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Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
I had forgotten about the fifth chapter of The Art of Resurrection -- it is an extremely dense, 7-page long paragraph of a sort of context-switching stream of consciousness. Last time I read this book, I'm pretty sure I mostly skipped over it. It is valuable for the way it gets inside Zárate Vega's head, and by switching back and forth between the narrator's voice and the Christ of Elqui's, makes explicit the identification between reader and writer and character -- also we see the use of first-person plural, not used in this book anything like as much in Santa MarÃa de las flores negras, to make explicit the identification between the narrator and the workers who live in the salitreras.
posted evening of March 20th, 2012: Respond
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Monday, March 26th, 2012
Chapter 9 is like Chapter 5, a single long paragraph telling Domingo Zárate Vega's back-story. I was thinking today about how these chapters are functioning in the structure of the book. They set off groups of chapters that are telling a fairly straight, linear story, and they are set at critical junctures -- at the end of Chapter 4 the Christ of Elqui is preparing to enter La Piojo; at the end of Chapter 8 he has at last met Magalena Mercado and is receiving an "urgent blowjob." The narrative voice in these chapters is a bit different from the narrative voice in the rest of the book, and I was thinking this might be Zárate Vega writing his memoirs -- I'm not sure about that, it doesn't sound much like the voice he uses in his dialogue. Chapter 9 gives Zárate Vega's birthday as December 20, 1897 -- I am not clear about my arithmetic here* but I calculated last time I was reading this, that the events of Chapter 4 occur on December 19-20th, his 45th birthday. The intervening chapters -- the Christ of Elqui's arrival in La Piojo, his sermon, the lunch he shares with the striking workers, his nap, the introduction of Magalena Mercado -- are some pure reading pleasure.
 *ah yes -- this was not a calculation, Zárate Vega says in Chapter 15, when the emissaries from the union tell him it is the 21st, that yesterday, when he "almost died like a dog in the desert," was his forty-fifth birthday.
posted evening of March 26th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, March 31st, 2012
In Chapter 11 of The Art of Resurrection, we hear the Christ of Elqui praying aloud for the first time in the book -- or at least the first time we have his prayer written out for our ears to follow. Magalena Mercado asked him to teach her a new prayer, as she feels like her Mary icon must be getting tired of the same old recitation, and he answers that "Prayer is not a matter of technique, o my sister, but a grace"; but as he is lying down to sleep he recites this prayer:
Santo Dios, Santo inmortal, Santo fuerte, Santo protector, lÃbranos de todo mal. Verbo divino, Verbo eterno, Verbo salvador, lÃbranos, Jesús mÃo, de todo dolor. Si no puedo amar, que no odie; si bien no puedo hacer, que no haga mal, que en tu gracia santificante, Señor nuestro, nos guÃes con tu luz. Que asà sea por siempre. Amén.
Lovely! (Magalena Mercado will learn this prayer in Chapter 24.)
posted morning of March 31st, 2012: 1 response
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Monday, April second, 2012
The proceedings were honored by the priestly presence of three old men, survivors of the massacre. They were seated in the first row, legs together, hats resting on their knees, listening and watching everything, granitic, absent.
Since the first time I read The Art of Resurrection, I've read Santa MarÃa de las flores negras, and so I get a flash of recognition at the end of Zárate Vega's sermon in chapter 15, when he is introduced to the old miners who had survived the massacre in Iquique -- the oldest of them is Olegario Santana, the War of the Pacific veteran who is already 56 years old at the opening of Flores negras, feeding breakfast to his pet vultures. Now he is 91 years old and is present only as a stony visage. I had a hunch when I was reading Flores negras that Santana was Rivera Letelier writing himself into the story, and I'm going to stick with that impression -- nice to see him here.
posted evening of April second, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, April 8th, 2012
The final 20% of The art of resurrection is captivating and engaging and I have not been writing about it very much, not finding much I have to say that would add to the reading experience... I cannot resist quoting a few maxims which Domingo Zárate Vega gives to the proprietor of the print shop in Pampa Unión (the shop he passed by in Chapter 3, when he made a note to stop there later to make more copies of his pamphlets), to print in his newspaper. The whole of Chapter 23 is an interview with Zárate Vega, más conocido por todos como el famoso Cristo de Elqui, running on Saturday December 27* in La Voz de la Pampa.
Some new sayings or proverbs, Teacher?
‘Honesty is the key to good friendship.’
‘Honor is a golden palace.’
‘The birds in the sky are more content than the wealthiest millionaires, although they sleep out in the open, with only their feathers for cover.’
And another that our Eternal Father revealed to me only a few days ago, as I was emptying my bowels in the open pampa: ‘A good remedy for pride, is that a man should turn his head back now and then, to observe his own shit.’
It is Eastertime here where I am reading, and it is Christmastime in the story.
