READIN

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

🦋 Continuity problem?

Something that is driving me a little batty about "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" (in Putas asesinas) is trying to work out the chronology of Connie's pregnancy. She was impregnated by the Preacher, who then left, and later she was a hooker in New York and met Bittrich and came back to Medellín and started acting in porn movies; but some of the movies are made while she is pregnant, and there's no indication that she has a child when she's in NYC. The only way that would work is if she lived with the Preacher and got pregnant after she had come back from New York and started working for Bittrich; but I thought the narrator said that was not the case. -- No that's wrong, he says "Abandoned by my imbecile father, here's Connie, with Doris and Mónica Farr" -- but that doesn't include anything about the abandonment (or the liaison) preceding the acting career.

A couple of translation things -- I think this uncredited (uncredited? I cannot find the translator's name on it) English translation in the New Yorker does the story some violence by breaking it up into paragraphs and sections. The original story is all one paragraph and it's characterized by a really driving, insistent force of pulling the reader along -- really difficult to put down. I'm trying to do a translation all in one paragraph, don't yet know if I'll be able to communicate that effect in English. Is this a typo? When Connie and Mónica get together with Bittrich,

echaron a rodar los dados por la Séptima Avenida, el artista prusianao y los las putas latinoamericanas. Ya no había nada que hacer. Cuando sueño, en algunas pesadillas, vuelvo a verme reposando en el limbo y entonces oigo, al principio lejano, el golpe de los dados en el pavimento.

* No, not a typo: As Rick points out in comments, "rodar los dados" and "golpe de los dados" both refer to the act of rolling dice.

posted evening of May 8th, 2010: 8 responses
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Sunday, May 9th, 2010

🦋 The mechanics of translation and blogging

So I'm wondering something about legality or (I guess) just about what's ethical behavior. When I finish my translation of "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" (which is starting to look like more real of a possibility, and maybe will have a rough draft in place sometime this week?) I think I might like to post it in some form at readin -- it is too long for a blog post but maybe a linked page. I'd like to get people interested in reading this story and potentially talking about the sound of the narrator's voice and the crisp solidity of the characterizations. But I don't know how within my rights it is to do that with Bolaño's text, how far have I made it my own text in the process of translating it? (Should probably take a look at Edith Grossman's new book for guidance in this regard.) (And yes, clearly I've already posted a lot of long excerpts here, both direct quotations and my translations -- a whole story of this length and of this recent vintage seems somehow different.)

And on a similar note, a question/reflection about my blogging process. It's generally been that I will post the first or second draft of a translation as I finish it, occasionally even as unfinished fragments -- and sort of make minor revisions in place over time, and major revisions when they occur as a new post. I'm not sure how effective this is in engaging dialogue, which is sort of my dream-readin, hasn't really worked out that way so far but hope springs eternal... Possibly if I waited until I had more of a complete, revised work and posted that, more people would be interested in reading and chatting about it. And following on that, maybe a second level revision process would kick in, take this literary translation stuff to the next level. Let me know what you think, I'd appreciate it.

posted morning of May 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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Monday, May 10th, 2010

🦋 Monterroso on Borges on Kafka

In an essay in Perpetual Motion (the second piece down on the linked page), Monterroso talks about first reading Borges and about becoming slowly immersed in his thinking and his puzzles. It is a very nice introduction to Borges; I was surprised to see that the work which opened Monterroso's eyes was Borges' foreword to his translation (1938) of The Metamorphosis:

When I first found Borges, in 1945, I didn't understand him; he was frankly puzzling for me. Delving into Kafka, I found Borges' foreword to The Metamorphosis; and for the first time I saw before me his world of metaphysical labyrinths, of infinities, of eternities, of tragic trivialities, of quotidian relationships comparable to the worst hell imaginable. A new universe, gleaming, ferociously attractive. Crossing from that foreword to all the rest of Borges' work has been for me (and for many others) an activity as important as breathing, and at the same time as dangerous as walking too close to the edge of a chasm. Following him has meant discovering and descending into new circles: Chesterton, Melville, Bloy, Swedenborg, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf; taking up old friendships: Cervantes, Quevedo, Hernández; and at last returning to his illusory Paradise of the everyday: the barrio, the movie-house, the detective story.

