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Monday, October 25th, 2010
Another poem from Los contados dÃas.
At times I bear
as an enormous cross, love
mounted on this coffin, my corpse.
Shipwrecked and alone,
I crash like a thunderbolt, like a star.
Reborn from my anterior dyings,
to go on dying all around,
dying in a tree's ear
or at the hand of a dream.
I fell from void, just
like oblivion falls among the ruins,
I was thrust
into the beauty of the earth:
was clay before the brightness and the joy.
...
I pass from the bird to the rose,
by blood and by fæces,
between forgetfulness and dust.
My soul cries out for its species of pride,
its desolate labyrinth,
its universe of shadow.
But my mind won't stop
measuring out the ashes from my eye
...
And that the world remains the world
and that the land is bathed
in the purple of blood;
the flood's diluted in another flood,
the Gods break away from our grasp
our prayer is trapped
trapped in our throats
a nail, a catastrophe.
And still it's beautiful
raising up this cathedral of sighs
...
posted evening of October 25th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
I got a totally unexpected chance to go to Richard Thompson's show in Montclair last night. An amazing concert! Joe del Tufo captures nicely the visual experience of the concert, which he saw in Delaware -- you ought to buy the record Dream Attic to get an aural sense of it. I can't get over Joel Zifka's gorgeous fiddle solo in "The Gorse and the Gray".
posted afternoon of October 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Stranger Here Below is a little devious in its rendering of characters in the shifts of focus, Hinnefeld likes to lull you in to thinking of the other characters as fitting comfortably into the  background of whatever character's story is currently in focus. Here is a switch of focus reminding the reader suddenly that Maze is still in the foreground, when you've gotten used to tracking Mary Elizabeth's story:
The bus ride up from Lexington had been miserable. Endless and miserable. By the time she got to Indianapolis, she had a sharp, stabbing pain that ran up her right side, from her ankle to her armpit, and no matter how she shifted in the crowded seat, she couldn't get comfortable. Sciatica. Vista'd had it, too, she'd said, when she was pregnant. But Maze wouldn't touch any of the herbal remedies Vista or Georgia tried to get down her. She didn't trust either of those disappointed women.
That reminder of the complexities in her relationships with her mother and Georgia brings her suddenly into focus -- this is the beginning of one of the most dramatic confrontations of the novel (in which much of the conflict has been repressed or sub rosa), between the Pilgrim and the Stranger.
posted afternoon of October 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Here is a poem by a Mexican poet named José Cárdenas Peña, "Los contados días".
This wandering groping
like I'm walking into ruins:
this turning my face to the wind
without expecting a response from the wind;
instinctive phrasing, to live and to hope
without contact:
this clamour to God,
this doubt and this love, this blasphemy;
this dread of being lonely,
of the death that is not death;
it hurts me, hurts like a wound,
like my own native land,
like an angel's wing --
like my crime, like her bleak silence...
And when at last I scream Here! Here I am!,
so cleaves in two my naked, naked heart.
I really like the rhythm of the poem in Spanish and am trying to get a similar rhythmic thing going in the translation.
 (I posted the original of this poem in the comments to a LanguageHat entry about free verse and memorization.)
posted evening of October 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Saramago seems almost to be picking at a linguistic scab in his consciousness in these first few sentences of "Chair", the first story in An Object, Almost. If I'm understanding right the chair he is talking about is to some approximation the government of Salazar, though I'm not sure how explicit he makes that.
The chair begins to fall, to come down, to capsize, but not, in the strictest sense of the term, to come unleashed. Speaking strictly, coming unleashed means losing one's bonds. And of course, one can't say that a chair is chained or in bonds, if it had for instance a couple of lateral arm rests, you would say the armrests of the chair are falling, not that they have been unleashed. But truthfully, storms can be unleashed, I would say, or better I remember having said, so as not to fall into my own traps: if cloudbursts can be unleashed, which is just another way of saying the same thing, could not, in short, chairs likewise be unleashed, even without having bonds? As at least a poetic liberty? At least as the simple artifice which proclaims itself style, voice? Let's accept that chairs can come unleashed, even if it ultimately proves preferable that they should only fall, should capsize, should come down.
I finished a couple of revisions of "Ebb-tide" and sent a copy of it to the editor who accepted my translation of "Requiem" -- I'm starting to fantasize about publishing a translation of this collection of stories, not sure if that means I have to learn Portuguese or if it's legit to translate from the Spanish translation -- what I have done so far sounds very nice to my ear so I am sticking to the Spanish for now.
posted evening of October 21st, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
In one beginning, for everything must have a beginning, even in the case where this beginning is the same as that terminal point from which it cannot, ultimately, be broken, and to say "cannot" is not the same as saying "will not" or "need not", it is the extremity of not being able, for if this breaking could take place, we know that the whole universe would crumble into its component bits, the universe is a fragile construction, it cannot bear interruption, in one beginning, then, four paths were laid out.
