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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Saramago  has made his entry into animation! Juan Pablo Etcheverry animated "A flor máis grande do mundo" based on Saramago's book A maior flor do mundo, which doesn't seem to be in translation -- I had never heard of it before I saw Saramago's post about the cartoon just now. It is his only children's book, written in the 70's -- oops; not reading closely. The idea is from the 70's but the book was not written until 2000.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: Respond
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Huh: weird! I happened on this poem today, attributed to Borges and with a translation attributed to Alastair Reid. I was kind of taken with it, especially with the way the whole poem is subjunctive and the return to declarative voice in the final line feels kind of crushing. Checking for links with more information about this poem I find many, many pages reprinting the poem and attributing it to Borges, and also two articles (one by Iván Almeida, published in Borges Studies Online, and a shorter one by Eugenio Siccardi which refers to Almeida's piece) denying that Borges wrote this poem. I haven't read Almeida's whole article -- it's late and I'm tired, and I don't speak Spanish -- but he looks to know what he's talking about. Interesting -- what strikes me as really weird about this is attributing a translation of the fraudulent poem to Reid. I hope to have another go at the article tomorrow and see how this plays out.
Instantes
(no por Borges)
Si pudiera vivir nuevamente mi vida.
En la próxima tratarÃa de cometer más errores.
No intentarÃa ser tan perfecto, me relajarÃa más.
SerÃa más tonto de lo que he sido, de hecho
tomarÃa muy pocas cosas con seriedad.
SerÃa menos higiénico.
CorrerÃa más riesgos, harÃa más viajes, contemplarÃa
más atardeceres, subirÃa más montañas, nadarÃa más rÃos.
IrÃa a más lugares adonde nunca he ido, comerÃa
más helados y menos habas, tendrÃa más problemas
reales y menos imaginarios.
Yo fui una de esas personas que vivió sensata y prolÃficamente
cada minuto de su vida; claro que tuve momentos de alegrÃa.
Pero si pudiera volver atrás tratarÃa de tener
solamente buenos momentos.
Por si no lo saben, de eso está hecha la vida, sólo de momentos;
no te pierdas el ahora.
Yo era uno de esos que nunca iban a ninguna parte sin
termómetro,
una bolsa de agua caliente, un paraguas y un paracaÃdas;
Si pudiera volver a vivir, viajarÃa más liviano.
Si pudiera volver a vivir comenzarÃa a andar descalzo a principios
de la primavera y seguirÃa asà hasta concluir el otoño.
DarÃa más vueltas en calesita, contemplarÃa más amaneceres
y jugarÃa con más niños, si tuviera otra vez la vida por delante.
Pero ya tengo 85 años y sé que me estoy muriendo.
 A little more: Almeida says Reid did publish this translation, in Queen's Quarterly of Autumn 1992, and seems to be a bit mystified as to why he would have done that. "Perhaps the history of literature is the history of grand errors in reading." Almeida finds the original author of this poem to be Nadine Stair of Kentucky, published in the March 27 1978 issue of Family Circle (Almeida bizarrely calls the magazine Family Circus). ...According to Bryon Crawford, the author's real name was Nadine Strain.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: 3 responses
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Wow, sometimes a passage of  reading just sends you scrambling for reference materials... A izquierda y a la derecha, absortos en su lúcido sueño, se perfilan los rostros momentáneos de los lectores, a la luz de las lámparas estudiosas, como en la hipálage de Milton. This comes from the dedication at the front of Borges' El hacedor -- Borges is dedicating the book to his deceased countryman Leopoldo Lugones, and imagining a library where he would give the book to Lugones. "To the left and to the right, absorbed in their lucid dream, the momentary faces of the readers are outlined in the light of the studious lamps, as in the hypallage of Milton." Wait -- the what of Milton? Wikipædia is useful as normal -- "studious lamps" is a hypallage, an application of the adjective to a different word than the one it's actually describing. Now I was curious and wanted to know why Borges was making reference to Milton here. So I looked; and in the course of surfing around trying to figure it out, made a very useful discovery. In Dreamtigers, Mildred Boyer translates "lámparas estudiosas" as "bright officious lamps" -- why? A search for that phrase brings one directly to the source passage in Milton -- Paradise Lost IX.103-4: Terrestrial Heav'n, danced round by other Heav'ns,
That shine, yet bear their bright, officious lamps I spent a little while trying to figure this one out -- is "officious" rendered as "estudiosas" in the Spanish translation of Milton? That would not make a lot of sense, and besides I'm sure Borges read Milton in English. Ultimately I think it is just a really weird choice on Boyer's part -- Borges is not quoting Milton, he's alluding to him, but Boyer seems to be committed to a reading that says Borges is quoting Milton -- and thus makes the usage not be a hypallage but simply an incoherency. But look at how Andrew Hurley translates the passage in Collected Fictions:To left and right, absorbed in their
waking dream, rows of readers' momentary profiles in the light of
the 'scholarly lamps,' as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives
would have it. This is a little wordy maybe -- but it communicates the image in Borges' piece precisely, indeed it allows me to see the image much more clearly than I had when I was grappling with this unfamiliar word "hypallage".I came across Hurley's translation in an essay he wrote for Cadernos de Tradução, the journal of the translation department at Universida de Federal de Santa Caterina in Florianópolis, Brasil: What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges [PDF]. It is a magnificent article and I want to post about it in more detail, but I strongly encourage anyone interested in Borges to read it. One of Hurley's points in this piece is that the hypallage is a key element of Borges' style. In the following sentences, Borges refers to two more instances of hypallage: the "arid camel" from Lugones' own Lunario sentimental, and Æneid VI.268: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (approx. "They passed in darkness under the lonely night through shadow." -- according to Borges, a line that both "employs and surpasses this artifice.")You can hear Borges reading this dedication at Poema en audio. Lots more of his readings there too, which I haven't begun to check through yet.
