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Saturday, April 24th, 2010
(I see other translators have rendered it "Roaming" or "Vagabond" in F and B, these may be closer to an accurate translation --  I'm leaving it "Wandering" thinking that reflects the directionless feeling I get from reading the story and trying to inhabit B's character.) In this paragraph B is thinking about how he knows the authors listed on the magazine's cover. Notice something interesting with tense, which is that the story having been told up to here in the present, here Bolaño wants to loosen the focus a little so he shifts into a mix of past tenses and actually goes so far as to alert the reader that's what's going on.
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La Revista, que aparece o aparecÃa tres veces al año por iniciativa de Marc Dachy, está editada en Bruselas, por TRANSéDITION, y tiene o tenÃa su domicilio social en la rue Henry van Zuylen, número 59. Roberto Altmann, en una época, fue un artisto famoso. ¿Quién recuerda ahora a Roberto Altmann? piensa B. Lo mismo con Carlfriedrich Claus. Pierre Guyotat fue un novelista notable. Pero notable no es sinonimo de memorable. De hecho a B le hubiera gustado ser como Guyotat, en otro tiempo, cuando B era joven y leÃa las obras de Guyotat. Ese Guyotat calvo y poderoso. Ese Guyotat dispuesto a comerse cualquiera en la oscuridad de un chambre de bonne. A Mirtha Dermisache no la recuerda, pero su nombre le suena de algo, posiblemente una mujer hermosa, una mujer elegante con casi total seguridad. Sophie Podolsky fue una poeta a la que él y su amigo L apreciaron (e incluso se podria decir que amaron) ya desde México, cuando B y L vivÃan en México y tenÃan apenas algo más de veinte años. Roland Barthes, bueno, todo el mundo sabe quién es Roland Barthes. De Dotremont tiene noticias vagas, tal vez leyó algunos poemas suyos en alguna antologÃa perdida. Brion Gysin fue el amigo de Burroughs, el que le dio la idea de los cut-up. Y finalmente Henri Lefebvre. B no conoce a Lefebvre de nada. Es el único al que no conoce de nada y su nombre, en aquella librerÃa de viejo, se ilumina de pronto como una cerilla en un cuarto oscuro. Al menos, de esa forma B lo siente. A él le gustarÃa que se hubiera iluminado como una tea. Y no en un cuarto oscuro sino en una caverna, pero lo cierto es que Lefebvre, el nombre de Lefebvre, resplandece brevemente de aquella manera y no de otra.
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The magazine, which appears (or was appearing) three times a year under the initiative of Marc Dachy, is published in Brussels, by TRANSéDITION; it has (had) its home office on rue Henry van Zuylen, number 59. Roberto Altmann, at one time he was a famous artist. Who remembers Roberto Altmann nowadays? thinks B. The same with Carlfriedrich Claus. Pierre Guyotat was a noteworthy novelist. But noteworthy is not synonymous with memorable. In fact B would have liked to be like Guyotat, in another age, when B was young and was reading Guyotat's works. This bald, powerful Guyotat. This Guyotat who was fixing something for dinner, in the darkness of a chambre de bonne. He can't place Mirtha Dermisache, but her name reminds him of something, maybe of a beautiful woman, almost certainly an elegant woman. Sophie Podolsky was a poet whom he and his friend L had appreciated, you could even say adored, way back in Mexico, when B and L were living in Mexico and were hardly over twenty years old. Roland Barthes, well good, everyone knows who Roland Barthes is. Of Dotremont he has heard vague reports; perhaps he has read some of his poems in some lost anthology. Brion Gysin was that friend of Burroughs, the one who gave him the idea of cut-ups. And then at last Henri Lefebvre. B hasn't seen Lefebvre at all. That's the only one whose name he has never seen at all; in that anticuarian bookstore, the light comes on right away, like a match struck in a dark room. Or at least, that's about how B feels. He would like if it would light his way like a torch. And not in a dark room but in a cavern -- what's for sure is that Lefebvre, the name Lefebvre, shines briefly in just that manner, not in any other. |
I am not satisfied with certain bits of this translation, most notably the sentence about Guyotat fixing something for dinner, and the last couple of clauses of the last sentence. And whether B and L are adoring Podolsky's work or the poet herself. If you notice anything that sounds off or see a way to improve the way it sounds, please mention it in comments.
