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Readings
I like to read, and I read a lot of books -- the primary impetus for starting this site was to give myself a way of keeping track of what I am thinking about the books I am reading, and to remember the thoughts as time passes.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Sunday, June 16th
I have in mind a pastiche of The Library of Babel, in which the volumes' pages contain, rather than 40 lines of 80 black letters, a nine-by-nine grid of boxes, some boxes blank, some containing a decimal digit. The hardy folk who wander the Library's hexagonal galleries cling to a belief that its stacks contain every possible Sudoku game -- you will hear rumors from time to time, never at first hand, of a solvable Sudoku grid encountered in some distant gallery; for your own part, you have seen only blank grids, with perhaps a 3 or a 7 in one of the cells, or a grid filled entirely with 9's except for the middle cell, which is blank. Once, you found a book in which every grid had the digits 1 through 9 scattered haphazardly, just one of each digit. You could discern no pattern.
One of the first poems I ever translated was "Der Novembertag," by Rainer Maria Rilke. The closing line of the poem has the wind in the chimney sounding out "eines Totenkarmens Schlussoktaven." I mistranslated this as "a death-karma's closing octaves" which has always struck me as a beautiful and enigmatic image...
This morning it occurred to me to mention this in my recently-created Mastodon account; and Mastodon came through! A couple of people suggested the archaic German Totencarmen, meaning "funerary song," obviously the correct interpretation.
Der Novembertag
Kalter Herbst vermag den Tag zu knebeln, seine tausend Jubelstimmen schweigen; hoch vom Domturm wimmern gar so eigen Sterbeglocken in Novembernebeln.
Auf den nassen Daechern liegt verschlafen weisses Dunstlicht; und mit kalten Händen greift der Sturm in des Kamines Wänden eines Totenkarmens Schlußoktaven.
The November Day
Cold autumn can muzzle the day, silence its thousand jubilating voices; from the steeple whimper, so peculiar, death bells in November's mist.
On the wet rooftops lies sleeping a white fog; and with cold hands the storm inside the chimney's walls strikes a lamentation's closing octaves.
This weekend I was listening to Andrea Pitzer's marvelous history Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. I happened on it thanks to Pitzer's lovely thread detailing her search for the King of Zembla -- turns out there was one, very briefly and only by chance, and that Nabokov very likely knew the story. So anyways: listening to Icebound on Audible, and early in the book where it is talking about Barentsz making his plans to seek a Northeastern Passage, I hear a reference to how Dutch scientists thought the climate at the North Pole was temperate. This rings a bell for me as something the Chums of Chance in Against the Day might have believed... I asked Ms. Pitzer for further reading suggestions and she forwarded me a link to Colin Dickey's excellent article On the Open Polar Sea, about John Franklin's lost expedition to the North Pole... I was well down the rabbit hole by the time I hit on Dickey's reference to "Cornelius P. Broadnag, who claimed to have the journal of an American named Jonathan Wilder, which told of an “internal region” inside the earth that Wilder had traveled extensively." Well: Broadnag's account is online in full at Google Books, a little illegible though and you cannot copy and paste from it. So I spent Sunday putting it into Google Docs:
A lot is going on in Book 5 of Eve's writings. The two have found themselves an oasis to the east of Eden (is what I get from a reference to the sun setting behind Monte Divino). They try and fail repeatedly to conceive a child, eventually understanding that they have to do it like animals do; brothers Cain and Abel are born, followed by Ara and her two twin sisters whose names are not given, one light-complexioned, the other dark like her mother. Cain is born without pain, occasioning suspicion on the part of his father; Eve conspires with an angel and a giant to create menstruation and the pain of childbearing, as a means of winning Adam's sympathy -- "Qué trama tan estúpida, y tan eficaz. V§50 [Such a stupid connivance, and so effective.]"
Throughout this book Adam is growing more distant and hostile toward his wife and his firstborn son. This culminates with Adam dreaming the story of their creation from mud by "His" hand -- the first reference to "Him" -- and making further elaborations on the story. Eve summarizes his preaching in V§51:
Y encima de eso, contaba Adán, no sólo él era el primero y el origen de mi persona, sino que yo, cuando comí la fruta, porque ésta era prohibida (?) por Yahvé (?), pequé (?), y traje a nosotros la expulsión (?) del Edén que era paradisiaco (fabulosa mentira); que por mí se nos impuso el trabajo como un castigo (barbaridad), y el dolor en el parto (ya saben la verdad).
