READIN

La isla de los alcatraces

Jeremy — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:56:56 -0600

No Dress Rehearsal Rag this week, we hope to put a nice performance together this weekend...

The READIN family went on vacation this weekend to see sister Miriam get married, congratulations, Miriam! The next day we took the ferry to Alcatraz for some exploration... I've never gone there before and was more blown away by the stark physical beauty of the place than interested in the history of the prison. Some pix at the family album:

Also took a very nice walk through North Beach, but alas no pictures, phone was dead.

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Tags: the Family Album

The Art of Resurrection

Jeremy — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:09:04 -0600

Hernán Rivera Letelier grew up in the mining towns of Humberstone and Algorta, in Chile's Norte Grande, at the tail end of the nitrate-mining era: a major stage in Chile's history and in the history of the industrialized world. He tells Ariel Dorfman (as related in Dorfman's Desert Memories, 2004) that his earliest memories are of "eavesdropping on [the] adult conversations" of the miners who ate their meals in the Letelier home; his mother padded the family budget by selling home-cooked meals to the bachelor miners. The stories he was listening to were of the last remnants of the nitrate industry, already moribund by the time of his childhood; he listened well, and has built a successful career as one of Chile's most popular novelists (although mostly overlooked, until recently, outside of Chile) telling the stories of the pampa salitrera, the mining camps built in the Atacama desert at the end of the 19th Century by British and German firms and operated until the middle of the 20th Century, and of the people who lived and worked there.

Rivera Letelier's 13 novels to date span the length of the nitrate-mining era and the breadth of the Atacama desert -- from the 1907 massacre of striking workers retold and reconstructed in Our Lady of the Dark Flowers (2002), to the 1942 mining camp strike in Providencia in the (surreal) Art of Resurrection (2010), to the later dusty remnants of Coya Sur in The Fantasist (2006), on the verge of becoming a ghost town -- somewhat reminiscent in all of Faulkner's treatment of Mississippi. (or John Ford's, of the Old West?) The Art of Resurrection won the prestigious Premio Alfaguara and has happily brought his work some well-deserved recognition. It is the story of a week in the life of Domingo Zárate Vega ("better known to all as the Christ of Elqui," sort of a Chilean Rasputin who wandered the country in the mid-20th Century preaching his gospel) -- in which he searches for, finds, and loses his own Magdalene.

My translation of a portion of Chapter 4 of the book will be up soon at The Unmuzzled Ox, under the title "Christ in the Desert".

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Units of rhythm, units of syntax

Jeremy — Sun, 12 May 2013 18:09:01 -0600

I was complaining to a friend recently about how the New Yorker had printed its translation of "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" split up into paragraphs where the original was a single paragraph, and he did not really get where I was coming from -- if it was more readable in paragraphs, isn't that the way to go? As I'm reading the first sentence of Queen Isabel was singing rancheras, I'm wondering why it seems so important to me that this block be preserved as a single sentence, thinking I ought to justify that somehow. If it's more readable broken up, why not break it up?

In the flow of a book or story I do not slavishly follow the syntactic boundaries in the source text -- though perhaps I err on the side of slavishly following them. There are certainly points where a period in English seems like the correct translation of a comma or a y in Spanish. But these long paragraphs and long sentences in Spanish seem to me to fill more than a syntactic role; they are communicating a rhythm and pacing which splitting them up has a tendency to spoil. And not only in Spanish -- being a single paragraph seems to me like a fundamental quality of (for instance) "Ein Landarzt"; it pulls the reader insistently into the driving rhythm of the story, will not let go.

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Mash-up

Jeremy — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:19:00 -0600

John couldn't make it over to Lonesome Nickel studios this weekend; Dress Rehearsal Rags will resume in a couple of weeks.

Seemed like it would be a good idea, this sunny Sunday morning on Meeker St., to mash up a couple of old country tunes together which don't really have that much in common. Here's the Carter Family + Ernest Tubb, for your delectation:

Thanks to Ellen for the wonderful camerawork -- thanks to Pixie for sitting and listening!

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(of interest)

Jeremy — Sat, 11 May 2013 15:09:46 -0600

Robyn Hitchcock has released on Spotify a version of Love from London with commentary tracks à la Spectre. Magnificent. (...And more! The commentary trax are available as videos at you tube!)