 One thought running through my head as I go over this passage, is how Bolaño can write using bits of his experience, and I don't necessarily need to label the writing a form of memoir -- I have a habit of thinking of The Savage Detectives as if it were, or were in parts, a work of autobiography -- the bit about Sophie Podolsky references a bit of Bolaño's experience, and also a bit of Belano's experience, and I don't really see any need to untangle which is which.
posted evening of April 24th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Bolaño spends a lot of his time in these stories talking about other authors. A long, climactic scene in "Days of 1978" is spent explicating the plot of Andrei Rublev; a central point of interest in "Wandering in France and Belgium" is the cryptic writing of Henri Lefebvre (whom I hadn't heard of before reading this story but who appears oddly not to be the same as the Henri Lefebvre whom I can find via Google -- his dates of birth and death and his life story and (afaict) work are all distinct. Seems very strange to reference a name, a name "B does not know from anywhere" and which gets B interested in deciphering his scribblings, and then have it be a different person from the historical owner of that name... (Lefebvre is supposed to have contributed a piece to an issue of Luna Park which also contains writing by Sophie Podolsky, Brion Gysin, Roland Barthes, Roberto Altmann.):
The second day, after finishing a novel in which the murderer lived in a retirement home (although this retirement home seemed more like Carroll's looking glass), he makes the rounds of the anticuarian bookstores; he finds one on the rue de Vieux Colmbier and here he finds an old issue of Luna Park, number 2, a monograph devoted  to graphics and typography, with texts and pictures (and after all, text is a picture and the reverse as well) by Roberto Altmann, Frédéric Baal, Roland Barthes, Jacques Colonne, Carlfriedrich Claus, Mirtha Dermisache, Christian Dotremont, Pierre Guyotat, Brion Gysin, Henri Lefebvre and Sophie Podolsky.
And then a page is given over to describing B's acquaintance with the work of each of these authors except Lefebvre... It seems very unlike what I am used to. Not complaining, not at all.
 Further... The issue Bolaño is referencing is the actual Luna Park #2, which features actual logograms by an actual Lefebvre. If the biographical information Bolaño gives is accurate (and it's hard for me to see how it wouldn't be), this is just a different person with the same name as the Lefebvre profiled in the Wikipædia article linked above.
posted evening of April 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Patrick Farley has a new plan for reloading Electric Sheep and making it into an working proposition. If you love great webcomix, help him out with a dollar or two -- he is one of the best authors out there, it would be great to see new content from him.
posted evening of April 21st, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
  I must thank Alicia Kennedy for alerting me to the existence of a BBC adaptation of White Teeth (2002), and to its availability at hulu.com. I watched the first episode this evening; it is just magnificently, ebulliently well done. Smith's strong narrative voice is missing, but the filmmakers (Julian Jarrold, director; Simon Burke, screenplay) have found their own distinctive, resonant approach to the story. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
posted evening of April 20th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 19th, 2010
 Today I read a comment to the effect that Bolaño's style in Nazi Literature in the Americas was influenced heavily by Borges and by J.R. Wilcock. Well Borges of course, think I; but whose is this other name? ...Turns out he is a very intriguing Argentine author from the mid-20th C. (who spent much of his life in Italy, and it looks like much of his writing is in Italian). Also he was a civil engineer, like my father, and like Oswaldo. Here is a story of his I found online, the story of Yahweh's messenger looking for work in the ages when Yahweh no longer speaks to His creations -- powerful stuff!