[And on top of all this, Adam went on -- not only was he the first, the origin of my being, but furthermore I, when I ate the fruit, since that was forbidden (?) by Yahweh (?), had sinned (?), bringing on us expulsion (?) from Eden, a paradise (fabulous lie); because of me we were condemned (barbarity) to labor, and to suffer pain in childbirth (and you already know the real story).]
The parenthetical question mark after "forbidden" is making my head spin a little. In I§3, when Eve took leaves from the fig tree, it told her "Thou hast disobeyed!" So the idea of a prohibition should not be as incomprehensible as she is making it out to be. I am still puzzled about where the prohibition came from. Adam is inventing Yahweh as a source for the prohibition (which note, he is saying the violation was taking the apple rather than taking the leaves); this is an interesting spin on the idea that God is necessary as a "first cause" -- here He is invoked as the first cause not of existence but of law.
Éramos de un material resistente, como las hojas de higuera que guardaron las brasas por meses. Al ir perdiendo las pezuñas, nuestros músculos se volvieron más firmes. Los tendones, más tensos. (p. 111 III§27)
[We were made of a tough material, like the fig leaves that conserved the embers for months. As our hooves wore away, our muscles firmed up; our tendons tightened.]
In books III and IV of Eve's writings, her body and Adam's are becoming more like the reader's. They get assholes in Book III when she accidentally scratches one into Adam's backside and he poops out a "bagasse"; seeing how it benefits him she does the same to herself. (My initial reaction, beyond "ew", was to wonder how it connected to his digestive tract, and whether they had buttocks at the top of their legs; then I remembered I was not reading science fiction. Is this book "magical realism" though? not sure, I'm thinking no, need to think more about what the genre is. "Fable" seems insufficient and "Scripture" is not quite right either. Elements of both, certainly.) After they start pooping, they begin to feel hunger -- they had already been urinating and feeling thirst, though no mention is made until later of the mechanism for urination.
Book IV is mostly about their acquisition of sexual organs. Beginning in Book II bees have played an important (if not too clearly defined) role in their journey; in IV§32, Eve eats honey for the first time and has an extremely dark dream in which she envisions sexual intercourse as a male hyena eating female carrion. She wakes up and eats the seed which she saved from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (She has been carrying the seed tangled in the hair of her armpit) -- the seed travels through her body to the "duct for the exit of urine" between her legs, where it blossoms forth like a flower. Again the fruit from Eden, which has given her gender, now gives her sex.
Adam gets no Edenic seed, and is left to his own devices to give himself a penis by means of rubbing himself in IV§34-35... I have not yet understood a lot of this portion and am engaged in rereading.
Gender is an interesting issue in Eve's writing. Eve is very clearly female, and Adam clearly male; but what makes them that? There doesn't seem to be any physical distinction between the two at the time they leave Eden; it's not really clear to me that they have bodies as such at all, before they eat the apple. There is a long period elapsed of them being Woman and Man before they become "anatomically correct"... It seems to me like the thing that makes Eve Woman (in the world of this book) is the fact that she chooses to eat the apple and to offer it to Adam, and the thing that makes Adam Man, is that he follows her lead and eats second. Did they have gender beforehand?
Book II of Eve's writings describes Eve's and Adam's flight from Eden, their first experiences of Earth. By and large I have found it easy to follow. They discover thirst, they drink, they experience cold and are warmed by the fire that Eve steals from the Angel who guards the gate of Eden (I str this is the Angel of Death?); they experience night and day, and sleep; Eve invents cooking in a dream. Eve touches Adam and luxuriates in the feel of his skin, although they do not yet have genitalia -- I think sex will come in Book IV and V.
I am wondering about how this compares with Canon. I have always assumed Adam and Eve had sexual characteristics in Eden, and that these characteristics were the nakedness of which they were ashamed after eating the apple. Paintings show Adam and Eve with genitalia although I'm not sure from memory how explicit they are. My memory is that Eve's punishment was to suffer in childbirth, but I'm not at all clear on whether she had the ability to procreate before the Fall. I think so? But then why are her children only post-Fall? Need to do some research.
