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Sunday, November 15th, 2009
I'm a little over a quarter of the way through my rough draft translation of El viaje -- whether I end up revising it into something actually readable or no, it is a very useful exercise from the standpoint of helping me read the story -- it brings the imagery really sharply into focus, this process of reading the passage, sort-of understanding, setting out to render it in my own language, looking up unfamiliar terms, reading again... Goytisolo's punctuation of dialog (which seems to be shared pretty generally in the Spanish stories I've been reading) is to set quoted text off with em dashes -- I've been using this in the translation although it's possible that quotation marks would read more naturally. Not sure about that yet. Here is a passage of dialog I liked a lot, at the end of a drunken rant in which a circus impressario is assuring some of his performers (who have been stuck in this AndalusÃan town for several months without any money to pay for carriage) that he's got feelers out, he's going to get them passage to Lisbon, he's going to pay everybody...
The man took the bottle by its neck and guzzled another slug. His face was soaked in sweat and he was drumming his fingers on the top of his boot.
--People today, only interested in the vulgar --he said, looking at us--. The movies, every day at the movies... The work of an artist counts for nothing...
His tongue was giving him trouble with speaking and he looked around him, his gaze full of irritation.
--I had offers from Algeciras, from Tangiers, from Morocco, and I preferred to come here... They told me that in this town people appreciate art and now look... A sacrifice in vain... Like mixing margaritas for swine...
He was too drunk to go on and he hid his head between his hands. The waiter went and came back with the bottles and, passing by us, gave a wink.
--Don't pay him any attention... Every day it's like this.
Just then, the clock on the town hall struck nine.
It was time to go back; we got up.
The very brief paragraphs and heavy use of ellipses are characteristic of the story. I read a quote from Goytisolo somewhere that he considered Marks of Identity (1966, so half a decade after this) his "first real novel" -- maybe I should put that on my list.
posted evening of November 15th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, November 14th, 2009
I'm glad I watched La Pointe-Courte when I did, as I'm now seeing loose parallels between it and everything I am reading... Sort of the archetypal melancholy romance.
Paco se habÃa sentado en cuclillas, algo más lejos y antes de abandonarme del todo, le pregunté:
--¿De qué vive la gente aqu�
Se entretenÃa en escurrir la arena entre sus dedos y no levantó, siquiera, la cabeza:
--De la pesca.
--¿Y tú? --Me extendà boca arriba y cerré los ojos--. ¿Qué quieres ser?
Su respuesta, esta vez, llegó en seguida:
--Mecánico.
Me dormÃ. TenÃa conciencia de que, al cabo de unas horas, olvidarÃa la fatiga del viaje y no deseaba otra cosa que cocerme lentamente, cara al sol.
En una o dos ocasiones, me desperté y vi que Dolores dormÃa también.
Con la vista perdida en el mar, Paco hacÃa escurrir aún la arena entre sus dedos.
Paco was squatting a bit further down the beach; before giving myself up to sleep, I asked him:
--What do people live on, here?
He was distractedly letting the sand run through his fingers; he didn't even raise his head:
--On fish.
--And you? --I turned my mouth up(?) and closed my eyes--. What do you want to be?
His response, this time, came directly:
--Mechanic.
I slept. I was aware that after a few hours, I'd forget the fatigue of the journey; I didn't want anything besides to let myself bake slowly, my face to the sun.
Once or twice, I woke up and saw that Dolores was sleeping too.
His gaze lost in the sea, Paco was still letting the sand run between his fingers.
I'm thinking I will work on a full translation of this story.
posted morning of November 14th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, November 13th, 2009
A book of short stories by Juan Goytisolo, Para vivir aquà (1960, and containing the story La guardia that I was reading a couple of weeks ago), arrived in the mail this week, and I have been reading bits and pieces of it. The first two stories did not really grab me but as I look at the beginning of the third I am feeling pretty interested.
The journey
El cartel indicador se alzaba al final de la recta, con las letras pintadas de blanco, sobre el yugo y las flechas descoloradas. Desde la carretera se divisaba de nuevo el mar, liso y como bruñido por el sol y, más cerca, una zona cubierta de rastrojeras se extendÃa hasta los muros cuarteados de la fábrica en ruinas. A un extremo del campo, dos hombres batÃan la paja con sus bieldos. Era casi las doce y la calina que envolvÃa el paisaje, inventaba caprichosas espirales de celofán sobre el asfalto medio derretido.