Critics complain that in Kafka's three novels, there is a lack of linking material; but they recognize that this material is not essential. Myself, I maintain that this criticism indicates a fundamental unfamiliarity with the work of Kafka. The pathos of these "inconclusive" novels arises precisely from the infinite number of obstacles which block, again and again, the paths of his identical protagonists. Franz Kafka did not finish them: their basic property is that they are interminable. Do you remember the first, the most clear of Zeno's paradoxes? Motion is impossible, because before arriving at B we have to cross the intermediate point C, but before we arrive at C, we have to cross the intermediate point D, but before arriving at D... The Greek did not enumerate all of the points; Franz Kafka need not enumerate all the vicissitudes. It is enough for us to understand that they are infinite, like Hell.

As he closes his piece, Monterroso talks about what your encounter with Borges can do to you:

The great problem of reading Borges: the temptation to imitate him is almost irresistable; to imitate him, impossible. Some writers you can get away with imitating -- Conrad, Greene, Durrel -- not Joyce; not Borges. It will sound facile and obvious. The meeting with Borges never takes place without consequences. I've listed here a few of the things that can happen, for better and for the worse:

1. Pass him by without noticing (for the worse).
2. Pass him by; retrace one's steps and follow him for a little while to see what he's doing (for the better).
3. Pass him by; retrace one's steps and follow him forever (for the worse).
4. Find out that one is a simpleton, that until this moment one has never had an idea worth one's while (for the better).
5. Find out that one is intelligent, because one enjoys reading Borges (for the better).
6. Dazzle oneself with the fable of Achilles and the Tortoise; believe that one has figured it all out (for the worse).
7. Discover the infinite and the eternal (for the better).
8. Mull over the infinite and the eternal (for the better).
9. Believe in the infinite and the eternal (for the worse).
10. Leave off writing (for the better).

posted evening of May 10th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

🦋 Homeric scribblings

I've been thinking about asemic writing over the past few weeks, and I was happy to notice this passage (which I had forgotten completely) when I was rereading "The Immortal" this morning:

Quienes hayan leído con atención el relato de mis trabajos, recordarán que un hombre de la tribu me siguió como un perro podría seguirme, hasta la sombra irregular de los muros. Cuando salí del último sótano, lo encontré en la boca de la caverna. Estaba tirado en la arena, donde trazaba torpemente y borraba una hilera de signos, que eran como letras de los sueños, que uno está a punto de entender y luego se juntan. Al principio, creí que se trataba de una escritura bárbara; después vi que es absurdo imaginar que hombres que no llegaron a la palabra lleguen a la escritura. Además, ninguna de las formas era igual a otra, lo cual excluía o alejaba la posibilidad de que fueran simbólicas. El hombre las trazaba, las miraba y las corregía.

Those who have been reading my story attentively, will remember that a member of the tribe had followed me -- like a dog might follow me -- up to the formless shadow of the walls. When I emerged from the final cellar, I found him in the mouth of the cave. He was stretched out on the sand, where he was languidly tracing and erasing a row of symbols like the letters in a dream, letters which one is on the verge of understanding when they flow together. At first I thought it was some kind of barbarian alphabet; but then I saw how absurd it was, to imagine that men who had never arrived at the spoken word would get to writing. Furthermore, none of the shapes was the same as any other; that excluded, or rendered unlikely, the possibility that they were symbolic. The man was drawing them, then examining them and updating them.

posted evening of May 26th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, June 6th, 2010

🦋 Mimicking Chaos, Censoring Nonsense

The denizens of the Library have different ways of dealing with their lot in life...