I am finding this passage from the very beginning of II§7 confusing (and enjoying the passing reference to Aristophanes' speech from the Symposium):
Éramos en parte de aparencia animal por las apestosas pieles de bestias con que nos había cubierto el Trueno y los cascos en los pies. Teníamos pezuñas. Nuestras uñas eran como las de los equinos y las cabras que nos auxiliaban con la empinada cuesta del áspero Monte Divino. La memoria nos recuerda conscientes de nuestros cuatro cascos, los dos del varón, los dos de hembra, yo, y que los cuatro eran cascos idénticos. No "de hembra" ni "varoniles", neutros, como lo éramos nosotros.
¿O será que nos supimos desnudos porque, previo a morder la manzana, una cutícula pulida nos recubría; una que cayó con la primera mordida? ¿Nos envolvía cuando vivíamos allá, y tal vez por eso yo no oía, no sentía, no veía, no escuchaba, no percibía? Eran las pezuñas el remanente de esa cutícula?
Será verdad que habíamos sido antes una sola persona de cuatro piernas, un solo ser con el rostro de mujer al frente y el de varón mirando hacia atrás, recubiertos sus dos cuerpos distintos en una cutícula común, unidos por la espalda?
It seems to me like she is saying their feet were not yet distinctively "male" and "female" feet, but were practically identical. I'm confused about why she needs to point this out...
Hm, interesting... Very first article I happen on in my searches asserts that Cain was contrary to Canon, conceived and born before the fall. Which confirms my thinking that Eve's children are traditionally thought to have been born after the Fall, and also introduces a new bit of detail...
And the command "Be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:22) certainly implies that Adam and Eve were able to procreate, though there is nothing specifying that it would be done with genitals and womb as it is post-Fall.
posted morning of December third, 2020: Respond ➳ More posts about The Bible
Bastó un paso para que dejáramos atrás el siniestro, letal mandato del Trueno, atrás quedó el llamado Edén. (p. 47 I§6) [A single step was sufficient for us to leave behind Thunder's sinister, lethal commandment; the place called Eden lay behind us. I am here translating mandato as commandment for the biblical voice of it; other terms that might work are mandate and precinct. I am rendering el llamado Edén as the place called Eden; so-called Eden might be right.]
At the end of Book I of Eve's writings I have some questions. Primarily I am wondering about what commandment Eve and Adam have disobeyed. In Genesis 2:16-17, YHWH explicitly mandates that Adam and Eve may eat fruits of all the trees except his special one. But in this book, Thunder does not talk to Eve and Adam, at least not in clear sentences.
After Eve and Adam eat the fruit, their senses are awakened and they begin to exist in Time. They are aware of their nakedness and have access to language (explicitly connected to being-in-time). When Eve tries to take leaves from the tree to cover her nakedness, the tree angrily refuses to allow her to take them (I§3), because she has disobeyed*. But what did she disobey? I reread the opening sections but find no commandment... Also: why does the tree give Eve its seed (I§6)?
I'm interested in the connection between language and being-in-time, and in what is the nature of this tree, as distinct from the rest of Eden. I will be looking to find out more about Eden in the coming books, though Eve and Adam have left Eden I expect Eve's memory of the expulsion will play an important role.
Eve says "Eden expelled us" (and not "Thunder expelled us from Eden") but then immediately says "It stank of dead animals, all we could do was leave." (p. 46) -- It is Eve and Adam that make the choice to leave. Covering their nakedness and leaving are the first two choices they make once they have begun to exist in Time.
* A neighboring tree, which is presumably the Tree of Life, also refuses her. She is able to take leaves and branches from a third tree, a fig tree.
posted morning of December first, 2020: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation
If I were translating El Libro de Eva, I would certainly use "thou/thee" and the appropriate conjugations to translate tú and its verbs. "¡desobediciste!" -> "thou hast disobeyed!", not "you have disobeyed!". (And not "thou disobeyedest", that's just silly)
(In sections written as dialogue between Eve's narrative voice and an unseen interlocutor, "you" would be more appropriate.)