Dolores frenó más allá del cartel y nos detuvimos a mirar, junto a la cuneta. El pueblo se extendÃa sobre una pendiente escalonada de terrazas y la cúpula de mosaico de la iglesia reverberaba a la luz del sol. De no ser por el bullicio y griterÃo de los chiquillos, se hubiera dicho que nadie vivÃa en él. Muchas casas estaban desmoronadas o en alberca, y sus fachadas maltrechas testimoniaban la existencia de una época de prosperidad y trabajo de la que la chimenea agrietada del teso y los restos alcinados de un molino constituÃan un recuerdo nostálgico. Ahora, toda la vida parecÃa concentrarse en el mar, y el puerto abrigaba medio centenar de embarcaciones protegidas por un espigón de obra, liso y curvado como una hoz.
-- ¿Qué te parece? --dije, señalando con el brazo, hacia el mar. --Como sitio tranquilo, lo es --repuso Dolores, sin gran entusiasmo.
Translation attempt below the fold.
The sign was up at the end of the block, with letters painted in white, over the cross-piece(?) and the faded arrow. From the road you could see the ocean again, flat and as if burnished by the sun and, closer in, a stubbled region stretched to the broken-down walls of a factory in ruins. At one end of the field two men were beating straw with their winnowing-forks. It was almost noon and the haze that shrouded the landscape was making up capricious spirals of cellophane above the half-melted asphalt.Dolores slowed down a bit by the sign and we turned to look, close by the ditch. The town extended across a spreading, terraced slope and the tile cúpola of the church reflected the sunlight. By not being a-bustle, full of children's cries, it let us know there was no one living in it. Many houses were dilapidated or fallen down(?), and their beaten-down façades were testament to there having been an epoch of prosperity and work, of which the cracked chimney at the top(?) and the remnants of a windmill constituted a nostalgic reminder. Now, all the life appeared concentrated in the sea, and the port sheltered half a hundred vessels, protected by a breakwater, smooth and curved like a sickle. --How does it look? --I said, gesturing with my arm toward the sea. --Like a peaceful spot, I guess --replied Dolores, without much enthusiasm.
↻...done
posted evening of November 13th, 2009: Respond
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Calm but amazed, I said nothing: It was as if I had never noticed before what a strange shape my life had taken.
This is a really startling admission by Kemal so late in the story (chapter 75). Much of the first 400 pages of the book has been him apologizing for and justifying the weird shape of his life -- legalistic attempts to define the good life so that it will include his odd self-deception. But this line strikes me as really sincere, I can sympathize with him here without feeling hypocritical.
posted evening of November 13th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, November 12th, 2009
At Skytopia, Daniel White has written up a 3-dimensional extension of the Mandelbrot set, with extraordinary renderings of it at different levels of magnification, and with different parameters to the equation.
I am finding it easy to imagine jumping into this, climbing around on it like a toddler on an endless jungle gym. ...And, there looks to be a whole lot of other engaging stuff on the site, I haven't really started to look it over yet. Thanks for the link, Russ!
posted evening of November 12th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Happy Armistice Day! (And to our Latvian readers, happy Lāčplēsis Day!) The guns of August have ceased their roar. A good time to hope that we will see an end to the wars that plague our world today.
posted evening of November 11th, 2009: Respond
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On today's Leonard Lopate show, Orhan Pamuk talks with Lopate about Museum of Innocence. They cover much of the ground that Pamuk and Andreou were talking about on Monday, and go into a bit more detail -- Lopate is the better interviewer. Lopate asks about the choice of the term "Innocence", which is something I have been wondering about myself. They also touch on Pamuk's cameos in the novel (he calls them "Hitchcock-like roles"), and on the museum Pamuk is building.
Pamuk will be reading and signing books this evening at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square.
 Very nice to hear: the subject of Pamuk's next novel will be a street vendor in Istanbul.
posted evening of November 11th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
It was a lot of fun, and enlightening, listening to Orhan Pamuk reading from Museum of Innocence last night at the 92nd Street Y -- he seemed a little nervous at the opening of the reading but was soon in his element. The big news of the evening came after the reading, when he and George Andreou (his editor at Knopf) had a short conversation about his books and about writing; he indicated, with reference to the lecture series he just got done with delivering at Harvard, that he was planning to publish the lectures as a short book on the art of the novel.
