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Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Wow, look at this: the Mathnawi of Rumi (and other works -- possibly his complete works?), with multiple English translations and commentary. Awesome.
posted evening of April 16th, 2008: Respond
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(From this interview with Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.) Pamuk published The White Castle while he was in New York, being "his wife's husband" -- she was studying for her doctorate at Columbia University.
I had a little room at the library in which I wrote more than half of The Black Book. And very typical of a non-Western person coming through main cultural centers of Western civilisation, say London, Paris, New York, and then having a sort of an anxiety about his cultural identity, and, ah... I lived these things, and I faced the immense richness of American libraries and culture; and I began to ask myself, what is Turkish culture? What am I doing there? And at that time, I used to think that Turkey's cultural identity should only be a sort of ultra-Occidentalism.There, at the age of 33, I began to read old Sufi allegories, the whole classic texts of Islamic mysticism -- most of them are classical Persian texts -- with an eye on Borges, on Calvino: they have told me to look at literary texts as sort of structures which have metaphysical qualities. I have learned from Borges and Calvino to delete the heavy religious vein of classical Islamic texts, and see these texts as sort of, em, geometrical shapes; metaphysical structures and allegories; parables full of literary games.
 Also some interesting stuff in the interview about fluidity of identity and how that plays into his novels. Engdahl mentions René Girard -- Pamuk confirms that he likes what Girard has to say but says he came to Girard's stuff late in life; Engdahl asks if Pamuk sees jealosy as playing a major role in his work, and Pamuk agrees that it does.
posted evening of April 16th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Istanbul was an open book to him now; it harbored no secrets.
Galip's unravelling continues in Chapter 30 -- he accosts a stranger on a bus, asking "What does this snow signify? What does it augur?" -- and the reader is complicit in his insanity. The dream he recounts in this same interaction is breath-taking. I'm having a little trouble reading this chapter -- I have started it over a couple of times thinking I'm missing the point. Today when I restarted it I was approaching it from an angle of "maybe Pamuk has blown his wad, Galip already became Celâl in the last two chapters, if he's going to spend the next hundred pages talking about the same thing there is a lot of potential for it to get boring." But I started to get excited about the story again as I was reading -- now it's seeming like Galip's eventual metamorphosis may be into the city of Istanbul. (Particularly interesting in this regard is that Freely is translating the names of Istanbul streets in this chapter, which I do not think she has been doing in the rest of the book -- it seems totally appropriate here.)
posted evening of April 15th, 2008: Respond
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Permit me to compose drunk for a moment, in honor of Michael's birthday. (Happy Birthday, Michael! Michael has been visiting us for a week, roughly, and is going away to Boston tomorrow. I always thought he was a native of Berlin, but turns out he is a native of southern Missouri who has lived most of his life in Berlin.)
Yoga class tonight was taught by a substitute (a little spacy, I thought -- and I have a nerve, to be thinking of other people as spaced out) -- when we did the corpse pose at the end of class I had the following thoughts:
- This is not a great pose for me to meditate in. I feel much less self conscious when standing or sitting.
- You know what would be great? I should just levitate now.
- OK, let's go, levitating muscles. Start lifting!
Well of course I didn't go anywhere. It made me start thinking, in a strongly non-meditative way, about Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book which I just loved as a teenager and have felt embarrassed about ever since. See what I was thinking, roughly, was: If I was JLS I would just know that I could levitate, and it would happen independent of my wishing it to. But of course the point of JLS was that you didn't have to be a particular person to get this supernatural effect, you just had to be completely comfortable in your being.
posted evening of April 15th, 2008: Respond
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Speaking of Other Colors, this blog looks very promising. Orhan Pamuk category and all. Links to video of a conversation between Pamuk and Rushdie.
Speaking of Orhan Pamuk on video, here is a recent appearance at the NYPL. And nobelprize.org offers a half-hour interview with the author. Plus, here is Maureen Freely discussing translating Pamuk's work.
posted morning of April 15th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, April 14th, 2008
This evening I saw the first James Bond movie I have ever seen: From Russia with Love. How did I like it? Well, I liked it. It seemed extremely similar to North by Northwest, which is a great movie to resemble. Didn't have Hitchcock's genius, maybe, so a lot of the attempts at wit came off as corny and a lot of the dialog was flat; but the photography was lovely, the action exciting, the plot twists not always expected. Why did I watch the movie? I saw a reference to Goldfinger in Pamuk's Other Colors, and then read this letter in the NY Times, pointing out that Pamuk had the wrong movie in mind. Thought, I've never seen a Bond movie, maybe I'll see about it, added it to my Netflix queue.
posted evening of April 14th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
Robert Fagles died this week, 74 years old. I am sorry to hear about it. I just loved his translations of Homer -- reading them really opened my ears to what epic poetry should sound like. I heard him read from Ulysses one Bloomsday several years back; if I remember right he signed my Iliad. (Sure where it is, I am however not; since then I got the big hardcover printing of his Iliad and Odyssey when they were published together. I wonder where I put the paperback copy? I may have loaned it out.) One of these days I will get to reading the Æneid, and I will be glad there is a Fagles translation available. (I remember making a start on Fitzgerald's translation, in my teens -- somebody gave it to me for my birthday one year -- and finding it impenetrable.)