Es verosímil que esos graves misterios puedan explicarse en palabras: si no basta el lenguaje de los filósofos, la multiforme Biblioteca habrá producido el idioma inaudito que se requiere y los vocabularios y gramáticas de ese idioma. Hace ya cuatro siglos que los hombres fatigan los hexágonos... Hay buscadores oficiales, inquisidores. Yo los he visto en el desempeño de su función: llegan siempre rendidos; hablan de una escalera sin peldaños que casi los mató; hablan de galerías y de escaleras con el bibliotecario; alguna vez, toman el libro más cercano y lo hojean, en busca de palabras infames. Visiblemente, nadie espera descubrir nada. A la desaforada esperanza, sucedió, como es natural, una depresión excesiva. La certidumbre de que algún anaquel en algún hexágono encerraba libros preciosos y de que esos libros preciosos eran inaccesibles, pareció casi intolerable. Una secta blasfema sugirió que cesaran las buscas y que todos los hombres barajaran letras y símbolos, hasta construir, mediante un improbable don del azar, esos libros canónicos. Las autoridades se vieron obligadas a promulgar órdenes severas. La secta desapareció, pero en mi niñez he visto hombres viejos que largamente se ocultaban en las letrinas, con unos discos de metal en un cubilete prohibido, y débilmente remedaban el divino desorden. Otros, inversamente, creyeron que lo primordial era eliminar las obras inútiles. Invadían los hexágonos, exhibían credenciales no siempre falsas, hojeaban con fastidio un volumen y condenaban anaqueles enteros: a su furor higiénico, ascético, se debe la insensata perdición de millones de libros. Su nombre es execrado, pero quienes deploran los «tesoros» que su frenesí destruyó, negligen dos hechos notorios. Uno: la Biblioteca es tan enorme que toda reducción de origen humano resulta infinitesimal. Otro: cada ejemplar es único, irreemplazable, pero (como la Biblioteca es total) hay siempre varios centenares de miles de facsímiles imperfectos: de obras que no difieren sino por una letra o por una coma.

It seems likely that these mysteries could eventually be explained with words: if the philosophers' language be insufficient, our multifarious Library has somewhere produced the never-heard language that will do it, the vocabulary and syntax of this idiom. Four hundred years ago already, men were becoming tired of these hexagonal cells... Now there are official sheriffs, inquisitors. I've seen them myself, carrying out their duties: always visibly exhausted -- they speak of a staircase missing a rung, which they almost died on; they speak of the galleries and the staircases with some librarian; sometimes, they grab the closest book and leaf through it, looking for forbidden words. It's plain on its face that none of them expects to find anything. On these wild hopes followed, as is natural, a bleak sense of depression. The certainty that some one shelf in some hexagon bears precious books, that these precious books are unreachable, was almost intolerable. One heretic sect proclaimed that we must stop our searches; that all humanity must mix letters and symbols, until we devise -- through some incredible stroke of fortune -- the books of canon. The authorities found themselves obliged to enforce a strict prohibition. The sect vanished, but in my childhood still, I saw old men who would hide themselves in the water closets with some metallic discs and a forbidden cup, and weakly they would imitate divine chaos. On the other hand were those who believed that man's destiny was to eliminate the nonsensical works. They would attack the hexagons, show (not always forged) credentials, would leaf annoyed through one volume and condemb entire shelves: to their hygienic, ascetic fury is due the senseless loss of millions of books. Their memory is execrated -- but those who deplore the "treasures" that they destroyed in their frenzy are ignoring two important facts. One: the Library is so vast as to be only infinitesimally affected by any reduction of human origin. And the other: every volume is unique, irreplaceable; but (since the Library is everything) there are always hundreds of thousands of imperfect copies: works which differ in only one letter, one comma.

Anyway -- an overlong post with a too-high excerpting-to-analysis ratio, enjoy...

posted evening of June 6th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

🦋 Quotations

An idea I just had which I think it would be fun to implement: a database table with favorite (striking or profound) brief lines from each book I read -- When you read the archive page for the book in question, those lines, or some randomized subset of them, would be displayed as part of the information in the left hand sidebar. Add to this a setting in the database for "current reading", the book or books that I'm currently reading/thinking about, and a set of lines from those books could be on the front page's sidebar. A little bit like the epigraphs I run at the top of the page, but a bit more fleeting, less a permanent part of the site. For instance I really liked the line, "He does not know -- nobody could know -- my immeasurable contrition, my weariness," from "The Garden of Forking Paths." But it really only seems meaningful in the context of that reading. (This would really free me up in terms of posting short quotations, too -- generally I try only to post a quotation when I have something in particular to say about it. And only to create a new epigraph when I find a really meaningful one. -- So this is a third way.)

