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Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Saramago takes another look at the epigraph, and makes me understand that I had been misreading it in a key way:
In a conversation yesterday with Luis Vázquez, closest of friends and healer of my ailments, we're talking about the film by Fernando Meirelles, just premiered in Madrid, even though we could not be in attendance, Pilar and I, as we intended to be, for a sudden bout of chills obligated me to retire to my chamber, or confined me to bed, in the elegant phrasing in use not so long ago. The conversation soon turned to the public's reactions during the exhibition and afterwards, highly positive according to Luis and to other trustworthy witnesses... We moved from there, naturally, to talking about the book and Luis asked me if we could look over the epigraph which opens it ("Si puedes mirar, ve, si puedes ver, repara"), for in his opinion, the action of seeing [ver] encompasses the action of looking [mirar], and therefore, the reference to looking could be omitted without bias to the meaning of the phrase. I could not come up with a reason to give him, but I thought that I should have other reasons to consider, for example, the fact that the process of vision occurs three stages, successive but in some manner autonomous, which can be stepped through as follows: one can look and not see, one can see and not observe, according to the degree of attention which we pay to each of these actions. We know the reaction of a person who, having just checked his wristwatch, returns to check it when, at that moment, somebody asks him the time. That was when light flooded into my head concerning the origin of the famous epigraph. When I was small, the word "observe", always supposing I already knew it, was not for me an object of primary importance until one day an uncle of mine (I believe that it is Francisco Dinis of whom I am speaking in this brief memoir) called my attention to a certain way of looking that bulls have, which almost always, he then demonstrated, is accompanied by a certain way of raising the head. My uncle said: "He has looked at you, when he looked at you, he saw you, and now it is different, he is something else, he is observing." This is what I told Luis, which immediately won the argument for me, not so much, I suppose, because it convinced him, but because the memory made him remember a similar situation. A bull looked at him as well, and again this movement of the head, again this looking which was not simply seeing, but observation. We were at last in agreement.
So, reparar is not "fix" as I had been thinking, but "observe" or "contemplate". The dictionary entry confirms that the word can be used in this sense. I'm still (like Luis) a bit dissatisfied with the relationship between mirar and ver in the first part of the epigraph.
posted evening of March 5th, 2009: 1 response
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Thanks to a recommendation from SEK, Ellen and I have taken up watching The Wire -- we're starting in on Season Two this weekend. Season One was really riveting. Anyway I notice Aaron of Zunguzungu has started writing some posts about The Wire as a "post-colonial western," pursuant to a paper he's working on -- intriguing! First post is here.
posted morning of March 5th, 2009: 3 responses
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Tuesday, March third, 2009
This evening was the first meeting of the 6-week intermediate Spanish class I am taking at the local Adult School. I feel ambivalent about it -- I wonder if it's going to teach me anything I don't already know. Probably not -- what I really need is practice speaking and listening, and most of what I'm going to get in that class will be reading aloud, on a much lower level than what I already know how to read aloud. What I ought to be doing is having conversations with Spanish speakers I know -- this is where I run into the root problem, which is that I'm just generally not a very talkative guy. I was wondering this evening whether the deep longing I've always felt to learn to speak new languages is not at root a longing just to be better at speaking, to have words come more readily, to feel like I have interesting things to say.
posted evening of March third, 2009: 7 responses
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Saramago is looking back on writing the epigraph for Blindness: Si puedes mirar, ve.
Si puedes ver, repara.
I wrote this for Blindness, already a good couple of years ago. Now, when the film based on this novel is making its debut in Spain, I've encountered the phrase printed on the bags of the 8½ bookstore and on the inside front cover of Fernando Meirelles' making-of book, which this same bookstore's publishing arm has edited with skill. At times I have said that by reading the epigraph of any of my novels, one will already know the whole thing. Today, I don't know why, seeing this, I too felt a sudden impulse, felt the urgency of repairing, of fighting against the blindness. [links are my additions -- J]
I'm curious about how to translate that epigraph. (And surprised that I don't remember this epigraph from when I read Blindness, and annoyed that I cannot go check how Pontiero translated it, because I lent it to a friend...) The sense of it is, "If you can see, see. If you can see, repair." -- Obviously this does not sound good in English because the distinction between mirar and ver is missing, and the transitive structure is lost. The literal translation of the first sentence would be "If you can look, see" -- but I'm guessing the sense of Si puedes mirar is something more like "if you are able to see", i.e. if you are not blind. It seems like ve has a more transitive sense, "see something, some injustice" (although the object is omitted, as it is with repara) -- where mirar is intransitive.
