READIN

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

🦋 Points of view

I'm watching All About my Mother again tonight, for what I think will be the last repetition (for the time being); I am really getting the movement of it, and understanding the scenes individually and in combination.

Just pausing the film to note what seems to me like a really brilliant detail -- at the end of the scene showing Manuela acting in an organ donation seminar, the camera pans to her son jotting notes, then back to Manuela. Then the view switches to black and white and you see the movie rewinding -- the camera pulls back and you see the black and white is the videotape playing for a group of nurses who are reviewing the seminar. But in those couple of seconds before the camera pulls back, the impression (at least the impression I get) is that the black and white photography and the rewind are occuring in the mental image of Esteban the story teller, writing a story about his mother. This ambiguity seems really neat to me.

posted evening of October 20th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 Progress

I am a little surprised at the progress I am making with Hymns to the Night -- I was mentioning to a friend today that when I pick up projects like this, I usually map them out in detail, then translate a sentence or two and lose interest. Today I've got working translations of the first and second hymns, and I think they read reasonably well. I have borrowed heavily from MacDonald's translation but I think mine is more pleasant of a read -- you have to spend less time and effort on diagramming the sentences in your head to make them make sense.I think a combination of telling everybody I'm working on this and the effort I put into programming the translation page is making this feel like a higher priority to actually put in the time and do it. We'll see about the verse sections of hymns 4, 5, and 6 -- I think it is going to be really difficult to come up with anything.

Update: I'm no longer a one-man band! The first outside contribution to the project comes from Greg Woodruff, and it's a good 'un.

Update: Another translation, from Gary.

posted evening of October 20th, 2007: 6 responses
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I had been a little confused by the chronology of The Blue Flower, particularly as regards the first two chapters and the area right around chapter 11 or 12 -- a reference in chapter 33 to Dietmahler's visit cleared up the first thing, but I'm still a little confused by things like Fritz's time at his primary school -- letting it ride for now as the kind of thing I'll probably pick up on better if I reread the book.

I love the book but I have to say, Fritz's involvement with Sophie does not strike me as the most interesting thing in the book.

posted evening of October 20th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 19th, 2007

Watching All About Eve tonight -- I am being blown away. I'm almost sure I've seen it before at some point, but have no memory of it at all. It is going to be really useful when I am rewatching All About my Mother -- I'm picking up a lot of the references that I totally missed before.

Is it a commonplace observation that Susan Sarandon looks like and acts like Bette Davis? Because I am noticing that for the first time. (Ellen points out that Sarandon does not have the imperious persona, which I guess is true -- there were non-imperious moments when the likeness was jumping out at me.)

posted evening of October 19th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, October 18th, 2007

🦋 Experiencing poetry through translation

Trying to translate a poem I don't really understand out of a language I don't really speak fluently might seem, well, a little Quixotic. But listen -- I think it is worthwhile. It is I guess at root a way of making myself spend some time trying to get the sounds and meanings of the poetry. I have traditionally had a hard time with poetry because I pass over it too quickly and miss nuances. An exercise like this, assuming I can stick with it, will work to correct that tendency.

posted evening of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 A fantastic sight

This evening I saw the most extraordinary thing: I was walking through the park after dark, next to the duck pond. There were street lamps lit near the pond but where I was, was in the shadow of a large tree, so the only light was patches reflected from the rippling surface of the pond. I noticed a slight movement a few feet ahead of me -- it was the egret that lives in the canal next to the park, crouching over the edge of the pond like a diver. (This bird I have never seen from closer than about 50 feet.) The egret's curved neck was a matte black "S" against the glossy black of the water, for a beautiful moment before it jumped in to the pond.

posted evening of October 18th, 2007: Respond

🦋 Collaborative translation

Want to help me come up with a new translation of Hymns to the Night? I've set up a page for translating.

Update (Friday evening): Hm, haven't seen anybody else over there yet. But I have a working copy of the first chapter, and I think it sounds pretty good. I have copied MacDonald's translation quite closely in places, and introduced changes in other places. See what you think.

posted afternoon of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 First comment spam

Wow, that was fast! Guess I will hafta come up with some kind of security thingy.

Update: Well I wrote a script for quick deletion of spam. What should I do about blocking it? A captcha?

posted morning of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

🦋 Inversion

So this:

Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht. Fernab liegt die Welt - in eine tiefe Gruft versenkt - wüst und einsam ist ihre Stelle.

doesn't sound nearly as odd to me as this:

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world, sunk in a deep grave; waste and lonely is its place.

Possible reasons:

• It is normal to invert elements of a sentence like that in German, where in English it sounds archaic -- I cannot vouch for the truth of the first clause here but that's what they told me in high school German. It may be that the construction would sound archaic to a native speaker of German.
• The German sounds foreign to begin with, and my ears do not pick up enough nuance to tell anything more than that; whereas the English is my own language, and I can tell straight off that it is not the kind of thing you would say, if you were speaking about turning to the holy, mysterious Night.

I am trying to figure out here, whether a more colloquial translation would be a good thing -- if the German sounds stilted in the original, then a comfortable translation would not be true to the source material.

posted evening of October 17th, 2007: 2 responses
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🦋 Hymns to the Night

Here are some different editions of Novalis' Hymns to the Night:

• A transcription of the author's manuscript, arranged in lines of free verse.
• The first published edition, in which the lines are collected into paragraph form.
• A translation done by George MacDonald, a Scottish minister, in 1897, also in paragraph form.
• A new translation, by Simon Elmer.

The first sentence: Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light, with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? is in praise of the light and the Day when I am expecting to find praise of Night. The opposition between the two will make up the body of this poem.

I dig the sound of the poem and am intending to spend some time in the coming days thinking about its meaning, anyway if I can do so without having it sound too much like I'm writing an essay for my freshman English class. Otherwise I will just focus on the sounds.

Update: In comments, Gary posts his own translation of the poem.

Update: For the sake of completeness, another translation, this one by Henry Morley. (At the very end of the page.) Dick Higgins also has done a translation, but it is not accessible online.

posted evening of October 17th, 2007: 10 responses
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