READIN

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

🦋 Dos cuentos argentinos

At 3% today, I read about the forthcoming Op Oloop, which will be the first of Juan Filloy's 27 novels to appear in English. Nice! It was also the first I had heard of Filloy, who appears to have had a long and important career. In honor of the occasion, I will try my hand at translating his short story "La vaca y el auto."

The cow and the car

by Juan Filloy

The rain has firmed up the unpaved road's surface. The recently rinsed atmosphere is fresh and clean. The sun's glory shines down at the end of March.

A car comes along at a high velocity. Beneath the pampa's skies -- diaphanous tourmaline cavern -- the swift car is a rampaging wildcat.

The moist fields give off a masculine odor, exciting to the lovely young woman who's driving. And accelerating, accelerating, until the current of air pierces her, sensuous. But...

All of a sudden, a cow. A cow, stock-still in the middle of the roadway. Screeching of brakes, shouting. The horn's stridency shatters the air. But the cow does not move. Hardly even a glance, watery and oblique, she chews her cud. And then, she bursts out:

-- But señorita!... Why all this noise? Why do you make such a hurry, when I'm not interested in your haste? My life has an idyllic rhythm, incorruptible. I am an old matron who never gives way to frivolity. Please: don't make that racket! Your clangor is scaring the countryside. You do not understand why; you don't even see it. The countryside flies past, by your side; your velocity turns it into a rough, variegated visual pulp. But I live in it. It is where I hone my senses, they are not blunt like yours... Where did you find this morbid thirst which absorbs distance? Why do you dose yourself with vertigo? You subjugate life with urgency, instead of appreciating its intensity. Come on! lay off the horn. Time and space will not let themselves be ruled by muscles of steel and brass. Speed is an illusion: it brings you sooner to the realization of your own impotence. The signifier of all culture is the intrinsic slowness of the unconscious, which unconsciously chooses its destiny. But you already know yours, girl: to crash into matter before you crash into materialism. So, good. Don't get mad! I'm moving. Let your nerves once again become one with the ignition. Reanimate, with explosions of gas, your motor and your brain. The roadway is clear. Adiós! Take care of yourself...

The car tears away, muttering insults in malevolence and naphtha.

Parsimonious, chewing and chewing, the cow casts a long, watery gaze. And then a lengthy, ironic moo, which accompanies the car towards the curve of the horizon...

And while I'm doing this: I get a lot of misdirected Google hits by people looking for "a translation of El dios de las moscas" or similar phrases -- I had never heard of this story until people started coming to my site looking for it; but I like it. (But do your own homework, people!) It is by Marco Denevi. Dare I say, a little bit in the manner of Borges.

The god of the flies

by Marco Denevi

The flies imagined their god. It was another fly. The god of the flies was a fly, sometimes green, sometimes black and golden, sometimes pink, sometimes white, sometimes purple, an unrealistic fly, a beautiful fly, a monstrous fly, a fearsome fly, a benevolent fly, a vengeful fly, a righteous fly, a young fly, an aged fly, but always a fly. Some of them augmented his size until he was enormous, like an ox, others pictured him so tiny he could not be seen. In some religions he had no wings («He flies, he sustains himself, but he has no need of wings»), in others he had an infinite number of wings. Here his antennæ were arranged like horns, there his eyes consumed all of his head. For some he buzzed constantly, for others he was mute, but it meant the same thing. And for everyone, when flies died, they would pass in rapid flight into paradise. Paradise was a piece of carrion, stinking, rotted, which the souls of dead flies would devour for all eternity and which was never consumed; for this celestial offal would continually be replenished and grow beneath the swarm of flies. --of the good ones. For also there were evil flies; for them there was a hell. The hell of the condemned flies was a place without shit, without waste, without garbage, without stink, with nothing at all, a place clean and sparkling and to top it off, illuminated by a dazzling light; that is to say, an abhorrent place.

posted evening of February 7th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, February 6th, 2010

🦋 Pilgrimage

A couple of passages from Diary of a Bad Year, having to do with the relationship between reader and writer. From Chapter 28, "On Tourism":

A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were , in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.

During his later years, Tolstoy was treated not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage. His contemporary Walt Whitman endured a similar fate. But neither had much wisdom to offer: wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they were ordinary men with ordinary fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect.

