|
|
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time [are] not worthy [to be compared] with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected [the same] in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. -- The letter of St. Paul to the Romans
Chapter â…§: 18-22
King James version
For a long time I have been wondering how a translation of JoachÃn Pasos' Battle-song: The War of Things might best preserve the voice of the poet. Throughout the poem he is addressing vosotros, the explicitly familiar, explicitly plural second person which does not exist in English. Turns out the key is the epigraph to the poem.For an epigraph, Pasos quotes from the Vulgate version of the above verses of Romans; but he prefaces the quotation with "Fratres:" -- "Brethren:", which is not part of these verses. Paul's letter is addressed to his brethren the Roman Christians, so this insertion makes good sense. And if you read Pasos' poem as a continuation of Paul's address to his brethren, then the familiar second-person plural is clear from context. This morning I had what seems to me like a good idea for a non-literal translation of the poem's third stanza:
Give me a motor, a motor stronger than man's heart.
Give me a robot's brain, let me be murdered painlessly.
Give me a body, metal body without and within another metal body,
just like the leaden soldier's who never dies,
never begs oh Lord, your grace, let me not be disgraced among your works
like the soldier of mere flesh, our feeble pride,
who will offer, for your day, the light of his eyes,
who will take, for your metal, take a bullet in his chest,
who will give, for your water, give back his blood.
Who wants to be like a knife, like one no other knife can ever wound.
(With liberal borrowings from Steven F. White's more literal translation.) This poem reminds me strongly of León Ferrari's paintings of armaments. Remember that the poet is addressing his brethren: He is asking for these cybernetic enhancements not from his God but from his peers.
posted morning of June 4th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Poets of Nicaragua
|  |
Sunday, May 15th, 2011
I picked up Krakauer's Into the Wild at the South Orange Public Library's annual sale yesterday, and read it last night and today. It is a great read, hard to put down: it takes you into McCandless' world and into various historical frames with remarkable clarity. I have always admired Krakauer as a journalist; what he is doing here is not so much journalism as memoir -- he is examining himself through the lens of the research he did into McCandless' life and death. I wrote at the time I saw the movie that I found it sappy and that I expected the sappy qualities were Penn's additions to the story rather than Krakauer's writing. But they're not, or not precisely -- the book is an exercise in romanticization. What keeps it from being sappy is Krakauer's clarity about what he is doing in writing the book, about why he is romanticizing McCandless' life. The reflexive element of Krakauer's authorial voice was missing from the movie, so the problem was not additions by Penn but rather omission. Anyways: I found myself crying on the last pages of the book, and it came as something of a surprise how emotionally invested in the story, in the author's voice, I had become. Another beautiful thing about the book which was (as best I can recall) missing from the movie, is the epigraphs. Every chapter is headed with excerpts from the books McCandless was reading at the end of his life, and from other books Krakauer finds relevant to the case. His judgement is superb.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2011: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Into the Wild
|  |
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
If you think, “I breathe,†the “I†is extra. There is no you to say “I.†What we call “I†is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.
—Shun Ryu Suzuki
A magnificent recent story, which I discovered today thanks to a comments thread at Crooked Timber, is Daryl Gregory's Second Person, Present Tense, published in Asimov's in 2005. About hindering or disabling the narrative process of self, about how this can be a goal of drug use or of meditation. (Can't guarantee that link will always work -- his web site says the story will be readable online "for a limited time" but it looks like that was written a while ago. Update -- The link broke, Asimov's took the story down. The link is now pointing to a short piece about Gregory's story, at bestsciencefictionstories.com.) I fell in love with the story from the moment of reading the epigraph above, which I've never seen before but have just now added to my collection of header quotes for the site. And every sentence of the story moves me as strongly as this quote...
 (Matt Dickerson calls my attention to Daniel Wegner's book The Illusion of Conscious Will, which looks to have a lot of bearing on Gregory's story.) Gregory's notes on his story can be found on his home page. He recommends some sources for further reading on consciousness.
posted evening of November 24th, 2010: 1 response
➳ More posts about Readings
|  |
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
Another Saramago epigraph from El libro de los consejos -- at the front of his Small Memories is the line, "Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste/(roughly) Allow the child you were to carry you." The first time I've been able to find a lead suggesting affirmatively that these quotations are actual quotations from somewhere else, not invented by Saramago -- this line takes me to Juan Pedro Villa-Isaza's blog
Casi un objeto, which gives some context for it:
Mientras no alcances la verdad, no podrás corregirla. Pero si no la corriges, no la alcanzarás. Mientras tanto, no te resignes.*
Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste.
As long as you do not know the truth, you will not be able to alter it. But if you do not alter it, you will never be able to reach it. Still, do not resign yourself. Allow the child you were to carry you.
 (Also, Googling for the original Portuguese rendering of this quote "Deixa-te levar pela criança que foste" leads me to a 2006 interview with Saramago, where he talks about his life and his writing process.) ..."llevar/levar" can also mean "to lead" -- indeed that appears to be the primary meaning in Portuguese; a better rendering of this line might be "Let yourself be led by the child you were." *... and now I am remembering that this line is the epigraph for The History of the Siege of Lisbon... and am back to thinking the whole thing is Saramago's invention.
posted evening of November 9th, 2010: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Blindness
|  |
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
An idea I just had which I think it would be fun to implement: a database table with favorite (striking or profound) brief lines from each book I read -- When you read the archive page for the book in question, those lines, or some randomized subset of them, would be displayed as part of the information in the left hand sidebar. Add to this a setting in the database for "current reading", the book or books that I'm currently reading/thinking about, and a set of lines from those books could be on the front page's sidebar. A little bit like the epigraphs I run at the top of the page, but a bit more fleeting, less a permanent part of the site. For instance I really liked the line, "He does not know -- nobody could know -- my immeasurable contrition, my weariness," from "The Garden of Forking Paths." But it really only seems meaningful in the context of that reading. (This would really free me up in terms of posting short quotations, too -- generally I try only to post a quotation when I have something in particular to say about it. And only to create a new epigraph when I find a really meaningful one. -- So this is a third way.)
