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Thursday, January 8th, 2009
I watched Innocent Voices Tuesday night, and again tonight. I want to write a post about it but am having a hard time getting my thoughts about it into any kind of postable order. So: maybe I will write about my reaction to it later on. But for now I just wanted to let you know about it; it's very much worth your while and I had not heard about it until just recently. Here is an interview with the screenwriter Oscar Torres, whose childhood is the subject of the film.
posted evening of January 8th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
So she flew on, never losing sight of the angels, and gradually as she came closer they took on a clearer shape.They shone not as if they were burning but as if, wherever they were and however dark the night, sunlight was shining on them. They were like humans, but winged, and much taller; and, as they were naked, the witch could see that three of them were male, two female. ...  Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know... that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.
For some reason I am finding this description of the angels very satisfying. I can picture them very clearly in my mind. (And as I was writing this, I realized the image I am picturing is the stone faces of Igor Mitoraj.)Here is a minor thing that has been bugging me about the setup of the worlds in His Dark Materials. Clearly various languages exist, and a similar set of languages exists across the parallel universes, at least those few we have seen. But Lyra doesn't seem to have encountered anybody yet she could not speak to in English. So okay: let's say (a) witches and (b) bears are both non-human, so maybe they are communicating with Lyra via some kind of extra-linguistic mechanism that just seems to be speech; or more simply and implausibly, that witches and bears speak English. And I guess it's reasonable that all the humans Lyra interacted with in the first book could have known English. But the place where Lyra and Will meet is clearly parallel-world Italy, with Italian place names and everything. So at this point you have to just say ok, well the structure of the book demands that everybody speaks English; that's fine, I'll go along with that. But! Joachim Lorenz threw a huge monkey wrench into that psychic construct on p. 135, when he referred to a building as "the Torre degli Angeli, the Tower of the Angels" and to a city as "Cittàgazze. The city of magpies." -- I found this extremely annoying because it indicates that Joachim knows the place names are in a different language than he's speaking in. Well anyway, not a huge deal or anything. End rant.
posted evening of January 6th, 2009: Respond
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 I've seen a few references to Horacio Castellanos Moya's newly translated Senselessness -- sounded interesting and worth checking out. Chad Post of 3% posts about it today as part of his Best Translated Books of 2008 series, with links to reviews and to interviews with Castellanos Moya and translator Katherine Silver. I'm much more interested now after reading these -- and by coincidence I have the movie Innocent Voices currently checked out from Netflix, also about victims of the civil war in El Salvador.
New Directions has an excerpt from the first chapter up on the book's home page. l am not complete in the mind, I repeated to myself, stunned by the extent of mental perturbation experienced by this Cakchiquel man who had witnessed his family's murder, by the fact that this indigenous man was aware of the breakdown of his own psychic apparatus as a result of having watched, albeit wounded and powerless, as soldiers of his country's army scornfully and in cold blood chopped each of his four small children to pieces with machetes, then turned on his wife, the poor woman already in shock because she too had been forced to watch as the soldiers turned her small children into palpitating pieces of human flesh. Nobody can be complete in the mind after having survived such an ordeal, I said to myself, morbidly mulling it over, trying to imagine what waking up must have been like for this indigenous man, whom they had left for dead among chunks of the flesh of his wife and children and who then, many years later, had the opportunity to give his testimony so that I could read it and make stylistic corrections, a testimony that began, in fact, with the sentence I am not complete in the mind that so moved me because it summed up in the most concise manner possible the mental state tens of thousands of people who have suffered experiences similar to the ones recounted by this Cakchiquel man found themselves in, and also summed up the mental state of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary men who had with relish cut to pieces their so-called compatriots, though I must admit that it's not the same to be incomplete in the mind after watching your own children drawn and quartered as after drawing and quartering other peoples' children, I told myself before reaching the overwhelming conclusion that it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind, which led me to an even worse conclusion, even more perturbing, and this was that only somebody completely out of his mind would be willing to move to a foreign country whose population was not complete in the mind to perform a task that consisted precisely of copyediting an extensive report of one thousand one hundred pages that documents the hundreds of massacres and proves the general perturbation.
posted evening of January 6th, 2009: Respond
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I'd love to watch this discussion between Lobo Antunes and his translator. It occurred last September; the web site says (AOTW) that it's "coming soon", which hopefully just means there has been a delay getting it digitized and online. Fingers crossed! I notice that Lobo Antunes has quite a significant body of work to his name before the current novel; I sort of knew this but was not (I think) taking it sufficiently into consideration. This probably means that my response to What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is being hampered by a lack of familiarity with his catalog.
posted afternoon of January 6th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 5th, 2009
It occurred to me while we were reading just now, that Will's role in this story is comparable in some ways to Lyra's in The Golden Compass. The parallel is not exact, obviously; but as I read about Will realizing that his father had found a dimensional window like the one Will found, I'm responding in a similar way to when I read e.g. about Lyra making the connection from the General Oblation Board to the "Gobblers." Some nice idle free-associations from tonight's reading: Lee had once seen a painting in which a saint of the Church was shown being attacked by assassins. While they bludgeoned his dying body, the saint's dæmon was borne upwards by cherubs and offered a spray of palm, the badge of a martyr.
This somehow reminded me very strongly of the church scene from Saramago's Blindness. On the next page, Lee is trying to get information from Imaq, an "old Tartar from the Ob region":
"What happened to [Grumman]? Is he dead?" "You ask me that, I have to say I don't know. So you never know the truth from me." "I see. So who can I ask?" "You better ask his tribe. Better go to Yenisei, ask them." "His tribe... You mean the people who initiated him? Who drilled his skull?" "Yes. You better ask them. Maybe he not dead, maybe he is. Maybe neither dead nor alive." "How can he be neither dead nor alive?" "In spirit world. Maybe he in spirit world. Already I say too much. Say no more now."