With respect to the art of the novel, one of the points he made -- this was in response to a question about his judgement of the upper-class Istanbullus' consumerist "Westernization" which Kemal is reacting against -- was that "Ethics in novels is a dead end.... Novels do not operate properly if we are strongly interested in passing ethical judgement," which seems to tie in nicely with my idea that this novel works much better as a character study than as an indictment of Kemal. (Along these lines he had noted while reading from chapter 43, that he had responded to a journalist's query about Kemal's "obsessive" behavior by noting that he had never used that term in the book, because "Writing a novel is going inside a person and rejecting labels, is making everyone seem normal," only to be looking through the book later and spot the line, "After that night we had both become resolved to the fact that I was never going to get over my obsession.") All of the passages he read were from the first half of the book, and were only the past-tense storytelling with the present-tense curating edited out. He mentioned this during the interview portion of the program, without (it seemed to me) really justifying it -- he said something like he did not want to confuse the audience with that -- whatever... He also made no mention, nor did Andreou, of the museum he is building in Istanbul. This all seemed strange to me. He closed the reading with a passage from chapter 56 about "the first Islamic porn films," in which "the 'love scenes'... mixed sex with slapstick, as the gasping and moaning proceeded with ludicrous exaggeration, as the actors assumed all the positions that could be learned from European sex manuals bought on the black market, though all involved, male and female alike, would never remove their underpants."
When he was reading from chapter 44, in which Kemal roams the back streets of Istanbul searching for Füsun, while "it never crossed my mind that I would remember these hours as happy ones," Pamuk made reference to a Turkish literary tradition of the "East-West novel", which plays out between traditional Islamic culture and modernized, cosmopolitan culture -- I was glad to hear him talking about this since it's been in my mind a lot as I read this book -- however it was also a useful counterweight to hear him saying, as he did several times over the course of the evening, that Museum of Innocence is primarily "a book about how it feels to be in love," though not a romantic novel.
posted evening of November 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, November 8th, 2009
Buscaba inútilmente la forma de soportar el dolor, daba vueltas por la casa, me daba un baño muy caliente, me acostaba, me volvÃa a levantar, daba un paseo, me dejaba caer sobre el sofá, de nuevo fatigada...
Soledad Puértolas, "Masajes"
I'm not at all sure how to translate much of this story -- it is only the second thing I have read in Spanish without a translation available to help me flesh out what the meanings of the words and constructions were. I'm understanding it only in a pretty rough, impressionistic way, the images are quite out of focus. This makes the impact of the words as words stronger in a way, the sound of the language a larger proportion of the experience: and I'm really struck by the shift in tense here between me acostaba and me volvía a levantar -- "I was walking around the house, drawing myself a very hot bath, was putting myself to bed, I got up again, I was going for a walk, letting myself fall on the sofa, suddenly fatigued..." Many of the constructions in this story seem strange to me and hard to make sense of -- this is contributing certainly to the fuzziness of my reading experience.
Me inquietó y acabó, sobre todo, molestándome, porque me hacÃa estar pendiente de la hora y del silencio de la casa y imaginar, antes de escucharse, el ruido del timbre abriéndose camino hacia mÃ.
It's just really hard for me to match up subjects and objects and tenses in this sentence -- I get that she's saying she was troubled by the phone call (which was mentioned in the last paragraph and is definitely the subject of Me inquietó) -- "It disturbed me and had just, most of all, been bothering me, because (?) it made me be hanging from the hour and from the silence of the room and to imagine, before hearing it, the noise of the ringer making its way towards me." (Or something like that.) El ruido del timbre abriéndose camino hacia mí is a particularly nice image, provided I am reading it correctly. I'm sort of happy to find an author that I like but am not heavily invested in to practice this kind of language comprehension on... I am also thinking Goytisolo will fit the bill in this way.
 Another example (the narrator is speaking of a health club employee who had in the previous paragraph shown her around the facility) --
Su amiabilidad, su interés por mÃ, tenÃan una nota atificial, falsa, como si alguien la hubiera convencido de que tenÃa que ser asÃ. O sencillamente era asà como quien es hosco y antipático desde la cuña o como quien tiene una especial habilidad para los idiomas o para las installaciones eléctricas.
"Her friendliness, her interest in me, bore a note of artificiality, falsehood, as if someone had convinced her she needed to act like that. Or simply like when somebody is hostile and antisocial from the cradle, or somebody has a particular ability for languages or for electrical work." -- None of the entities separated here by or's seem to me like they can sustain that kind of relationship with one another.
↻...done
posted evening of November 8th, 2009: 1 response
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On the approximate spur of the moment, Sylvia and I went to Brooklyn today, to have lunch on the boardwalk with some relatives and to walk around. I don't think I've been in Coney Island since the last time I took Sylvia there, 5 years ago; and have not been there off-season in probably 10 years or more. What a lovely place to be! The sun was confused, shining as bright and as warm as if it were June rather than November. The amusement park is closed; but the aquarium is open -- we saw walruses, and seals, and sharks, and seductive, luminous jellyfish. Hot rock band playing on the boardwalk outside Ruby's. We walked a whole lot, probably 4 or 5 miles all told, and ate tasty snacks to keep us refreshed, and played in the sand among the wheeling gulls. It was a satisfactory day.
posted evening of November 8th, 2009: Respond
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