posted evening of May 20th, 2009: 7 responses
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
A friend gave me Paulo Coelho's The Devil and Miss Prym for my birthday, and I've been reading it for the last couple of days. Some nice language but what is notably lacking is a sense of place -- the village is ostensibly in Galicia but there's nothing that really makes me think of this particular village in Galicia distinct from any other small town in any other country. This seems like a shortcoming to me -- Coelho is very obviously going for an impression of universality but he has not established the particulars of his story firmly enough for that to work for me. This is a working impression though, there is still a lot more book to read and it could turn around.
posted evening of May 19th, 2009: Respond
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Padeces cautiverio, pero habrás dado una palabra al poema.
I was reading from Labyrinths this afternoon and took a look at the third section of the book, "Parables", which had totally slipped from my memory. It is very short pieces, a page or less, not quite "fictions" because they are not plotted, just quick, terse observations of the human condition. The first two pieces, "Inferno, I, 32" and "Paradisio, XXXI, 108" use Dante's comedy to posit the impossibility of knowing one's place in the universe. Sharp and sweet. It looks like these pieces are almost all taken from Borges' 1960 book El hacedor (I think this is roughly "The Creator"; it was published in English as "Dreamtigers"), which is available online from literatura.us -- I think I will try to read some of them in their original language. (A note about translations, though: the translations in Labyrinths, mostly done by James E. Irby, are head and shoulders above the other Borges translations I've been looking at, mostly by Anthony Bonner.)Perhaps some feature of that crucified countenance lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was obliterated, so that God could be all of us.Who knows whether tonight we shall not see it in the labyrinth of our dreams and not even know it tomorrow.
posted evening of May 19th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 10th, 2009
I just made a fun, pleasant discovery; looking back at the Orhan Pamuk interview I was reading last night, I wanted to check whether the Paris Review had published a copy of it on the web. Turns out they did [PDF], and what's more it contains reproductions of a few pages of Pamuk's manuscript notes for The Black Book. Beautiful!
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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(Not today; yesterday -- today the sun is shining.)
Snufkin got a feeling that he wanted to write songs. He waited until he was quite sure of the feeling and one evening he got his mouth-organ from the bottom of his rucksack. In August, somewhere in Moominvalley, he had hit on five bars which would undoubtedly provide a marvellous beginning for a tune. They had come completely naturally as notes do when they have been left in peace. Now the time had come to take them out again and let them become a song about rain.
This is nice: last night I was reading Moominvalley in November with Sylvia, and we came across the passage above. Later on, and without being conscious of the coincidence until this morning, I sat down and finished writing out a song I have had in the back of my mind since two weeks ago (when I first thought of it I wrote down the first two bars) -- I'm tentatively calling it "Rainy Day".
An interesting thing with the key of this piece -- when I started out I was thinking it was in D minor; but then something happened in measure 5. If the three-note run at the end of that measure is D-E-G♮, then the song ends up resolving on D; if it is E-G♮-A, the resolution is on A, and the key is A phrygian. I am not sure what the accidental sharps on C and G are doing to the key. Hoping to record this later on, it's pretty hypnotic (like listening to a heavy rain outside, was the genesis of the working title.)
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, May 9th, 2009
In the Paris Review interview of Pamuk (from 2004):
Pamuk: I was [in Snow] underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing.... After Western ideas came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with a romantic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth.... On the other hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.
Interviewer: Have you ever written poetry?
Pamuk: ...I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this and then I tried to imagine -- if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing.
At Orbis Quintus, paledave links to a bunch of other Paris Review interviews.
posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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I'm very taken with this idea from "Pierre Menard" about total identification with the author. I've written before about striving for that reading fiction and essays, but haven't really thought about it in connection with poetry. But just now I had the thought (while experimenting with FB statusses), Why not try the final bit of Bolañ's "Resurección" in the first person -- substituting myself for "poetry"? I slip into the dream
like a dead diver
into the eye of God (Thanks to Jorge for the structuring of the translation.)
posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, May 7th, 2009
I happened on a nice site today; literatura.us has a good broad selection of short stories, essays and poetry in Spanish. Mostly Latin American, and all the usual suspects -- Cortázar, Borges, Cardenal, Neruda... -- and a lot of other authors that I know and more that I don't. Also there is a limited but well-chosen selection of stories from other languages translated into Spanish; I just about fell over laughing when I read the title of "Un dÃa perfecta para el pez plátano." I don't quite understand what this website is -- it is created by Ramón Paredes, who is a grad student at CUNY and is the author of Marinelly y otros mujeres -- is it just a selection of literature that he finds vital? Whatever, I'm very glad to have found out about it.
posted evening of May 7th, 2009: Respond
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