I'm really getting somewhere with this translation of "Ebb-Tide" -- I've got a rough draft nearly done and have been doing some revisions, I think it's going to come out very pleasant. In the first sentence you can already hear Saramago's unique rhythm and pacing.It's interesting to read Saramago talking about two cycles of his work, the narrative novels and the more allegorical novels he wrote after moving to the Canary Islands -- it makes a lot of sense to me that he named this book as the root source of the allegorical stories, I can hear Blindness and The Cave in it. I think Death With Interruptions will be worth rereading with this story in mind.
(It occurs to me that "the extremity of not being possible" or "of impossibility" might be better English. I kind of like the sound of "the extremity of not being able". The Spanish is "el extremo no poder".)
posted evening of October 19th, 2010: 1 response
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I found a wonderful interview with José Saramago, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Mass Humanities. The interviewer is Anna Klobucka of U. Massachussets Dartmouth.
AK: The mainly historical novels you wrote in the
1980s, from Baltasar and Blimunda to The Gospel
According to Jesus Christ (published in 1991), form
the first grand narrative cycle in your work. Many
of your readers perceive a clear dividing line
between these narratives and your subsequent
works, the three allegorical novels from the 1990s:
Blindness, All the Names, and A Caverna. How do
you describe the balance of continuity and change
in your writing in the last two decades?
JS: The first narrative cycle you mention includes
also, as a starting point, Levantado do Chão, the
novel in which I articulated for the first time the
distinct “narrative voice†that from then on became
the hallmark of my work. And in the novels of the
second cycle there are clear echoes of my earlier
volume of short stories, Objecto Quase.
Furthermore, we must not forget my still earlier collections
of newspaper columns, Deste Mundo e do
Outro [From This World and the Other] (1971) and A
Bagagem do Viajante [The Traveler’s Baggage] (1973).
In my view, everything I have written in later years
is rooted in those texts. As for the definition of the
“dividing line†that separates the two novel cycles,
I explain it through the metaphor of a statue and a
stone: up to and including The Gospel According to
Jesus Christ, I was describing statues, insofar as a
statue is the external surface of
a stone; with Blindness and later
novels, I have moved inside the
stone, into that space where
the stone does not know whether
on the outside it is a statue
or, for example, a doorsill.
posted morning of October 19th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, October 16th, 2010
 Ellen and I watched Never Let Me Go this evening -- I am not sure quite what to say about it other than that I think it is an extremely faithful adaptation of the book: watching the movie felt very much like what I remember of the experience of reading the book. I would certainly recommend the movie on that basis alone; I thought it was a great, great book to read. But at the same time I'm not sure how necessary the movie is -- what it adds to the book. Some of the images were very powerful, such as Ruth hobbling on her walker the first time we see her after she has started donating, and Daniel screaming at the end of the film. And it was nice to have the "Never Let Me Go" song be an actual song that you could listen to. In general I liked the filming of the second half of the movie, when they were adults, much better than the portion set at Hailsham, which did not ring as true to me. The actors who played adult Tommy, Kathy, and Ruth all did a fantastic job.
 (I'm just really puzzled by Manohla Dargis' review, the only review I've read of this film, by her claim that "your emotional response to the slow-creeping horror will most likely soon die, snuffed out by directorial choices that deaden a story already starved for oxygen." This just seems really off to me in a couple of different ways. * The direction seemed to me really well-done. * The movie is thoughtful and emotional, and the thoughtfulness does not kill the emotional response, quite the contrary. * You will find it confusing in places, how to respond emotionally, not be able to figure out quite what is going on until you think it through; this is an asset of the movie, one of the best things about it (and a way in which it is very successfully modeled after the book); Dargis seems to be complaining the movie is not manipulative enough, which just strikes me as a bizarre reaction.) (...As James Sanford notes in his review, the transition from "young Kathy" to "adult Kathy" is excellent.)
posted evening of October 16th, 2010: 1 response
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 National Geographic publishes the winners of the 2010 Small World Microphotography Competition (thanks for the link, John!) -- my favorite image is the structure of a rat's retina taken at 100x magnification, shown to the left. I was also very taken with these green, spiraling vessels from the stem of a banana tree:
(Speaking of bananas, My Hands are Bananas.)
posted afternoon of October 16th, 2010: Respond
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Benoît Mandelbrot, discoverer of the infinitely detailed set which bears his name and inventor of the discipline of fractal geometry, has died at the age of 85.
posted morning of October 16th, 2010: Respond
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