 *Which weirdly, December 27 1942 appears to have been a Sunday. That seems like a really weird mistake to make and I'm thinking there must be some explanation for it, like the newspaper being a weekend edition and taking the Sunday date or something... I'm kind of baffled by this.
posted morning of April 8th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, December second, 2012
Nice find! (via a wordreference thread referencing The Art of Resurrection.)
posted morning of December second, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, December 8th, 2012
I'm working further on my translation of Hernán Rivera Letelier's El arte de la resurrección... Vague plans to write an interesting cover letter for the first four chapters in rough draft translation and see if I could find a publisher who'd be interested in having me work on the book. Obviously there is a lot of sun to describe in this book, taking place as it does in the Atacama desert. I found this metaphor just gorgeous: The Christ of Elqui left the station. The town of Sierra Gorda, nailed down here on the bottom of purgatory, seemed to be completely empty. It seemed an oasis, a mirage in the desert -- indeed its only inhabitant appeared to be the sunshine, stretched out lazy on its four dirt roads, a giant, yellow mongrel dog. (still not certain about "sunshine" there for "sol"...) -- This came just two pages past a darker image:Many of their dear ones -- as they themselves would say, their voices low -- had probably died in a work accident, or in a barroom brawl, or infected by one of the epidemics which regularly tore through the north, or had fallen in one of the Army’s massacres of the saltpetre workers -- most had simply vanished into thin air, like the reverberating sun of mid-day vanishes into the desert. They rode the trains in hopes of meeting up with their kin, even if it were to be in a graveyard.
posted morning of December 8th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, December 16th, 2012
And on every one of these occasions, plus many others as well, the Christ of Elqui's response was simply to recite this verse, as boring already as the menu of a pulperÃa: "I'm very sorry, dear brother, my dear sister, very sorry; but the sublime art of resurrection belongs exclusively to Our Divine Master."
And that is what he said to the miners who arrived caked with dirt, carrying the cadaver of their workmate, just at the moment when he was most full of grace, preaching before the people on what diabolical influence the modern world could wreak on the spirit of even a devout Catholic, a believer in God and the Blessed Virgin Mother. The gang of calicheros broke through the midst of the crowd of worshippers carrying on their shoulders the body of the deceased; clearly dead of a heart attack, they were telling him as they laid the body with care at his feet, stretched out on the burning sand.
Upset, embarrassed, everyone talking at the same time, the rednecks were explaining to him how after they had eaten their lunch, the Thursday plate of porotos burros, the group of them had been on their way down for a drop to drink, to "wet the whistle," and that's when tragedy struck -- their fellow worker, all of a sudden he grabbed at his chest with both hands, he fell to the ground as if hit by lightning -- not even a chance to say so much as help!
The art of resurrection: Chapter 1
I have been wondering about porotos -- it seems to be a Chilean word for "beans" or maybe just for food. Still not sure what preparation porotos burros is (or is it just "stupid beans"/ "just plain beans again"?); but in the course of looking around the net today I found a couple of recipes for porotos granados, a dish which appears to consist of whatever vegetables are around plus beans and winter squash, cooked up together into a stew. I'm game, and so were Ellen and Sylvia; so I made up my own version of porotos granados for dinner tonight. It was tasty! Herewith the recipe I followed, a rough compromise between the different ones I found online and what ingredients were to hand:
Porotos granados
- Cook beans until tender. I used ¾ pound dry of cranberry beans. Cook with dried oregano and bay leaves. Add some salt when they get soft-but-not-tender.
- Peel and chop squash and veggies. I used 1 medium butternut squash and a couple of carrots as well. Fresh corn is a recommended component but is not available to me this time of year; canned or frozen corn probably would have added a lot to the dish as well.
- In a stock pot, saute 9 cloves of garlic, minced, and two chopped onions in a good amount of oil. Season with a tbsp. ground cumin and more oregano. Add squash, veggies, and beans. Add a little water, not enough to cover the vegetables, and cover the pot.
- Let simmer for about 45 minutes, adding water if it gets too dry. When everthing is falling apart, mash it together with a wooden spoon -- it should be about the consistency of lumpy mashed potatoes.
- Serve with a salad of bell peppers and minced cilantro; sour cream and hot sauce make good condiments.
posted evening of December 16th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, March second, 2013
posted evening of March second, 2013: Respond
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Saturday, March 30th, 2013
In the past few months of not-blogging-much (and not at all, I suppose, about translation), I have been quite busy with reading and re-reading The art of resurrection and extending the excerpt I published in translation. I thought a good thing to write about here would be the manner in which I've been doing the translation.
Essentially I've split the process into four (or 3 1/2) phases, rough draft, revision, close read of the revision, second revision. I have (mostly) finished this process for the first 2/3 of the book and taking a break to look at what I've come up with; I must say, reading my translation feels a whole lot to me like reading the original feels to me -- not sure if that has any bearing at all on how others will perceive the text.
The rough draft process is always done longhand; much of it takes place on the train to and from work. This is where I read the Spanish and write very rough, almost literal translation as fast as I can, with (ideally) very little re-reading. The goal is to come up with something vaguely like a Google Translate translation, where the sentence structure is not quite right and some of the words are untranslated or incorrectly translated, but the overall structure and meaning of the sentence can be divined.
Revision is transferring my rough draft onto the computer, tweaking the language so it reads smoothly and sounds right, and communicates the image in the original. This is a much slower process and involves a lot of looking up words and phrases (at variously, Span¡shD!ct, Google Translate, WordReference.com,... the list goes on...) and consulting with friends and acquaintances, thanks all!
Now it's time for a close read of what you've done so far. Print out a few chapters of what's on the computer, and spend a few days reading it, marking changes in the text or on the computer. When done, go through the document adding in the changes you have marked.
What's great about this process is I never feel like I am or should be dealing with a finished product so I'm free to leave notes and uncertainties in the text. What I have now for chapters 1-16 reads really well, mostly, but there are still notes in it about changes that need to be made. Obvious? Probably, but this feels like the first time I am really believing it.
posted afternoon of March 30th, 2013: 2 responses
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