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Wednesday, August third, 2011
 The land was ours before we were the land's...
posted evening of August third, 2011: Respond
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Monday, August first, 2011
 This weekend I read Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations, without knowing much more about it than that I had seen it recommended a number of times over the years in pretty glowing terms. I found it, well, pretty disappointing -- went in hoping for great literature and found a couple of flashes of genius surrounded by 200 pages of a well-crafted lack of inspiration.
What is frustrating about the book is it seems to me like the author knew his work was lacking in inspiration, in vivacity -- he almost tries to make that the book's selling point. The complex structure of the book (which is about its most interesting feature) can be simplified as: a series of frames within frames; in each enclosing frame, an author is failing to find the needed inspiration to write the story in the enclosed frame. It sort of seems like a great book could be written with that structure, if the author were, say, Joseph Heller. But here it is ultimately just the chronicle of Josipovici trying and failing to write Goldberg: Variations -- my reaction is, if you can't write the book, then don't write it, or at least don't publish it... There are definitely moments of genius and of beauty in the book; for me, they are not enough to recommend reading it. If I were asked for a one-word description of it, my reply would be "Stultifying."
posted evening of August first, 2011: 2 responses
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Sunday, July 31st, 2011
The hiss of the cicadas in the trees behind our house is at its peak this evening -- really reverberating through our entire second floor. (It's a sound I love, for which small mercy I give thanks.) As I was listening to the buzzing just now a new approach hit me to a problem of tense that I'd been batting around a few weeks ago:
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£)
by Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Thus spoke el maestro
de Tarca:
Catch the cicada
by its wing
At least
you're holding in your hand
its song.
 I believe this is both truer to the source and better sounding, more poetic, than what I had previously.
posted evening of July 31st, 2011: 1 response
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Friday, July 29th, 2011
 In case you have not been following comments on my years-old threads (and really -- who could blame you?): Ben has convinced me to re-open the Novalis translation project that I started back in 2007 but never really got anywhere with. He has contributed some excellent suggestions regarding nearly all of the sentences in the poem's second stanza. Perhaps you started reading this blog sometime since 2007 and you would be interested in helping out with this project, if only you knew about it! -- Well, here is your chance. We're trying to improve on the various English translations of Novalis' poem Hymns to the Night, and we're trying to do it by committee. Take a look and see what you think.
Ben's working translation of the second hymn is below the fold.
Hymn to the Night â…¡Does the Morning always have to return?
Will the obligations of everyday life never stop?
Troublesome activity undermines the heavenly passage of Night.
Won’t the secret offering of love ever burn for ever?
Light’s time was measured out, but the power of the Night is timeless and
boundless.
Holy Sleep, gladden not too seldom the Night’s servant in everyday work.
The span of sleep is endless.
Only fools misunderstand you and know of no sleep except that shadow that
in the half-light of genuine sleep you softly throw over us.
They aren’t aware of you in the nectar of the golden grape, in the almond
tree’s marvelous oil, and in the brown juice of the poppy.
They don’t know you are that which lingers around the bosom of the tender
maiden and makes a heaven in her lap; they have no idea that you open
a path to Heaven from the Old Stories, and that you carry the key to the
dwellings of the blessed,
O, silent bringer of endless secrets.
↻...done
posted evening of July 29th, 2011: Respond
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One of my very favorite qualities of the Nielsen Hayden blog Making Light, is the way commenters there freely rewrite classic poetry in new voices and on new subjects. It is a highly literate crowd over there -- today they have been (spinning off of an exchange between Chris Clarke and Abi Sutherland at Google+) rewriting the greats to have reference to the world of blogging and newsgroups and social networks. Thomas speaks through Henry Reed: Today we have naming of trolls. Yesterday
we had spam deletion. And tomorrow morning
We shall have what to do after banning. But today
Today we have naming of trolls. Economies
Totter world-wide toward bankruptcy
But today we have naming of trolls.
(And on the subject of Making Light: at the bottom of a week-old thread, a troll has inspired commenters to translate old favorites into Chinese via Google, with some fun results.)
posted evening of July 29th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, July 24th, 2011
At The Hooded Utilitarian, the first posts have gone up in the new Illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable, which will be ongoing over the next few weeks. Up first is Mahendra Singh's take on the totally seasonally appropriate Cuban Doctor. (Singh styles himself "An illustrator busily fitting Lewis Carroll into a protosurrealist straitjacket with matching dada cufflinks.")
posted morning of July 24th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
So I am reading some of the pieces in this edition of Two Lines (the one I mentioned yesterday) and it is making me feel very good to be included in this crowd. The quality of selections and of translation is just off the charts. And rereading my piece in this context, I honestly think it holds up, that it is of a like quality to the rest of the anthology. (Although almost the first thing I noticed was a problem of tense, a sentence that would have sounded much better with the addition of the word "had". Oh well, too late for revisions.)
- Chris Andrews' translation of the opening of Varamo, by César Aira, had me laughing out loud on the train this morning, underlining passages ("the sequence was dense with meaning, but threatened from within by the infinite"! "the innocent look of an incoherent letter"! "Light dissolved the worries created by its dark twin, thought"!) and longing to read the whole thing.
- Joanne Turnbull's translation of The Letter Killers, by Sigizmund Krzhinzhanovsky, again makes me want to read the whole book. The inklings of asemia contained in Krzhinzhanovsky's protagonist's method of composition have me dying to know where he goes from here.
- Andrew Oakland translates Martin Reiner's meditation on "The Angel of Destruction" -- the Warsaw Pact troops entering Brno when Reiner was 4 years old, in kindergarten. Extremely powerful and, as Oakland asserts in his translator's note, it does not require much familiarity with Czech history to get the point.
- Harry Thomas and Marco Sonzogni translate two poems by Primo Levi which have me wondering how come I have not read any Levi yet.
posted evening of July 19th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, July 18th, 2011
 My copy of the forthcoming issue of Two Lines -- journal of the Center for the Art of Translation -- arrived in today's mail. A nice feeling to see my name there; my translation of the first chapter of The Art of Resurrection is my first contribution to Two Lines, hopefully there will be more to come.
And -- well, this seems like some kind of sign to me, to me who is always looking for portents: The editor's note from Luc Sante mentions in its second sentence "the late Kenneth Koch, one of my greatest teachers" -- so soon after I'd been thinking about Koch in the context of translation...
posted evening of July 18th, 2011: 4 responses
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Friday, July 15th, 2011
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
He dreamt of his distributed weight
lying hair's-breadth by hair's-breadth this side of collapse
on the springs of his mattress; his linen-clad pillow,
the thousands of hairs on the nape of his neck; dreamt of
covers and sheets and the million thread count, the
mechanics of sleep, of the pale thunder moon, of the
gasp from his lungs as his body escapes
this cold matrix of wakefulness, bitterness, playfulness:
memories of nuzzling close in the arms of the
black grinning spectre of night.
Woke up this morning without much memory of the dream but with the strong impression that I had been dreaming about being asleep. Within a few minutes the poem had assembled itself in rough outline; over the next hour or so it came into a nice sharp focus.The epigraph is from a villanelle by Roethke: one I did not know of until today. I like its sense and its sound. "I learn by going where I have to go."
Here is a link to several pieces I've posted over the last few months that I've been particularly happy with: Memories and Dreaming -- 7 original pieces plus 2 translations. Maybe if I get a couple more together, I will make a chapbook.
posted evening of July 15th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
posted morning of July 12th, 2011: Respond
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