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Sunday, June 16th
I have in mind a pastiche of The Library of Babel, in which the volumes' pages contain, rather than 40 lines of 80 black letters, a nine-by-nine grid of boxes, some boxes blank, some containing a decimal digit. The hardy folk who wander the Library's hexagonal galleries cling to a belief that its stacks contain every possible Sudoku game -- you will hear rumors from time to time, never at first hand, of a solvable Sudoku grid encountered in some distant gallery; for your own part, you have seen only blank grids, with perhaps a 3 or a 7 in one of the cells, or a grid filled entirely with 9's except for the middle cell, which is blank. Once, you found a book in which every grid had the digits 1 through 9 scattered haphazardly, just one of each digit. You could discern no pattern.
posted afternoon of June 16th: Respond
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Saturday, June 27th, 2015
Not totally sure what to make of this yet... It is at the very least a fascinating idea for a project...
posted morning of June 27th, 2015: Respond
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Monday, May 26th, 2014
Over time, working at the Branch Library, I came to think of all books as just misprinted editions of Moby-Dick. Carol told me she felt the same way.
Shaenon K. Garrity has written the only (non-graphic*) "Library of Babel" fanfic that will ever need to be written.
 * There is certainly still room for a "Library of Babel" graphic novel. Make with the infinite libraries, cartoonists!
posted afternoon of May 26th, 2014: Respond
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Thursday, February 27th, 2014
Here is a poem I have been working on this week. The genesis is as follows: I was thinking about my poem Analogies for Time, and also about the Persistence of Memory. I thought, well, the Persistence of Memory is a suspension of time, time does not progress in a painting, the time on the melting watch will always be 6:55 and the watch will never melt away -- from all this came the line "No hay rÃo para correr a través de este paisaje soñado" -- it's a landscape without a river. Well: a promising line. I spent a while tossing it around and it is seeming not to be so much a poem about that painting, but about a landscape that is outside of time. (Possibly this landscape could be the setting for the eternal city in "El inmortal".) Here is what I've got so far:
No river flows through this immortal landscape, dry and still.
No hunter seeks the spoor of his hallucinated prey.
The jagged cliffs look down on desert -- cliffs of granite, dreary desert --
static sands untouched by wind or moisture, waiting still
for time eternal, the imagined camera pans and zooms
but finds no hint of motion, no decay,
no sign of change for good or ill.
posted evening of February 27th, 2014: Respond
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Tuesday, June 5th, 2012
In the array of inexplicable matters which is the universe, which is time, a book's dedication is surely not the least arcane. It is presented as a gift, a boon. But excluding the case of the indifferent coin which Christian charity lets drop into the indigent's palm, every gift is in truth reciprocal. He who gives does not deprive himself of what is given. To give and to receive are identical.
Like every act in the universe, dedicating a book is a magic act. It could be considered as the most pleasant, the most fitting manner of giving voice to a name. And now I give voice to your name, MarÃa Kodama. So many mornings, so many oceans, so many gardens of the East and of the West, so many lines of Virgil.
Jorge LuÃs Borges
inscription to La cifra:
May 17, 1981
Juan Gabriel Vásquez' column from last week is fun: "About a Magic Act" is about dedications, spinning off from his dedication of The Secret History of Costaguana to his daughters, and the difficulty his various translators have had in rendering “que llegaron con su libro bajo el brazo†in their target languages -- apparently, so he learned, it is not the case in every language, that a baby can arrive with a loaf of bread under its arm (it looks at first glance like nacer con el pan debajo del brazo means roughly, "be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth") -- Anne McLean rendered it, "For Martina and Carlota, who brought their own book with them when they arrived." He looks at dedications from GarcÃa Márquez, Juan Carlos Onetti, Camilo José Cela, Joyce, Hervé Guibert, Shakespeare, Borges... My own very rough translation of the Borges dedication Vásquez refers to is above.
posted evening of June 5th, 2012: 2 responses
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Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
 I was translating (just starting to translate, I was on the first page) into English a translation into Croatian of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. It seemed like it was going to be a magnum opus...
posted morning of January 10th, 2012: Respond
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Monday, November 28th, 2011
Brandon Holmquest's analysis of the practice of translating poetry is well worth reading. Holmquest translates Borges' poem "El general Quiroga va en coche al muere" and examines closely the decisions he is making at each juncture.
posted morning of November 28th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, September 9th, 2011
Es que la tarea, la tarea del arte es esa, es transformar, digamos, lo que nos ocurre
continuamente, transformar todo eso en sÃmbolos, transformarlo en música, transformarlo en
algo que pueda perdurar en la memoria de los hombres. Es nuestro deber ese, tenemos que
cumplir con él, si no nos sentimos muy desdichados.
--Entrevista a Borges
Ian Ruschel composes a tribute, Buenos Aires: Las Calles de Borges -- via Open Culture, which has a number of intriguing-looking Borges links. (Thanks for the link, Lep!)
posted evening of September 9th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, February 5th, 2011
 Rereading "La escritura del dios" last week, I was inspired to do some searching for background material, to find out who is Qaholom, the god who has written his sacred scripture in the markings of the jaguar for Tzinacán to read. I found out about the Popol Vuh, a transcription of the K'iche' creation story -- written down in the 1500's by a Jesuit missionary in Quiché, Guatemala based on the reading of a (no longer extant) hieroglyphic document, translated into Spanish and annotated by Adrián Recinos.
According to Recinos, Qaholom is "the paternal god, the god who sires children, from qahol, 'a father's son', qaholoj, 'engender'." Recinos also notes that Gucumatz (one third of the trinity which is called Heart of the Heavens, and I think possibly another name for Qaholom? -- I haven't quite got the pantheon straight yet) is a "serpent covered with green feathers, from from guc, in Maya, kuk, 'green feathers', Quetzal via antonomasia, and cumatz, 'serpent'; he is the K'iche' version of Kukulkán, the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec king, conqueror, bringer of civilization, god in Yucatán during the epoch of the Post-classical Mayan Empire."
posted morning of February 5th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
 Many thanks to commenter Mariano on last year's Hypallage post for his valuable information about the image from Milton that Borges references in his dedication of El hacedor to Lugones. Mariano points out that beyond the fact that "las lámparas estudiosas" is clearly not quoting the "bright officious lamps" of Paradise Lost, book Ⅸ, there is not even any reference to this passage; rather, we have a quote from Milton's Areopagitica, a tract he wrote for Parliament in opposition to censorship.
Behold now this vast City: a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with his protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer'd Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea's wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. So, well, this means that both Boyer's translation and Hurley's have problems. Boyer is correct in calling the phrase "the hypallage of Milton" (though I would like "Milton's hypallage" better) -- Hurley's "a Miltonian displacement of adjectives" is clumsy and does not communicate Borges' intent. And Hurley has "scholarly lamps", which undoes the quotation. But Boyer quotes the wrong passage of Milton! That spoils the image. The image from Areopagitica makes complete sense as a part Borges' dedication, while the image from Paradise Lost seemed pretty out of keeping with the context.
 ...Reinventing the wheel dept. -- I see Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti wrote about this last November, saying "as others have noted" -- guess it's not a new piece of knowledge. Nice to have on hand though.
posted evening of December 7th, 2010: 1 response
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Borges is the genius of 20th-Century literature. His short stories defy description but demand to be read.
