little while. And then, this morning we were looking at xkcd's Sierpinski Valentine, and checked out Wikipædia's article about Sierpinski Triangles (which has a nice animation) -- I asked Sylvia if she knew what infinity meant, she said "Yeah, like something that never ends." And she made reference back to the book she had been talking about yesterday -- I found it pretty exciting that she would make this connection.
 And this is funny: apparently David Foster Wallace made the claim that Infinite Jest is structured like a Sierpinski triangle.
posted morning of February 15th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 14th, 2009
Well: the end of Elizabeth Costello did not, as I was vaguely hoping, tie things together; if anything it further unravelled them. I'm not sure right now what to think this book is about -- the longing Costello feels for union with the Other, variously expressed as Animal Nature or as Divine Nature; her role as an author in making that union possible for the reader (? -- I just put these words together now -- are they in the story?) How expressing arguments mediates with belief in the principles she is arguing for. Her relationship with colonial history. Her aging, of course. And other tangents... I am dividing the novel into four quite distinct parts: Chapters 1 through 6, about public speaking and argument (the plot of the novel, as far as it can be said to have a plot, is confined to this part); Chapter 7, about union with God; Chapter 8, a fable about justifying one's beliefs; and the afterword (with its epigraph), which seems to be about union with God and insanity. (And just now I noticed that Coetzee calls them not "Chapters" but "Lessons".) Let's look at the ending of each of these sections: Final paragraph of Lesson 6: There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the orridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.
Final paragraph of Lesson 7: A vision, an opening up, as the heavens are opened up by a rainbow when the rain stops falling. Does it suffice, for old folk, to have these visions now and again, these rainbows, as a comfort, before the rain starts pelting down again? Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?
Final paragraph of Lesson 8: The man behind the desk has evidently had enough of questions. He lays down his pen, folds his hands, regards her levelly. 'All the time,' he says. 'We see people like you all the time.'
Final sentences of Afterword: Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us. The afterword is Coetzee writing in the voice of Lord Philip Chandos' wife Elizabeth. (Wheels within wheels: Elizabeth Chandos ~ Elizabeth Costello; Costello wrote a book from the point of view of Leopold Bloom's wife Molly...) Lesson 7 might be the most interesting part of the whole book, with the most to think about. Possibly the final paragraph of Lesson 7 above is meant to represent Costello's death.
posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: 5 responses
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