 Looking at his Wikipædia entry, I see he also translated the Oresteia, the Theban plays of Sophocles, and the poems of Bacchylides. Of these, I loved Lattimore's Oresteia when I read it long ago (in a way I did not love his translations of Homer); I never would have thought a new translation was needed. And yet I would probably recommend Fagles unread to someone who asked what translation they should get. Lattimore's Sophocles did not make much of an impression on me; I ought to read Fagles'. Bacchylides I have never heard of (to the best of my recollection).
posted afternoon of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Tyler Cowen says of Pamuk's books that "The Black Book is the one to read last, once you know the others." I wonder how true this is, and why. I am, coincidentally, reading The Black Book last (leaving aside that I never finished The New Life -- Cowen thinks I would understand it better if I had knowledge of "how Dante appropriated Islamic theological writings for his own ends," which is certainly possible), and it does seem like a good position in the reading order for it. On the other hand I have recommended it to some friends who have not read any Pamuk, principally on the basis of their liking Pynchon -- this book seems to me to have a lot in common with Pynchon's writing, which I don't think any of Pamuk's other books do, particularly much. I think Snow is a great book to have read first -- principally because I relate very strongly to the lines from its first few pages that I quoted here -- Ka driving into the blizzard is (in certain ways) like me starting to read Snow.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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You became someone else when you read a story -- that was the key to the mystery. The chain of mystery in The Black Book is spiralling wider and wider in Chapter 24. The story seems to have taken Galip's paranoid break with reality smoothly in stride and assimilated that into the "reality" of the book. Galip's identification with Celâl is a done deal; and now we are seeing Celâl as having discarded his own identity in favor of Rumi's*. In addition Celâl has asserted in the previous chapter, that being able to tell stories, to command the attention of an audience and (I am reading in) thus to weaken your audience members' identities and to intermix your own self into them, is a primary element of human existence, something without which a person is anguished and "helpless in the face of the world!"Meanwhile the unknown caller is competing with Galip for Celâl's identity, and Galip has a moment of suspicion that he has been lured into "a deadly trap."
 *I have not read nearly enough Rumi -- I reckon I am going to be missing a lot of nuance in this portion of the book. The story about Shams of Tabriz in Chapter 22, for example, is widely divergent from what I read about him in the closest reference work to hand; I don't know what to make of this. ...Well here is a program about Rumi which speaks of a disputed account of Shams being murdered by Rumi's disciples. So the Wikipædia article is just incomplete I guess. (The Wikipædia article on Rumi does mention the murder, and does not even say that it is disputed.) That program also links to some readings from Rumi in Persian and in translation.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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...as he read, he identified first with the usher, then with the brawling audience, then with the çörek maker, and finally -- good reader that he was -- with Celâl.-- The Black Book
A couple of jottings in furtherance of my essay idea:
- Identity confusion is important in Pamuk.
- I started to formulate this statement while I was reading Other Colors, and have since seen it borne out in The White Castle, The New Life, and especially The Black Book.
- Does this statement also apply to Snow and My Name is Red, which I read before it occurred to me? (beyond the obvious detective-story aspects of Red) -- the answer may well be yes but I think I would need to reread them with this in mind, to be sure. If not, it might seem appropriate to think of this as something Pamuk had "outgrown".
- The confusion that I'm talking about is (frequently) a confusion between the roles of Author and Reader. So it's an easy step to take, to confuse yourself-as-reader with Pamuk-as-author. Or so I think.
- As a side note, I wonder how this plays into my impression of these 5 novels, which is that each of them is written in a distinctly different style and voice -- though I think I can hear shades of the same voice underlying each -- if Pamuk is serious about giving up his identity when he writes that would help explain the differences. An alternate explanation is that there are four different translators involved in creating English versions of these five books -- only Maureen Freely has two translations. But I don't think those two are particularly more similar to each other than any other pair.
- I think the experience of losing track of one's identity while reading a story is a wonderful thing; it might be the primary reason I read novels. Understanding this is something I am taking away from reading Pamuk. Is this the same as saying "I read for escape from my everyday life", which seems banal and not really worth thinking about at length the way I have been doing? In Pamuk's novels it seems to be doing a lot more work than that.
- What larger ideas if any does this lead to? How is the beauty of Pamuk's books explicable in these terms? Would such an explication be "criticism"? (Note: I've had an ongoing conversation with myself about what is criticism, and is it something I would be able to write, for a while now.)
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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