Two notes about the translation of that line, * Thanks John for helping with the adjective, "immeasurable" sounds much better than "innumerable" or than "endless", and * Thanks Dr. Hurley for the repetition of "my" at the end, I was leaning towards just using "contrition and weariness" as being the closest thing in format to "contrición y cansancio" -- but somehow that doesn't sound quite right in English.

Implementation: have a button or link on the editing view of the blog that is called "Add Quotation" or something similar -- clicking on it will bring up a dialog box or form where you can enter your quote and the book it is from -- then the the "current reading" books will be books for which I have either posted a quotation or a journal entry over the past say week or two.

posted evening of June 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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Saturday, June 12th, 2010

🦋 Voices of Time

If they were single threads, if they did not yet form parts of a common weft: some of the stories here collected were printed in newspapers, magazines. Wading into this pool, those primary forms have changed in shape and in color.

(from the front page of Bocas de tiempo)

Time which speaks

We are part of time.

We are its feet and its mouths.

Time's feet walk, they are our feet.

Soon, you know what I'm talking about, sooner or later time's wind will erase our footsteps.

A journey across nothing, nobody's footsteps? Time's mouths recount its voyage.

The Voyage

Oriol Vall, whose business is the recently born in a hospital in Barcelona, he says that the first human gesture is the embrace. Coming out into the world, at the beginning of their days, they reach out as if searching for someone.

Other doctors, those who busy themselves with the already born, have told me that the aged, at the end of their days, they die seeking to lift up their arms.

That's how it is, for all the approaches we might try to the subject, all the words we may pile on it. This is what everything comes down to, shorn of all explication: between your two wings is where the journey occurs.**

And more traces:

Footprints

This pair came walking down the beach, in the east of Africa, the rainy season bathing them. This woman and this man still look enough like monkeys; truth be told they are already walking upright and have no tail.

A nearby volcano -- today it is called Sadiman -- has been spewing gusts of ash from its mouth. The dust has preserved the traces of the pair, until this time, across all time. Beneath the gray mantle have remained, intact, the footsteps. These feet tell us -- today -- they tell us this Eve and this Adam came walking together, when at a certain point she stopped, looked away, walked a few paces from him. Then she came back to his side.

Human footprints -- the oldest ones -- have left the mark of doubt.***

Some few years have passed. The doubt is still with us.

**I wonder about this reading: This is what I initially thought was meant by "Entre dos aleteos, sin más explicación, transcurre el viaje." The authorized translation has, "Between two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs." -- the 'flutterings' being the raising of arms at birth and at death. I imagine that is the correct reading...

***cf. Mary Leaky, writing in National Geographic about the footprints at Laetoli:

You need not be an expert tracker to discern this motion -- the pause, the glance to the left, seems so intensely human. Three million, six hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor -- just as you or I -- experienced a moment of doubt.

posted evening of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, June 13th, 2010

🦋 Creativity

Two more pieces from Bocas del tiempo:

One Body

Leaning on their white walking sticks, buoyed up by a slug of booze, they made their way somehow or other through the streets of Tlaquepaque.

It looked like they were on the brink of falling over, but no: when she stumbled, he held her up; when he staggered, she straightened him out. The two walked together; the two sang together. They always stopped in the same place, in the shadow of the gate, and sang in their broken voices, old Mexican airs of love and of war. They were playing some instrument, maybe a guitar, I can't remember, it helped them stay near the key. Between songs, they would shake the dish where they were collecting coins from the respectable public.

Later on they left. Their walking sticks in front of them, they passed through the crowd under the sun and lost themselves in the distance, ragged and torn, arm in arm, supporting each other in the torrent of the world.

