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Thursday, December 25th, 2003
Well actually here I am at home this morning, might as well write a post I've been thinking of for a few days. It concerns translation so I will ask LanguageHat to link to it. First topic: I found a book on my shelf the other day while looking for train reading, called The Following Story (Het Volgende Verhaal) by Cees Nooteboom (what a wonderful name! I wonder how it is pronounced.) I have a vague memory of coming into possession of this book, and it is dog-eared at p. 76, so I must have started reading it -- I took another go at it Tuesday. And a couple of subtle grammatical errors got me wondering -- is the translator (Ina Rilke) not fluent in English? Or is Nooteboom playing some kind of linguistic game that Rilke is rendering faithfully? For example: the first sentence of the second paragraph of the story begins, "I had waked up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead..." "Waked" can be baby talk in the usage "I waked up" but it does not sound like baby talk here, just like nonsense. I do not know any Dutch so I will put my question forth and hope someone reads this who is familiar with Nooteboom in the original. If you have answers, mail me. By the way, here is a very nice couple of sentences: I'm ashamed to say that after all those years on earth I still do not know the exact makeup of the human eye. Cornea, retina, iris and pupil, which double as flowers and students in crossword puzzles, that much I knew, but the actual substance, that vitreous mass of coagulated jelly or gelatine, has always struck fear into me. Whenever I use the word "jelly," everyone invariably laughs, but all the same Cornwall in King Lear had cried: "Out, vile jelly!" as he put out Gloucester's eyes, and that is precisely what I had in mind when I squeezed those sightless spheres which either were or were not my eyes. A lovely passage -- but note "those" in the first sentence. Seems to me like it should be "these". Again -- is this from the original or from the translator? (Note -- very cool that the crossword puzzle joke works in both Dutch and English. I am assuming it worked without too much fiddling about on Rilke's part; if I am wrong and she did have to take liberties to get it to work, well, she did a very good job of it.)We visited Ellen's friend Alice the other day and gave her son Steven Demian as a Hanukkah present. Ellen had asked what I thought would be a good book for him -- he is studying German and is reading Camus -- so I thought Demian was a good idea. It is the first book I ever read in German, anyway the first one I was ever able to actually finish. We gave him my copy, plus a translation. I had a look at the beginning of it and found it fascinating as ever, and indeed highly legible. But here's what's interesting -- the German sounds great and a bit profound to my ears -- but when I try rendering it in English it seems a lot less profound, nearly banal. I don't think this is because I am a lousy translator, though I am; when I looked at the translation which we bought for Steven, its phrasing was pretty close to my own. So could the profundity which I am seeing in the original be something I am reading into it, inspired by the rush of being able to understand a foreign language? -- this is a pretty unusual experience for me. A number of people whom I respect have dismissed Hesse as not worthwhile for someone who is not a teenager. (Which either way, Steven is, so I'm covered there.) Any thoughts? Update: LanguageHat advises me that I am mistaken here: "waked" is a standard past participle of "wake", used more commonly in Britain than in the U.S. And he thinks "those" is acceptable in the longer exerpt. I'd still be interested to know more about the original text that was translated as "after all those years".
posted morning of December 25th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, December 12th, 2003
I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay last night -- by the time I got about halfway through I was utterly enthralled. I am sending it along to my dad (a comix collector) to read.
posted morning of December 12th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, December third, 2003
More Kavalier and Clay -- it is very absorbing and just about perfect for reading on the train. A review I read of it stated correctly that despite its substantial bulk, it seems to fly past.
posted evening of December third, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, December second, 2003
This morning I started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, which I found in the train station. It seems so far (60 pp. in) like a fun and amusing read, not touched by genius but the work of an attentive craftsman.
posted morning of December second, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, November 20th, 2003
Turns out to be The Evolution Man by Roy Lewis; Lewis is not French but English; and the first edition does indeed have "The Minotaur" on the cover. Thanks to Google and Prehistoric Fiction for their invaluable help. (See this post for context.) Oh and, I was misled by memory -- the novel is not set in neolithic age but earlier, in the transition from holocene to pleistocene. It was originally titled, What we did to Father.
posted afternoon of November 20th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, November 17th, 2003
I finished The English Passengers tonight -- what a dark book it is! I was moved to think about the meaning of the word "earnest" this afternoon, when I said to myself that this book was not (pejorative sneer) earnest in the way that The Life of Pi and The Corrections were -- this thought floated through my head complete with the sneer despite the fact that I had greatly enjoyed both those books, especially the latter -- what did I mean? Kneale does not make such a point of evincing sympathy for his characters as does Franzen -- and indeed, few of the portrayals are sympathetic -- I would say the only ones that are, were Tim Renshaw, Captain Kewley and Peevay, and all with a great deal of ambiguity. So the sympathetic characterizations which I found so compelling in The Corrections -- and which were present in The Life of Pi as well -- are not a feature here. This is probably what I meant to get at with my pejorative use of the word "earnest"; the word is not very well used then, as Kneale is certainly earnest in his scorn for his characters.
posted evening of November 17th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, November 12th, 2003
I am going to throw this out into the æther and see if any help comes my way... When I was young, I read a book that I loved and reread several times. I have forgotten the author's name (I believe he was French) and the title. Here is all I know for sure about the book: - It was set in the Neolithic era. The characters were a family of cavemen who did things like discovering fire, inventing written language, etc.
- The narrator's uncle was named Vanya.
- On the cover of the book (a paperback) was a print of Picasso's The Minotaur.
If anyone knows the book I'm thinking of I would be greatly indebted to you for providing me with that information.
posted afternoon of November 12th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, November 6th, 2003
I am zipping right through The English Passengers, nearly halfway now, and enjoying it. A geographical issue is bothering me -- if the voyage begins at London and has as its ultimate destination Van Diemen's Land, why would they be going to Jamaica and then to Africa? It seems to me that the logical route would be to head directly south around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean; a side trip to Jamaica means you have to cross and recross the Atlantic. The narrative style of the book -- each chapter is told from the point-of-view of a different character -- encourages me to go back to my reading of The Corrections, where I kept noticing how many different characters I felt sympathy for; I would expect something similar to happen here. But it does not, or not exactly -- I do sympathize with several of the characters; but the book is very broadly comic and much of it is caricature.
posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, November 4th, 2003
I got home last night to find a package had come for me in the mail -- how exciting! It is from Gary; I opened it up and found he had sent me a new book, with a note to the effect that he thinks I will enjoy it. (And a wonderfully cool bookmark, a snapshot of the Xyris crew from '94, the first year I was working there.) The book is The English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale. I started reading it this morning on the train and got hooked into it right away -- it has all the characteristics of a book I would like. The language is playful and erudite. The setting is 19th-Century Man, England, Wales, Australia, and Tasmania and it looks like I will get an introduction to some new history that I did not know, plus a little Manx dialect. I want to write a bit about comparisons to other books that are coming up as I read -- but I think I will wait a bit and see how these comparisons develop, before I commit them to "paper".
posted morning of November 4th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, October 16th, 2003
Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, home of the IMO best comics on the web, celebrated its 5th birthday yesterday. Patrick marked the occasion by unveiling a new front page, the first step in his planned redesign of the site. Go check it out -- there is a poll where you can ask for the new comic you would most like to see. (Hint: vote for Apocamon 4!)
posted afternoon of October 16th, 2003: Respond
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