El ángelpor J.R. Wilcock
El ángel Elzevar está desocupado, lo único que sabe hacer es llevar mensajes pero ya no hay más mensajes que llevar, y entonces el ángel da vueltas revisando en la basura del gran basurero municipal en busca de restos de comida y sobras de fruta: algo tiene que comer. De noche, hizo la prueba de recorrer la orilla del rÃo en calidad de prostituto todo servicio, y de hecho sabe hacer muchas cosas y su condición angélica lo exime de cualquier escrúpulo moral; pero la mayorÃa de las veces el encuentro termina mal, por ejemplo cuando el cliente, antes o después, descubre que Elzevar no tiene sexo: por lo que parece, en ciertas ocupaciones el sexo es particularmente requerido, e incluso indispensable. Para aplacar al desilusionado cliente, Elzevar le muestra un poco cómo vuela, primero a la derecha, después a la izquierda, después le pasa sobre la cabeza y le desordena los cabellos como una brisa ligera; pero los clientes de la orilla del rÃo exigen algo más concreto que una normal exhibición de levitación; uno le mordió el tobillo en pleno vuelo, otro calvo con peluca lo llamó sodomita y un tercero lo denunció a la policÃa, basándose en un artÃculo del Código Penal que prohÃbe exaltar la seducción y otros dos artÃculos del Código de Navegación Aérea relativos al vuelo urbano sin documentos. Después de lo cual Elzevar tuvo que mudarse a otro recodo del rÃo, peligrosamente frecuentado por familias y pescadores con cañas, incluso de noche.
Estos inconvenientes, natural consecuencia de su desocupación temporaria, no pueden realmente preocupar a un ángel. Para comenzar los ángeles son inmortales, y son pocos los mortales que pueden decir lo mismo. En cuanto a la falta de mensajes, un dÃa u otro tendrá que terminar. Nuevos emisores se están alistando, y los potenciales receptores por cierto no escasean. Ya en el pasado le sucedió estar sin trabajo por perÃodos más o menos largos, sin hacer nada. Basura de comer nunca le ha faltado; es verdad que la prostitución angélica ya no es lo que era , pero de cualquier forma, hasta que esté listo el nuevo mensaje, hay que seguir en contacto con los hombres. Mientras tanto Elzevar siempre puede encontrar trabajo en un circo, en tanto lamentablemente muchas cosas cambiaron desde que existe la televisión. Si el Gran Silencio durase mucho, otros caminos interesantes y poco recorridos se le abren: por ejemplo el cine underground, la aplicación de antiparasitarios, la manutención de computadoras, la limpieza de ascensores y los desfiles masculinos de moda.
| | The Angelby J.R. Wilcock
The angel Elzevar is unemployed -- the only thing he knows how to do is carry messages, but there aren't any more messages for him to carry, so the angel wanders through the garbage in the great municipal garbage dump, in search of food scraps and vegetable trimmings: he needs something to eat. At night, he tries his luck along the river's bank, offering his services as a prostitute; for to tell the truth, there are many things he can do, and his angelic status exempts him from any moral scruple; but the majority of these encounters end poorly, for example when the client discovers (sooner or later) that Elzevar has no genitals: as it appears, in certain occupations genitals are a particular requirement, even indispensable. In order to placate the disillusioned client, Elzevar demonstrates for him how he can fly, a bit on the right, a bit on the left, then passing over his head and toussling his hair like a soft breeze; but the clients on the river's bank are looking for something more concrete than a simple exhibition of levitation -- one bites his ankle as he is flying over, another, a bald man wearing a wig, calls him a faggot; a third denounces him to the police, basing his accusation on an article of the Penal Code which prohibits solicitation, and also on two articles of the Code of Navigation relating to unlicensed flight in urban areas. After that, Elzevar has to move around the bend of the river, to an area dangerously thick with families and fishermen, even at night.
