READIN

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

🦋 Poem and translation

Looking through Ellen's old poetry books I am glad to find a bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda's poetry, Fully Empowered. (Translations are by Alastair Reid, and I'm making a note to myself to look up this guy whose name is on much of the mid-century Latin American literature that interests me.) Take a look at the first stanza of the first poem in the book.

Deber del poeta A quien no escucha el mar en este viernes por la mañana, a quien adentro de algo, casa, oficina, fábrica o mujer, o calle o mina o seco calabozo: a éste yo acudo y sin hablar ni ver llego y abro la puerta del encierro y un sin fin se oye vago en la insistencia un largo trueno roto se encadena al peso del planeta y de la espuma, surgen los ríos roncos del océano, vibra veloz en su rosal la estrella y el mar palpita, muere y continúa.

The Poet's Obligation To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman or street or mine or dry prison cell, to him I come, and without speaking or looking I arrive and open the door of his prison, and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent, a long rumble of thunder adds itself to the weight of the planet and the foam, the groaning rivers of the ocean rise, the star vibrates quickly in its corona and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

A couple things -- why does Neruda say "casa, oficina, fábrica o mujer" -- is he meaning a woman is something to keep you cooped up like a house or a factory? This sounds sexist in a pretty retrograde tone which is not something I'd expect from Neruda; but then I don't really know that much about him -- think of him vaguely as progressive, which I take to imply egalitarian. "Adentro de... mujer" leads me to think of a fetus but I'm pretty sure that is not who the poem is addressed to... In the phrase "un sin fin se oye" is "un" a pronoun -- is this literally "something hears itself endlessly" -- I had thought "un" could only be an article, is this a poetic usage?

This is beautiful imagery; but I don't think I can read it closely enough in the translation to realy appreciate it -- I expect this is a failing more of my own reading than of the translation. I'm really happy to have read the observation (I think I read it first from Daniel Hahn; I've seen it referenced several places since then, most recently by Katherine Silver, so maybe it is a commonplace) that translation is a form of reading closely -- this is opening up a new understanding of how to read closely for me.

posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Repetition

The poems in Fully Empowered are kind of perfect for me to read in Spanish -- short stanzas, short lines, so I can hold them in my head while I go over Reid's translation and back over the original. And lots of repetition of words, so I can maybe get some of them into my vocabulary -- building vocabulary has always been the most difficult part of language study for me.

The repetitions seem meaningful -- certain words occur in almost every poem, like "línea" (in various senses), "caer" (in various forms), words relating to the water like "mar," "océan," "ola," "espuma,"... There are also frequent references to geography and geometry, to birds, to movement, to towers... I haven't quite put all this together yet -- the references to water make me think about Neruda being Chilean, seems like the ocean must be a pretty important part of life in Chile. (Jorge, can you speak to this?) The many repetitions of "línea" are making me think about geometry and language and again, the sea, and tying them together.

I just love the rhythm of this passage, which totally does not come through in the translation; I haven't been able to make a lot of sense of the passage, with or without the translation, but the sound of it is wonderful. From the second stanza of "Pájaro":

Cuando volví de tantos viajes
me quedó suspendido y verde
entre el sol y la geografía:
vi cómo trabajan las alas,
cómo se transmite el perfume
por un telégrafo emplumado
y desde arriba vi el camino,
los manantiales, las tejas,
los pescadores a pescar,
los pantalones de la espuma,
todo desde mi cielo verde.

posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 Word choice

So on the one hand I feel like who am I to criticize Reid's translations -- he surely knew Spanish better than I and was more familiar than I with the literature he was translating. Still I'm seeing a lot of lines in Neruda's poems that look poorly translated to my eye. But one in particular is kind of knocking me for a loop, because it just seems wrong, in a very basic and easy way. From "El desnudo":

Esta raya es el Sur que corre,
este círculo es el Oeste

This ray is the running sun,
this circle is the East

posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: 3 responses
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Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

🦋 The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination

I'm watching a panel discussion on The World of the Translator over at the beautifully named Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (via 3%) -- a nice chance to get inside the heads of some extremely accomplished translators. I enjoyed this exchange:

Jonathan Galassi: A translator is just someone who decides to do it. There are degrees that you can get; but it's really an existential decision that you make, that you're going to commit to working with someone else's work. I think there are probably a lot of psychoanalytic reasons for that, but -- there's several different types of translators sitting at this table, people who do it for a living, whatever you want to say about that, others who do it avocationally, like me, and maybe Peter, I'm not sure if you would put yourself in that, vocationally but not remuneratively, whatever, but -- we're all doing the same thing, the conditions may be different, the time constraints are different, but the actual work is the same. When you get right down to it.