I asked Sylvia if Imaq was reminding her of anyone, thinking as I asked her about Hagrid. She said yes, he was reminding her of "the detective from Moominvalley" -- nice association! I had forgotten about him, he's a character in one of the Moomin comic strip stories, whose signature line is "I shall say no more."
posted evening of January 5th, 2009: Respond
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Sylvia and I are wrapped up in The Subtle Knife. Liking it! I am having a little trouble getting as completely into the world of the novel as I got into The Golden Compass, I think primarily because of the introduction of "dark matter", the attempt to tie the fantasy physics of the first book's world into our world's real physics. It's a nice idea but a significant piece of my mind is refusing to suspend disbelief. OTOH Dr. Malone seems like she's going to be a really nice addition to the cast of characters. Lyra's character has changed in subtle ways -- she is no longer in any sense an ingenue, she knows exactly what's going on and what she needs to do. This is a quality that I disliked about the rendering of Lyra in the movie of The Golden Compass; here it is much more plausible and sensible.
posted evening of January 5th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Saramago posts today about writing. Interesting, this is the first I have noticed him blogging about blogging. The usual qualifiers about me not being a great translator apply; he says roughly: Has it been worth the struggle?
Have these commentaries, these opinions, these critiques been worth the struggle?
Is the world better than before? And me, what about me? Is this what I hoped for?
Am I satisfied with the work? To answer "yes" to all these questions, even only to some,
would demonstrate clearly an inexcusable mental blindness. And to respond with
a "no" without exceptions -- what could that be? Excessive modesty? Resignation? Or perhaps
the consciousness that some human labors are nothing more than a pale shadow
of the labors we dream of? It is told how Michelangelo, when he finished the Moses which
we see in Rome, in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, tapped the statue on the knee with
his hammer and cried: "Speak!" One needn't say that Moses did not speak.
Moses never speaks. In the same way he who has written in this place at length these last few months
has not been more wordy nor more eloquent than that which could possibly be written,
precisely that which the author would like to ask for, murmuring, "Talk,
please, tell me what you are, what you have served for, if it was for anything." They are quiet, they don't respond.
What to do, then? Interrogating words is the destiny of one who writes. An article? A column? A book? It will be done, but already we know that Moses will not respond.
(This is a step forward for me; rather than using Google translator and massaging the output as I've been doing, I worked directly from the Spanish text.)
posted evening of January 4th, 2009: 3 responses
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Saw a report today that Studio Ghibli is moving towards a North American release of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea later this year, on the big screen. Nice, something to look forward to! (While we wait, you can watch some footage of the Japanese-language film at DailyMotion.)
posted afternoon of January 4th, 2009: Respond
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So what am I thinking about What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?, which I have now read roughly a third of? Well first that too much of my reading experience with it has been asking myself what I'm thinking about it rather than doing the thinking about it... And maybe this is what I mean by calling it a difficult book, one that does not engage me, one that I have to struggle to engage myself in. I want to identify with Paulo, to get inside his head; and it seems like this should be easy -- Lobo Antunes' stream-of-consciousness seems to be intended as a straight-up portrait of the inside of Paulo's head. So what's the difficulty? Primarily I think it is the absense of any narrative framework. What makes the stream-of-consciousness in e.g. Faulkner's The Hamlet so striking, is that you have a handle on what's going on outside Isaac's consciousness. I am also a bit troubled by the decision to have Paulo "narrating" this book from inside a mental ward -- I have certainly experienced my own reality the way Paulo is doing, as repetitive images from memory; and I am not sick. (Well maybe a little sick I guess -- but nothing that requires hospitalization...) If Paulo were more lucid I think there would be a lot more room for understanding the ways he has been damaged -- this could also get past the (unmet) need I'm seeing for an external narrator. So: the book is not seeming to me like a successful one so far. But as I said, I'm in the middle of it -- I'm going to go on reading for the beaty of the language and images, and perhaps the fragmentary scenes Lobo Antunes is painting will come together into a story.
posted morning of January 4th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January third, 2009
Genesis 12: 5 Abram Tomó a Sarai su mujer, a Lot su sobrino y todos los bienes que HabÃan acumulado y a las personas que HabÃan adquirido en Harán; y partieron hacia la tierra de Canaán. Después llegaron a la tierra de Canaán,
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y Abram Atravesó aquella tierra hasta la encina de Moré, en las inmediaciones de Siquem. Los cananeos estaban entonces en la tierra.
Interesting -- the KJV translation has "the plain of Moreh" at the text I've emphasized; RSV has "the oak of Moreh". But this Spanish translation is calling it "encina", which means "holm oak", more specific than either of these. Blue Letter Bible's concordance doesn't show "holm oak" occurring in any English translation. Now I'm wondering what the source term is -- is encina a common tree in Spain as oak is in England, and the reference is just to a generic tree?I remember in The Stone Raft there were a couple of references to "holm oak", which I skipped over without really getting. I think Joana Carda's stick was described as being witch-hazel rather than "even" holm oak; I took this vaguely to be a way of minimizing how strong of a wood it was. Possibly a reference to this passage was intended here, though if the tree is common in Spain and Portugal, probably not.
 A bit wrong -- "Holm oak" appears four times in The Stone Raft; the one I was thinking of is on p. 106: Joana Carda responded with silence, after all, there is no law to prohibit guests from taking even a branch of holm oak into their room, much less a thin little stick, not even two meters long... At the beginning of the book there is a suggestion that Joana's branch was elm, or possibly wych-elm.
posted morning of January third, 2009: 2 responses
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