These inconveniences, the natural consequence of his temporary unemployment, are no real distraction for an angel. To begin with, angels are immortal; there are few mortals who can say as much. And as far as the drought of messages goes, one day or another that will be over. New transmissions are readying themselves, and potential recipients are hardly in short supply. It's happened in the past now and then, that he's been without work for however long a time, and it hasn't affected him. He's never been lacking for trash to eat. It's true that angelic prostitution is not what it once was; but somehow or another, until the next message is ready, he has to remain in contact with people. Elzevar could always find work in a circus, though here too, lamentably, much has changed since the invention of television. If the Great Silence lasts too long, other avenues could open, interesting and little explored: for example the underground cinema, the application of static suppressors, computer maintenance, cleaning of elevators, male modeling.
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Note: I don't know about "Elzevar" ("El-Zephar"?), likely this is the name of a particular angel but I'm not familiar enough with the Christian pantheon to know which one it would be or how to render it in English. Scanning Paradise Lost is not turning anything up... And is "The Great Silence" used to refer to the post-Mosaic times in which God no longer sends angels to communicate his wishes or commands to humanity? Wilcock's capitalizing that made me think he is referring to a term that is in use. "Solicitation" is a pure guess at a tranlation of "exaltar la seducción".
 Update: Look at that, Wilcock translated Jack Kerouac into Spanish! Interesting... Is this book Desolation Angels?
posted evening of April 19th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Last month's issue of Words Without Borders has newly-translated poetry by a Chilean poet and an Argentine: "Tales of Autumn in Gerona" is Erica Mena's translation of Bolaño's "Prosa del otoño en Gerona," excerpted from the forthcoming Tres (which Bolaño considered to be one of his best books); and "Roosters and Bones" is Elizabeth Polli's translation of "Gallos y huesos," by Sergio Chejfec. And, well, lots more too -- Words Without Borders is consistently full of interesting stuff.
posted evening of April 17th, 2010: Respond
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On re-reading, I find the last third of "Last Evenings on Earth" confusing. It seems like there is supposed to be some confusion, like that's the point of it -- the title suggests (and B seems to be worried) that B and his father die in Acapulco; but I'm pretty sure (though the ending is totally open) that's not what is going to happen, rather it's some element of their relationship that is dying. Bolaño sets this up at the beginning of the final section of the story when he says, There are things you can say and things that can't be said, B thinks, depressed. From this moment on, he knows that he is approaching the disaster. ... And here ends the parenthesis, here end the forty-eight hours of grace, when B and his father have visited the bars of Acapulco, have slept on the beach, worn out, have eaten and even laughed; here begins an icy period, a period seemingly normal but dominated by some frozen gods (gods who otherwise never interfere with the heat which reigns in Acapulco), a few hours which in another time, perhaps when he was a teenager, B would have called boredom, but nowadays he would never use that term; more likely disaster, a peculiar sort of disaster, a disaster which on top of everything else will distance B from his father -- the price they have to pay to live.
-- there's a lot strange about this paragraph -- why is this "the price they have to pay to live"? -- but I'm primarily interested in the notion that B is being further distanced from his father here. The theme of the whole trip seems to have been B distancing himself from his father; at the end they seem if anything a little closer than over the course of the trip. Look at the penultimate paragraph of the story: B thinks of Gui Rosey, who disappeared from the planet without leaving a trace, docile as a lamb while the Nazi's hymns rose up to a blood-red sky, and sees himself as Gui Rosey, a Gui Rosey buried in some vacant lot in Acapulco, disappeared forever, but then he hears his father, who is making some accusation to the ex-clavadista, and he realizes that unlike Gui Rosey, he is not alone. This has the feeling of an important moment for B, the moment where he grows closer to his father (and given the barroom-brawl setting, it must be said there is a lot of potential for this to be corny) -- but the moment has been set up as one of further alienation. So I come away from the story not sure what to make of it -- B's defining characteristic is his passivity, his father's might be his boorishness or it might be his cool-headedness "when it counts." I feel for B and hope he has a better time on his next vacation...
posted evening of April 17th, 2010: Respond
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 The high frequency in "Last Evenings on Earth" of the word clavadista (diver) makes me think about Bolaño's poem Resurrection: "Poetry slips into the dream/
like a dead diver/
into the eye of God." The word translated as "diver" here is buzo; I wonder what the distinction is. Is clavadista specifically a "cliff diver"? Is buzo a deep-sea diver?
