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Monday, February 9th, 2009
Elizabeth Costello is a book which I am finding requires access to source material. (I am kind of ignoring the major piece of source material for this book, but trying to track down the incidental pieces...) Below the fold, some source material for chapter 4, "The Poets and the Animals." This interview with Coetzee from the Swedish magazine Djurens Rätt ("Animal Rights"), while not strictly speaking "source material," also seems useful.
↷read the rest...
posted evening of February 9th, 2009: 4 responses
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Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Sergio Chejfec turned out not to be the highlight of the evening. His work -- the portion of it that is excerpted in BOMB -- is lovely and introspective; but because it is introspective it did not lend itself to being read aloud. You want room for your mind to wander while you're reading it. My favorite thing I heard this evening was the poetry of Nicanor Parra, read by his translator Liz Werner from the recent book Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great. For instance, from the poem "Something Like That": THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes
nothing otherworldly
God
the truth
the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes
whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
and we're right back to being enemies Also very nice to listen to was Lina Meruana's short story "Ay" -- she writes a flowing, engaging narrative that pulled me in. She only read the first half of the story but it was enough to make me want to read the rest of it on the train coming home. Raúl Zurita was also there, reading some oddly dream-like poems about the coup of 1973 and about Akira Kurosawa; he has one of the most pleasant reading voices I've ever heard -- it was almost hard to get past the immediate sensory delight of listening to him speak, to get at the content of the poems. Zurita also has a piece in this issue of BOMB about Nicanor Parra, sort of bringing me full circle.
posted evening of January 29th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Roberto Bolaño saw himself as a poet rather than a novelist: he said, “the poetry makes me blush less.” Now English speakers will have a chance to read some of his poetry; New Directions is publishing his first collection of poems, The Romantic Dogs, in translation this fall. (I can't tell whether the edition will be bilingual.*) At New Directions' site, you can read his poem The Worm, to get a taste -- I found it enchanting.
 (This poem sounds a lot like Ginsberg to my ears -- I hope that is honest reading and not just free-associating off the New Directions imprint. Lines like "built of brick and mortar, between United States and Mexico" and "Twilights that enveloped Lisa's father/ at the beginning of the fifties" bring "Howl" clearly to mind. Oh and "I saw him with my own eyes" is awesome.) *Aha! Amazon says it is bilingual.
posted afternoon of September 9th, 2008: 2 responses
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Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Picture (from Wikipædia) is the statue of Adamastor in Lisbon -- it is on the bench across from here that our hero Ricardo Reis spends much of his time sitting. How lovely! Man, I could look at that for a long time.
Adamastor is a god from the poem Os Lusíades by Camões, which is Portugal's national epic . Adamastor also appears in Pessoa's poem "O Mostrengo" ("The Monster"), which is online here with a translation I can't vouch for*, and which inspired an animation you can watch on MeFeedia. "O Mostrengo" was the inspiration for D.S. Maguni's "O Gigante Adamastor", written for the Mozambiquan rebel cause in the 1970's.
 Another view of the statue is at Flickr. (Or possibly the Wiki pic is a cropped detail of that graphic -- they certainly look very similar layouts.) * The translator says, "This page is solely intended to entice the students of Portuguese who may, through it, be tempted to have a go at Mensagem." The page has links to the full text of Mensagem and notes.
posted evening of August 20th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Counter to prediction, I did not finish The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend. I am however moving a bit closer to writing a summing-up post. My thoughts are moving in this kind of a direction: the book is beautiful and full of powerful original thought; but I have two complaints. First is a complaint with myself; I am not equipt to understand this book. Specifically I don't know Pessoa's poetry more than a little bit; I know hardly anything about Portuguese history, classical nor modern (I didn't know until I started reading this book, that "Lusitanian" means "Portuguese", nor until I looked it up just now that that is because Lusitania was the province of the Roman empire which included modern Portugal -- this just by way of example); and I don't know enough about the history of Europe in the years leading up to the second World War. A full understanding of this book seems like it would require pretty close acquaintance with these three fields. But insofar as I do understand the book: it seems to lack the focus and intensity of Saramago's later fiction. He spends a lot of time on Reis' character but it is still cryptic to me; Reis' self-absorption seems pretty reprehensible but I don't have any window on how he justifies it to himself. And his relationships with Lydia and with Marcenda are not touching me. So but anyway: Still reading it, still loving it, with caveats. Later on this evening I will post some of the meaningful bits I've been reading and thinking about this weekend.
posted afternoon of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
  I just found a interesting article by Margaret Jull Costa, who is Saramago's translator, on Translating Pessoa, with an exercise in translating a passage from his Book of Disquiet.
Fernando Pessoa is a 20th-Century Portuguese poet who assumed a number of different identities in his poetry and prose writing. Another interesting exercise is here: Thirteen ways of looking at "Autopsicografia".
posted morning of July 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
I wrote in comments to Dr. Waterman's post at The Great Whatsit, that the first two stanzas of "To Brooklyn Bridge" had me anticipating a story -- maybe I should try and explain what I mean.  How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty --
Then, with inviolate cure, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
-- Till elevators drop us from our day... So: You see the seagull flying across the bay in the dawn in the first stanza -- and I think this stanza is really the most beautiful bit of the poem -- and the second gives a feeling of dropping, as if we are taking our eyes from the gull to look at the events below it. Great! We're going to have a poem describing some events on the lower Manhattan waterfront! But no; the lens never focuses after it leaves the gull. That's my complaint. "Till elevators drop us from our day" totally makes me think, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
 Update: Waterman suggests that at least some of the images in subsequent stanzas could be interpreted as transformations of (or references to) the seagull. This is an interesting idea.
posted evening of April 29th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, October 22nd, 2007
I was thinking about Romanticism today and what it might mean in the context of Fritz's life, and in the context of Hymns to Night -- Jerry was telling me he thought the poem (of which I had read him about the first paragraph) sounded profoundly connected to being in the world, and I said well, there's a lot of alienation in the poem as well -- I was talking about the suggestions throughout the poem (as much of it as I have read), that the Night and unconsciousness are a higher, more true reality than day, because in sleep the poet can clearly see his beloved free of the trappings of the earthly. This seemed to me like a pretty clear-cut Idealist metaphysics, that the realm of thought is more real than the shadows of the outside world -- I had a go at explaining Plato's allegory of the cave to Jerry -- it's hard for me to see how such a metaphysics could be anything besides alienating of the thinker from the world, which seems like a bad thing to me. And, this ties in with the perception I have that Romantic thinking (on which I have only the vaguest of a grasp) and Idealism are somehow decadent -- which is just something I dimly remember hearing somewhere but has become sort of an article of faith.
(Dumb typo corrected, and it occurs to me that "Allegory of the Café" would be an awesome name for a restaurant.)
posted evening of October 22nd, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, October 20th, 2007
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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Thursday, October 18th, 2007
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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