 (There is an important misreading in this post, as regards the verb reparar -- see later post for the correction.)
posted evening of March third, 2009: 4 responses
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 56 years old today and absolutely in his prime musically.
posted afternoon of March third, 2009: Respond
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A fegmaniac recommended this mix tape the other day -- I was intrigued by the mention of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and thought I'd check it out. Well I'm back to report: it's all right, and you ought to take a listen. Most of the songs are standards; some of performances are highly unconventional. I was really taken aback at the opening of Musee Mecanique's performance of "I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore" -- the pipe organ seemed totally counter to the spirit of that song. But by the end it had won me over. There are interesting shades of meaning in experiencing that political song as a purely æsthetic phenomenon -- a truly beautiful one. The haunting vocal in Headlights' "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies" is going to stay with me for a while. Some of the straight "folk music" performances are not as interesting, but they serve nicely to leaven the weirdness of the other tracks.
posted morning of March third, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March first, 2009
Saramago recommends as "one of the most skilled and original" of Portugal's new generation of novelists, Gonçalo M. Tavares. Doesn't look like Sr. Tavares has any works published in English yet (this might be wrong -- his translations page lists rights for most of his works having already been bought for "English in India only" -- but it's not clear that those translations have been published) but definitely someone to keep an eye out for. When he received the Saramago Prize in 2005, Saramago said "Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!"
posted evening of March first, 2009: 5 responses
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For a long time I was relying on HTML named entities for my accented characters -- whenever I needed to type é, I would enter in é. This works fine (as long as you're just composing web pages) but can get to be a pain, especially if you want/need to quote a passage in (say) Spanish. Well a few weeks ago I finally did the research for figuring out how to use alternate keyboard layouts -- turns out it's quite easy to enable "U.S. International" layout, which serves most of my typing needs. (Though it takes a little getting used to, always hitting space-bar after ", when I need to type a quotation mark rather than an umlaut.) The keyboard layouts I have enabled now are: - U.S. International -- this is my default layout.
- Turkish Q -- there are two Turkish layouts, "Q" is the easier to use. For next time I am reading Pamuk or similar, and need to type characters like "ğ" and "ı".
- U.S. Pinyin -- I downloaded this from neveroddoreven -- in case my dormant study of Mandarin picks back up.
If you want to enable U.S. International layout in Windows, follow the instructions at Microsoft's web site. Other layouts, the steps to follow are parallel -- Googling the name of the layout will generally get you a page with a keyboard diagram.
(Hm, and Greek Polytonic seems like a useful layout to have enabled as well...)
posted morning of March first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Borges categorizes 5 of Poe's stories as detective stories, I just wanted to list them with links to sources: If I'm reading him correctly, he thinks that detective stories are spoiled if you know the solution going in*, and that Poe's stories have been spoilt because we all know how they're going to turn out. But this solution [the end of "Murders in the Rue Morgue"] is not a solution for us, because we all know the outcome prior to reading Poe. This, of course, takes away much of its power....
Not sure how to react to this -- I think I remember being surprised by the ending of "Murders in the Rue Morgue", which I read as a child; but it was so many years ago, I could be wrong. Borges goes ahead in the next sentence and spoils the ending for any of his listeners who do not already know it, which seems a little mean-spirited.
 * This is a little curious taken side-by-side with his assertion in "The Book", that re-reading is more important than reading -- it seems like an inescapable conclusion from these two statements, that detective fiction is not important literature...
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2009: Respond
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I'm trying to understand what Borges thought of Poe -- there are different, and conflicting, levels of his opinion to take into account. As I said yesterday, he is pretty dismissive of the poems and stories themselves -- he spends a few pages addressing Poe's detective stories one by one, and none of them comes off very well. But he still believes Poe to be a genius, and one of the most important authors influencing modern literature.
I have said, Poe was the creator of an intellectual temperament in literature. What happened after Poe's death? He died, I believe in 1849. Whitman, his other great contemporary, penned an obituary* of him, saying that Poe was a performer who only knew how to play the low notes of the piano, who did not represent American democracy -- a claim which Poe had never made for himself. Whitman did him an injustice, and so did Emerson.There are critics, today, who underestimate him. But I believe that Poe, if we take his works in aggregate, has the œuvre of a genius, even if his stories (excepting the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) are defective. Nonetheless, taken together they construct a character, a character more vividly present than the characters he created, more vividly present than Charles Auguste Dupin, than the crimes, than the mysteries which fail to scare us.
This seems to be his final judgement of Poe -- the rest of the lecture he spends discussing the flourishing of the detective story in Britain and its abasement in the US. So he gives Poe credit for inventing a genre, for inventing a style of reading, for inventing Borges himself -- at one point he says "we ourselves" read differently by virtue of having Poe's invention as part of our heritage. I guess he believes Poe to be a literary genius but not a great author.
 * I haven't been able to find the source for this obituary on the web. Update -- found it!
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2009: 3 responses
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Kate Beaton is cleaning up her office. She's put up a lot of her hilarious 