Peter Cole: I never wanted to be a translator, I had no intention whatsoever of being a translator; all through my college education, as a poet, I was always distancing myself from translating. In the 70's, there were many, I think, the prevalent attitude I encountered in English departments was to avoid translation, that translation was some sort of debased currency, a watered-down, de-eroticized version of English, that it just lacked that kind of primal contact, and I, ah, had a notion early on, kind of a Harold Bloomian riff, that my own poetry in English would somehow come out of Hebrew. And that was, like a lot of my notions, fairly delusive, because I didn't know Hebrew. And I grew up more or less like Joe in an assimilated Jewish family; I had some Hebrew from day school, but it was just, you know, kind of mechanical; but I thought this was something I needed to look into, and I was working in Providence, Rhode Island after I graduated from college in 1980, and I saw a notice that a British poet was coming to Brown to give a reading, a guy named Dennis Silk, who, Saul Bellow writes about him, in To Jerusalem and Back, so I went there and thought this would be my key, I'd been reading a lot of Judaica, Near Eastern mythology and all that, but all in English, and in walks this incredibly eccentric-looking guy, sort of, you know the Quasimodo hunch, big bushy eyebrows, and he gave a very good reading, and afterwards I had to ask one of those annoying questions, like I think, his early work when he was living in England seemed kind of Yeatsian, and then after 30 years of living in Israel, he had this much kind of more jagged, broken quality; more interesting to me too, his work; and I asked him, not knowing that after 30 years in the country he still barely spoke Hebrew, was it the influence of Hebrew that did this to your poetry? And he looked at me and he said, "Do you know Hebrew?" and I said "No, but I'd like to learn." And then he looked at me again, he said, "How long have you had this problem?" -- In a sense, that notion of, not the "problem of translation" the way people usually talk about it, but translation as this kind of dis-ease, not so much as healing almost but as this kind of chronic, persistent discomfort, that you learn to live with; before I even got to actually translating other people's works, I was drawn to that for whatever reason.

Interesting tidbit: the first translation project of Edith Grossman's, was the short fiction Cirurgía Psíquica de Extirpación, by Macedonio Fernández.

posted evening of February 4th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, February 6th, 2009

🦋 The nature of the language

Another nice line from Jonathan Galassi, from the translation panel:

Peter was saying something I feel, which is that when you look at a line of poetry in another language, it has -- all the secrets and the music and the magic of it are right there in the actual words, and I feel, I maintain that you can inhale that and know that even if you don't know a word of what it is, that somehow the nature of the language is right there...

The translator is a proselytizer and philanthropic in that sense, is that's where he's working for someone else, as well as himself, for this other person that he's identified with in some way.

Cole: And that's part of the pleasure and neurosis of it all, a sort of that giving out and resentment, we all know about...

Galassi:It's like writing a biography of someone -- there's a period where the biographer always hates the subject.

Cole: Well with mediæval literature I think it's more like writing a novel, because you're creating a fictional character; nobody knows who that mediæval writer is... but definitely that sort of transference.... [Freud] said dreams are translations, in his letter to Fleiss, he said that psycho-neurosis is brought about by a failure to translate certain materials, and that repression brings about that failure, because we are reluctant to enter into the displeasure that the labor of translation brings on. -- I know that feeling!

Grossman: Well I do transference better than anybody else, because I fall in love with every writer I translate. And I know the deepest insight into the natures of those people; beginning with Cervantes, and on up. And I have never hated the writer. There have been times when I say I'm never getting off of page 371; I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to translate this page; but always I've felt such a deep connection to the writer.

posted evening of February 6th, 2009: Respond

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

🦋 Atheist

Nice: I am thinking about Sister Bridget's speech on humanistic and divine learning, and I happen on a new blog entry from Saramago:

Let us face facts. Years ago (many years already), the famous German theologian Hans Küng wrote this truth: "religions have never served to bring human beings closer to one another." Truer words have never been spoken. Here is not denied (and it would be absurd to think so) the right that everyone has, to adopt the religion most to his liking, from the most accustomed one to the least heard of, according to its precepts or dogmas (such as they may be), not even called into question the recourse to faith as supreme justification and, by definition (as we know all too well), the most definitive shutting off of reason. It is possible that faith moves mountains, there is no evidence that such a thing has ever occurred, but this proves nothing, given that God has never been disposed to engage his powers in this type of geological operation. What we know is that religions not only do not bring human beings closer, but rather they live, these religions, in a permanent state of mutual emnity, in all the falsely ecumenical harangues which this one or that one finds advantageous for passing, temporary tactical reasons. Things are this way, the world is the world, it is not an indication that anything is going to change. Except for the obvious idea that the planet would be much more peaceful if everybody were an atheist. Clear that, human nature being what it is, we would not be lacking in other motives for every dischord possible and imaginable, but we would be free of this ridiculous, infantile idea that our god is greater than the rest of the gods walking around, that the paradise which we hope for is a five-star hotel. And more, I believe that we could reinvent philosophy.

posted evening of February 10th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, February 12th, 2009

🦋 Chinese Feathers

Interesting, so now I'm reading Elizabeth Costello and I'm seeing arguments about morality and animal rights everywhere I look. Today Saramago is writing about lobsters and geese:

Putting a living lobster in boiling water and cooking it is an old culinary practice in the western world. It seems that if the lobster were dead in the bath, its final flavor would be different, for the worse. There are furthermore those who say that the rosy color with which the crustacean leaves the pot is due precisely to the high temperature of the water. I don't know it, I'm saying what I've been told, I am incapable of properly frying an egg. One day I saw in a documentary how to prepare chickens, how to kill and butcher them, and I was very close to throwing up. And the other day, if I am remembering right, I read a magazine article about the use of rabbits in the manufacture of cosmetics, and there I found out that the tests to prevent any possible irritation caused by the ingredients of shampoos involve applying them directly to the eyes of these animals, after the fashion of the dreadful Dr. Death, who injected petroleum into the hearts of his victims. Now, a brief notice appears in the periodicals informing me of how, in China, the birds' feathers which are destined to be stuffing for pillows are plucked out the same way, while living, after which they are cleaned, disinfected, and exported for the enjoyment of civilized societies which find it proper and fashionable. I will not comment, it is not worth the trouble, these feathers are enough.

posted evening of February 12th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, February 15th, 2009

🦋 I am curious about this translation

From García Lorca's "Ansia de Estatua",

Rumor.
Aunque no quede más que el rumor.

Aroma.
Aunque no quede más que el aroma.

Rumor.
Though nothing may remain but the rumor.

Odor.
Though nothing may remain but the odor.

It seems strange to me not to use "aroma" to translate "aroma", keeping the look of the poem closer to the original. A possible objection is that "aroma" in English connotes a pleasant smell, I'm not sure it does in Spanish; but by the same token, "odor" connotes an unpleasant smell -- if I were looking for a neutral term I would use "scent".

The rest of this sweet, sweet poem is below the fold.

Pero arranca de mí el recuerdo
y el color de las viejas horas.*

Dolor.
Frente al mágico y vivo dolor.

Batalla.
En la auténtica y sucia batalla.

¡Pero quita la gente invisible
que rodea perenne mi casa!

* I'm not sure why but these two lines make me think about Borges' The Circular Ruins every time I read them.

↻...done

posted morning of February 15th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, February 16th, 2009

🦋 Death by the house doors

Some of the most moving writing at Saramago's blog has been about the plight of immigrants attempting to reach Europe (or the Canaries) from Africa. Today he writes about a group whose boat capsized almost within reach of safety:

At the door in Lanzarote, at the house door which, if fortune helps, maybe will come to be the door of the new house. Twenty meters from the coast, on the Teguise Coast, when certainly laughter and words of happiness have already been exchanged at having succeeded in reaching the good port, the boat has tipped. They have crossed the hundred kilometers which separate the island from the coast of Africa, and end up dying twenty meters from salvation. Of the more than thirty immigrants whom extreme necessity obliged to confront the dangers of the sea, for the most part young men and teenagers, twenty-four were drowned, among them a pregnant woman and some children of few years. Six were saved thanks to the valor and selflessness of two surfers who hurled themselves into the water and freed them from a death which, without their intervention, would have been inevitable.

This is, in the most simple and direct words I have been able to find, the square story [?] of what has happened here. I do not know what more I could possibly say. Today words fail me and only emotion remains. Until when?

Here is a recommendation: watch the video I've linked to. It attempts a style which others have used on YouTube, that of a magnificent program about the drama of immigration, which Marisa Márquez has directed on Spanish TV. The fragment which is circulating on the Internet is owing to the intervention of Pilar, who sympathized with the victims and pointed out those responsible.

Video is at the link. CNN reports the story here; they say 19 were drowned rather than 24. I am unsure about some of this translation -- the first sentence is a little shaky and "the square story of what has happened here" is a total guess. But I think it is sufficient to get the idea of the post across.

posted evening of February 16th, 2009: Respond

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

🦋 Nostalgia for Earth

A fun passage from the beginning of Borges' lecture "Immortality":

Without understanding [William James'] joke, don Miguel de Unamuno repeats it word for word in his The Tragic Sense of Life*: God is the provider of immortality, but he repeats many times that he wants to go on being don Miguel de Unamuno. Here I don't understand Miguel de Unamuno; I do not want to go on being Jorge Luis Borges, I want to be another person. I hope that my death will be total, I hope to die in body and soul.

I do not know if it's ambitious or modest, or at all justifiable, my pretension of speaking about personal immortality, about a soul which preserves a memory of that which was on earth and which already in the other world corresponds to the previous one. I remember that my sister, Norah, was at my house the other day and said: I'm going to paint a picture called "Nostalgia for Earth", having as its content that which an angel feels in heaven, thinking of earth. I'm going to make it up of elements from Buenos Aires when I was a girl.

Update: fixed a blunder in my translation, after referring to Eliot Weinberger's translation of the lecture in Selected Non-Fictions.

* Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun Martínez of the Universidad de Navarra have written a paper on Unamuno's Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience and its Context. Nubiola also has an interesting note in Streams of William James, vol. I, #3 (pdf), on "Jorge Luis Borges and WJ", and in vol. III, #3 (pdf), on "WJ and Borges Again: the Riddle of the Correspondence with Macedonio Fernández". Professor Nubiola has confirmed to me by e-mail that as he understands it, "Unamuno is a deep believer and William James is -- at the end of the day -- a non believer, who understands the belief in God as the other side of the belief of immortality."

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: 4 responses
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