Update: Yes, I think (based on Google image results) that it's a distinction between clavadista="an athlete who jumps gracefully into the water" and buzo="an explorer who wears a scuba suit and pokes around underwater" -- the fact that both of these are "diver" in English is coincidental, it's not part of the source material. Actually this makes the imagery in "Resurrection" a lot easier to understand.
posted afternoon of April 17th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, April 16th, 2010
In "Last Evenings on Earth," there's some ambiguity about the nature of the book B is reading. It's identified as a book of French Surrealist poetry with pictures and brief bios of the authors; but the long paragraph about Gui Rosey's disappearance reads like a summary of the book, and the book being summarized sounds more like Savage Detectives than like a brief biographical sketch. Perhaps what is being summarized is what's going on in B's imagination as he reads...
posted evening of April 16th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 12th, 2010
I knew nothing about this book or about this author, until I read Borges' foreword today. Now I want to seek it out and read it... This translation is fairly close to literal, it seems to work pretty well in this case.
From Parmenides of Elea until today, idealism -- the doctrine which affirms that the universe, including time and space and perhaps ourselves, is nothing more than an appearance or a chaos of appearances -- has been professed in diverse forms by many thinkers. Perhaps nobody has educed it with greater clarity than bishop Berkeley; nobody with greater conviction, desperation, and satiric force than the young Scot Thomas Carlyle in his intricate Sartor Resartus (1831). This Latin can be rendered as The Patched Tailor or Mended Tailor; the work is no less singular than its name.
Carlyle invokes the authority of an imaginary professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (Son of God Droppings of the Devil), who publishes in Germany a vast volume dealing with the philosophy of sand*, which is to say appearances. The Sartor Resartus, hardly more than two hundred pages, is a mere commentary and compendium of this gigantic work. Cervantes (whom Carlyle had read in Spanish) had attributed the Quixote to a Moorish author, Cide Hamete Benengeli. This book includes a pathetic biography of Teufelsdröckh, in reality a cryptic, secret autobiography, full of jokes. Nietzsche accused Richter of making Carlyle the worst writer in Britain. The influence of Richter is evident, but he was no more than a dreamer of tranquil dreams, not infrequently tedious, where Carlyle is a dreamer of nightmares. In his history of English literature, Saintsbury holds that the Sartor Resartus is the logical extension of a paradox of Swift's, in the profuse style of Sterne, master of Richter. Carlyle himself mentions the connection to Swift, who wrote in A Tale of a Tub that certain pieces of ermine hide and a wig, placed together in a certain fashion, make up what we call a judge, just as a particular combination of black satin and Cambray is called a bishop. Idealism affirms that the universe is appearance; Carlyle insists that it is a farce. He was an atheist and believed he had disavowed the faith of his parents; as Spencer observed, his conception of the world, of man and of behavior shows that he never ceased to be a rigid Calvinist. His gloomy pessimism, his ethics of iron and fire, are perhaps a Presbyterian heritage; his mastery of the art of the insult, his doctrine that history is a Sacred Scripture which we continually decipher and transcribe and in which we are also written, prefigures -- fairly precisely -- Leon Bloy. He prophecied, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, that democracy is a chaos at the mercy of the electoral urns, and counseled the conversion of all the bronze statues into bathtubs. I know of no book more ardent, more volcanic, more weary with desolation, than Sartor Resartus.
(The literal translation falls down a bit in the final paragraph, I need to go over that a bit more...)
 * (Maybe worth noting in this regard that 30 years later, Borges would title one of his last works of prose The Book of Sand. Or maybe just a coincidence... The first story in The Book of Sand does make a passing reference to Sartor Resartus FWIW.)
posted evening of April 12th, 2010: 3 responses
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