Usually the writers... claim that they write to me because my books speak directly to them; but it soon emerges that the books speak only in the way that strangers whispering together might seem to be whispering about one. That is to say, there is an element of the delusional in the claim, and of the paranoid in the mode of reading.

posted morning of February 6th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, February third, 2010

🦋 Political essays again

I'm spending a lot of time going back and forth, as I read Diary of a Bad Year, trying to figure out what Coetzee gains and what he loses, in presenting his essays as part of a novel. The thoughts are being presented as the thoughts of a fictional character -- though the fictional character is clearly the same person as Coetzee the author -- does that give the author less of a stake in the "Strong Opinions"? One of the essays (Chapter 26) makes mention of Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture, and says,

When one speaks in one's own person -- that is, not through one's art -- to denounce some politician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest which one is likely to lose because it takes place on ground where one's opponent is far more practised and adept. "Of course Mr Pinter is entitled to his point of view," it will be replied. "After all, he enjoys the freedoms of a democratic society, freedoms which we are this moment endeavouring to protect against extremists."

Clearly Coetzee is thinking about what he's doing in this book as he writes this paragraph. Speaking as Pinter did "takes some gumption," he says -- does it take less gumption to put such words in the mouth of your main character? I sort of think it must not -- at least not in this case, where everything is so clearly delineated to point out that this is Coetzee speaking out against violations of decency by Western (and specifically American) governments. There comes a time, he says, "when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act" -- and possibly he is couching that action in the form of a novel just because that is what he does well, that is how he knows to get his message across.

posted evening of February third, 2010: 4 responses
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Tuesday, February second, 2010

🦋 Political essays

I started reading Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year last night and am already ready to recommend it -- a bit like Elizabeth Costello but I think much more engaging and immediate; and the funny structure of the book is a real treat to read. A couple of different stories are being interwoven/superimposed on the page -- the top half of the page is the book of political essays that the main character is writing (under the title "Strong Opinions"), the bottom half is his first-person narrative of his life at the time he is writing the book; in some chapters the page is divided into thirds, with the bottom third being the first-person narrative of his neighbor, whom he has hired to type up the manuscript and on whom he has vain designs of seduction. This sounds kind of strange I guess, and like it would be really difficult to maintain; but Coetzee does a fantastic job of keeping the multiple threads running.

It seems pretty clear that the essays are Coetzee's voice; does this make the main character (who is after all the author of the essays) Coetzee? It kind of should, but I think he is intended rather as a fictional character. I'm not sure if this is as complicated semantically as it is seeming right now.* Anyway, the essays frequently tread dangerously close to cynicism; but (so far) they are not falling into the chasm.

As during the time of kings it would have been naïve to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naïve to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. The electorate -- the demos -- believes that its task is to choose the best man, but in truth its task is much simpler: to anoint a man (vox populi vox dei), it does not matter whom. Counting ballots may seem to be a means of finding which is the true (that is, the loudest) vox populi; but the power of the ballot-count formula, like the power of the formula of the firstborn male, lies in the fact that it is objective, unambiguous, outside the field of political contestation. The toss of a coin would be equally objective, equally unambiguous, equally incontestable, and could therefore equally well be claimed (as it has been claimed) to represent vox dei. We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin -- tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling -- but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of the coin?

* As of Chapter 10, it is becoming more clear that the main character is indeed intended to be Coetzee -- the country he is living in is identified as Australia, he refers to himself as a white South African, the neighbor calls him "Señor C."

posted evening of February second, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

🦋 Vision

Aquella noche Jacinta vio a Zacarías de nuevo en sueños. El ángel ya no vestía en negro. Iba desnudo, y su piel estaba recubierta de escamas. Ya no le acompañaba su gato, sino una serpiente blanca enroscada en el torso. Su cabello había crecido hasta la cintura y su sonrisa, la sonrisa de caramelo que había besado en la catedral de Toledo, aparecía surcada de dientes triangulares y serrados como los que había visto en algunos peces de alta mar agitando la cola en la lonja de pescadores. Años mas tarde, la muchacha describiría esta visión a un Julián Carax de dieciocho años, recordando que el día en que Jacinta iba a dejar la pensión de la Ribera para mudarse al palacete Aldaya, supo que su amiga la Ramoneta había sido asesinada a cuchilladas en el portal aquella misma noche y que su bebé había muerto de frío en brazos del cadáver. Al saberse la noticia, los inquilinos de la pensión se enzarzaron en una pelea a gritos, puñadas y arañozos para disputarse las escasas pertenencias de la muerta. Lo único que dejaron fue el que había sido su tesoro más preciado: un libro. Jacinta lo reconoció, porque muchas noches la Ramoneta le había pedido si podía leerle una o dos páginas. Ella nunca había aprendido a leer.