Two notes about the translation of that line, * Thanks John for helping with the adjective, "immeasurable" sounds much better than "innumerable" or than "endless", and * Thanks Dr. Hurley for the repetition of "my" at the end, I was leaning towards just using "contrition and weariness" as being the closest thing in format to "contrición y cansancio" -- but somehow that doesn't sound quite right in English.
Implementation: have a button or link on the editing view of the blog that is called "Add Quotation" or something similar -- clicking on it will bring up a dialog box or form where you can enter your quote and the book it is from -- then the the "current reading" books will be books for which I have either posted a quotation or a journal entry over the past say week or two.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: 2 responses
➳ More posts about The site
| |
Friday, January 29th, 2010
At The Millions, Garth Hallberg discusses Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor -- the "Difficult Book par excellence"; in the course of this discussion he describes the experience of reading difficult books with marvelous concision: "A willingness to let things wash over you can be the difference between sublimity and seasickness." Yes! I love this; I am adding it to my list of epigraphs for the site. (via Conversational Reading.)
posted evening of January 29th, 2010: Respond
➳ More posts about Ada
| |
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
I am happy: The Museum of Innocence was published at long last today, the first novel Orhan Pamuk has published since I fell in love with his voice back in 2007. I have been anticipating this since last August when I saw it mentioned in McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk... I'm wondering idly -- only read a few pages this evening, they are nice -- they have the same beguiling prose quality I remember from the opening of The Black Book -- how well the metaphor of strolling through a museum will work for the experience of reading this book. Will I linger over certain images, walk briskly past others which are not as engaging? Will I want to stay past closing time or will I find myself wanting to go home early, when I have not even gotten to see the exhibit on the third floor?... I'm usually a bit intimidated by museums, I have not yet felt even a bit intimidated by Pamuk's prose* -- its inviting affect is the thing I love most about it. Well; we'll see. Here are the epigraphs to this book: These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. (from the notebooks of Celâl Salik)[Celâl Salik? Is that Celâl from The Black Book? I sort of think so but not sure. Did the Black Book character have a last name? ...and, yes! the columnist in The Black Book is named Celâl Salik.] If a man could pass thro' Paradise in a Dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke -- Aye? and what then? (from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge) [This is very nice, and definitely calls to mind the opening of The Black Book.] First I surveyed the little trinkets on the table, her lotions and her perfumes. I picked them up and examined them one by one. I turned her little watch over in my hand. Then I looked at her wardrobe. All those dresses and accessories piled one on top of the other. These things that every woman used to complete herself -- they induced in me a painful and desparate loneliness; I felt myself hers, I longed to be hers. (from the notebooks of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar)
 *Oh wait, sorry, I am forgetting about The New Life. So make that "have not in most cases".
posted evening of October 20th, 2009: 1 response
➳ More posts about Museum of Innocence
| |
Wednesday, July first, 2009
I get home from the Spanish-language meetup this evening -- I mostly listened, talked a little bit -- and find a new post up on Saramago's blog, starting out "To write is to translate. It will always be, even when we're writing in our own language." The rest of it's a little beyond my meagre translating abilities, but interesting stuff. Reading The History of the Siege of Lisbon tonight, I found another reference to the Blindness epigraph -- ... Nonsense, I've simply done a little reading, I've amused or educated myself little by little, discovering the difference between looking and seeing, between seeing and observing, ...
posted evening of July first, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Saramago's Notebook
|  |
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see. Two aircraft streaked across the sky from south to north leaving vapour trails that slowly faded, and a noise like waves.
This passage -- like many others in this book -- is beautiful for the way it combines impressionistic rendering of the scene with terse, probing investigation of what is happening behind the scene. "Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep" communicates a mood that I know, puts me right in Michael's head, and does it with optimal efficiency, not a word wasted. Michael's meditation about silence and vastness is interrupted by his wondering by what right the owner's of the land possess this silence -- and the narrator moves outside him, above him, into the broader scene.Coetzee's epigraph for the book sounds oddly familiar, I'm sure I've heard it quoted elsewhere: "War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free." -- Or possibly I am thinking of some other similar quotation; I think this aphorism is composed in the style of some classical writer, but I'm not sure who...
 Update: the epigraph is from a fragmentary writing of Heraclitus, quoted by Hippolytus in Refutatio â…¨.
posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Life and Times of Michael K
| |
Friday, March 6th, 2009
 I got in touch with the friend to whom I loaned Blindness; she sent me the authorized translation of the epigraph I've been wondering about for the past few days.
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe. This is just right -- "If you can see" makes much better sense as an opening phrase than "If you can look"; and then on the second line, "If you can look" reads alright because you already have the structure set up to understand it in.
Saramago attributes this line to the "Book of Exhortations", which if I'm understanding right is Deuteronomy. It would be interesting to find out where it is in that book and see how e.g. the King James translation renders it. ...Looking further, it seems like "Book of Exhortations" is a pretty generic term -- it can refer to a lot of different prophetic writings. I wonder what Saramago's source for this line is. Update: Further investigation of the source here.
posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
➳ More posts about José Saramago
| Previous posts about Epigraphs
Archives  | |
|
Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
•
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.
| |