The Kiss

Antonio Pujía chose at random one of the blocks of Carrara marble which he had collected over the course of the years.

It was a tombstone. It had come from some grave, who knows from where; he had not the slightest idea of how it had come to his workshop.

Antonio lay the stone on a stand, and went to work on it. He had some rough idea of what he would sculpt; or perhaps he had none. He began by wiping clean the inscription: a man's name, his year of birth, the year of his passing.

Next, his chisel bit into the marble. Antonio found a surprise, what he had been hoping to find inside the stone: a vein in the shape of two faces touching one another, like two profiles touching at the foreheads, nose touching nose, lips touching lips.

The sculptor obeyed the stone. He went on excavating, gradually, until he completed the relief contained in that stone.

The next day, his work was done. And then when he raised the sculpture up, he saw what he had not seen previously. On the back of the stone was a second inscription: A woman's name, her year of birth, the year of her passing.

posted evening of June 13th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010

🦋 Réquiem

I've gotten a little bogged down in the translation process for Réquiem -- I thought I would try writing out some summary data as a way of helping myself get a handle on the story:

Slavko (to be precise, his narrator Felipe; having no information to the contrary I am identifying the author pretty closely with the narrator) discovers on June 14, 1986 (he is 16 years old, like I was that year) a strange power: by stealing a book from the shop of his family's friend Fernández and reading the book, he can cause the book's author to perish. The first to go is Borges (as you can see from the date) -- you have to be able to forgive this as an accident, after all he could not have known beforehand what his theft would entail -- and a few days later a local author, a young dentist whose name is never given named Benjamín Castro; Felipe stole his book of poetry seeking to confirm whether Borges' death had been his fault. Then in awe of his power, he does not exercise it for several years. But one thing leads to another...

Slavko kills Bioy Casares, by stealing a copy of Morel's Invention on March 8th, 1999. This precipitates the end of his relationship with Susana M (who he believes was already interested in the faculty dean anyways).

The next to go is José Ángel Valente, on July 18th, 2000, after Felipe steals a collection of his poetry. Here we see Felipe going off the deep end -- he embarks on a career of murdering authors just before he publishes an essay about the author -- Juan José Arreola dies on December 3, 2001; Arturo Úslar Pietri (February 26, 2001), Camilo José Cela (January 17, 2002), "and the majority of the authors whom we've seen disappear in the last few years" (not clear on the precise date of the story -- it was published in Piedepágina in 2008 but may well have been written, and set, a few years before that) -- people begin to notice the sequence of coincidences, the head of his department eventually calls him out. The ending is a nice twist that I don't want to give away...

This story interests me a bit by the way it draws on and amplifies the theme of the recent Latin American issue of Zoetrope (which is where I found out about Zupcic), the passing of an older generation of Latin American authors and the coming into their own of new authors with new voices and styles.

posted afternoon of June 17th, 2010: 2 responses
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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

🦋 Notebooks

On my birthday last month, the Saramago Foundation started updating the man's blog a few times a week with quotations from his work, from his books and his articles and his speeches. I'm not sure how I feel about this -- the entries are worth reading and it's nice to be introduced to some of his work that I didn't know about (and it did seem like a nice birthday present), while OTOH I had been identifying the blog (naturally) closely with him, and it's unsettling for him to be in the ground and the blog to continue. They have retitled it Saramago's Other Notebooks, which could help in identifying it as a new blog.

Today's entry comes from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:

Palabra La palabra es lo mejor que se puede encontrar, la tentativa siempre frustrada para expresar eso a lo que, por medio de palabra, llamamos pensamiento.

The Word The word is the greatest thing you will ever meet, the always frustrated effort to express that which, by means of the word, we call thought. [Vastly improved translation contributed by Rick in comments]

(Speaking of notebooks, I have ordered a copy of the Lanzarote Notebooks and am looking forward to reading it! though it will be my first posthumous Saramago...)

posted evening of June 22nd, 2010: 2 responses
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