That night, Jacinta again saw Zacarías in her dreams. The angel was no longer clothed in black. He was nude, and his skin was covered with scales. And he was no longer accompanied by his cat; instead a white serpent twined around his torso. His hair had grown down to his waist, and his smile -- the caramel smile which she had kissed in the cathedral of Toledo -- appeared to be cut through by triangular teeth, serrated like those she had seen in some fish of the high seas, their tails writhing at the fish market. Years later, the girl would describe this vision to a Julián Carax eighteen years old, remembering that on the day when Jacinta was leaving the Ribera boarding house to move to Aldaya's mansion, she learned that her friend Ramoneta had been murdered, stabbed in the doorway that same night, and that her baby had died of exposure in the corpse's arms. On learning the news, the tenants of the boarding house got in a screaming fight, throwing fists and scratching in a row over the dead woman's meager possessions. The only thing left was what had been her most cherished treasure: a book. Jacinta recognized it, for on many nights Ramoneta had asked if she'd read a page or two. Herself, she had never learned to read.

Maybe the most striking thing is, the construction of the book is getting less transparent -- in the first half of the book, it has often been too blindingly obvious, just where Ruiz Zafón is going with each detail of the plot. As Daniel and Fermín move through Santa Lucía and listen to Jacinta's story, it is refreshingly hard to see where they're going.

* Or, well, nix that -- I was reading too much into the ellipses. But they kissed passionately, which for the purposes of this story seems to come to about the same thing.

posted evening of January 31st, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, January 30th, 2010

🦋 Going to

If nothing else, La sombra del viento is certainly broadening my understanding of Spanish tenses. For instance, I did not know there was a present continuous in Spanish -- and it does not seem to be very common, certainly not as ubiquitous as in English, but occasionally a character will say something like "¡Lo está inventando!" ("You're making that up!")* -- Daniel said this to Fermín a few chapters ago, I've forgotten just what the context was. And today I see for the first time something that looks a lot like the English future progressive** ("going to ...") when Fermín says "Me parece que va siendo hora de que nos dejemos de remilgos y de picar al portal como si pidiésemos limosna. En este asunto hay que entrar por la puerta de atrás." -- which I am reading as, "It seems to me that there's going to come a time when we will need to leave aside our squeamishness and stop knocking on the door as if we were begging for alms. In this matter it's necessary to enter through the back door." And a little later, he says "Pues vaya desempolvando el disfraz de monaguillo" -- something like "Then go dust off your altar-boy disguise" but expressed with that same combination of ir + -ndo, "You are going to dust off." In English you can say "You are going to" do something in an imperative voice, maybe that's what is going on here.

In general Fermín's language is a lot more flowery than that of the other characters, and harder to read without a dictionary. I believe Daniel remarked on this at some point right around the time Fermín was first introduced. I'm thinking Fermín is Ruiz Zafón's nod to Picaresque literature, he is intended as an archaism.

* More precisely, "¡Todo esto se lo está inventando usted!" -- the context is that Fermín is telling him the indigent hospital's hearse wagon had been donated "by a company from Hospitalet de Llobregat specializing in butcher products, of dubious reputation, which years later was involved in a scandal." Fermín replies in turn that his "gifts of imagination do not extend so far."

** Is this the correct name for what I'm talking about?

posted morning of January 30th, 2010: 2 responses
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Friday, January 29th, 2010

🦋 Reading difficult books

At The Millions, Garth Hallberg discusses Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor -- the "Difficult Book par excellence"; in the course of this discussion he describes the experience of reading difficult books with marvelous concision: "A willingness to let things wash over you can be the difference between sublimity and seasickness." Yes! I love this; I am adding it to my list of epigraphs for the site.

(via Conversational Reading.)

posted evening of January 29th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, January 28th, 2010

🦋 Salinger

What do I have to say about Salinger? Not much really -- I loved reading his books as a young man, they have not stayed with me very much though, except for a couple of his short stories. A great writer certainly, but not someone I have spent very much time thinking about in my adult life. I don't want to let the occasion of his passing go unmentioned though -- the books felt extremely important at the time I was reading them, and they definitely played a role in my growing up as a reader. So I'll link to a couple of other bloggers who have more to say about him than I.

• Alvy Singer looks forward to "the upcoming war between New York publishers over thousands of unpublished items for the pleasure of completists (us)."
• Manosuelta recalls reading "The Laughing Man".
• SEK draws some parallels between reading Salinger and reading Zinn. (...And Hilobrow imagines the History of the United States told by Holden C.)
• Michael Sweeney reprints a piece he wrote last year, thanking J.D. for his books.

posted evening of January 28th, 2010: Respond

🦋 A Stone Raft Sailing to Haïti

The Saramago Foundation announces that a new edition of The Stone Raft will be published, with all profits given to the Red Cross's relief efforts in Haïti.

Update: no, I misread that. The foundation is not donating all profits to the Red Cross, but rather "the entire 15€ purchase price of the book" -- rather more substantial a commitment.

posted morning of January 28th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, January 21st, 2010

🦋 Ulysses, seen

✷ Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing­gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

posted evening of January 21st, 2010: Respond
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