READIN

Tuesday, June first, 2010

🦋 A Brief DiÅ¿courÅ¿e of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in N O R F O L K.

The ending of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" finds Borges sitting in the hotel in Adrogué where his family spent their summers during his childhood, working on revisions to "an uncertain Quevedian translation... of Browne's Urn Burial." (What is "Quevedian"? -- It must mean "in the manner of Quevedo" -- I have no idea what this would mean in this context...^✱)

Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial is a 17th-Century discourse on an archæological discovery, a Roman grave site in Norfolk. The text of Hydriotaphia is online at the University of Chicago's Sir Thomas Browne page, with this amusing note from the maintainer of the site:

Hydriotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus were published together in 1658, on which edition this web edition is based. They form a work that is somewhat difficult but rewarding to read. The number of critics who have a rock-solid grasp of the entire work can be counted on the fingers of one foot, so there's an open field out there for those inclined towards such work. Most critics read Hydriotaphia and comment on it as though they had in fact finished both sides. Among those whose comments are more interesting are Carlyle, Lytton Strachey, and, somewhat surprisingly, Virginia Woolf. Among those whose work seems to be based on something else the stand-out is Gosse^✽, whose commentary is so unrelated to the text putatively in front of him that it becomes a case-study in itself.

William Hamilton's address "Sir Thomas Browne, Jorge Luis Borges y Yo" is reprinted in the Atlantic of June 2003.

Borges refers to his translation of Browne's Urne Buriall in this interview. It seems like he did actually translate it or part of it in Quevedian Spanish, I am looking for more info about this.

Christopher Johnson has an essay in Translation and Literature called "Intertextuality and Translation: Borges, Browne, and Quevedo".

^✱Possibly "Quevedian" just means the language of the translation is archaic, 17th-Century Spanish. -- More info from John and Rick in comments.

^✽And Gosse père wrote Omphalos, which prefigures Russell's idea that the world was created just minutes ago with people's memories created intact, which is referenced in a footnote to "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" -- bringing us full circle.

posted evening of June first, 2010: 5 responses
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Saturday, May 29th, 2010

🦋 Sur

I am not the first author of the story called "The Library of Babel"; those curious as to its history and prehistory may consult the appropriate page of Sur, No. 59, which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus and Lasswitz, Lewis Carroll and Aristotle.

—foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths

Update: Found it!

posted afternoon of May 29th, 2010: 2 responses
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🦋 Memory, History, Fiction:

At UCLA in 2002, Saramago reads from some of his work:

posted morning of May 29th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, May 28th, 2010

🦋 Aurelianus' sources, and Pannonia's

I am understanding Aurelianus' motivations a little better, re-reading "The Theologians": previously I got caught up in the dispute between the Church and the Monotoni heretics, so that I missed the primary plot of the story, which is Aurelianus' striving for political stature in the Church. (This ties in nicely with the previous story, "The Dead Man," about Benjamín Otálora's striving for political stature in a gang of smugglers in Uruguay -- the two stories have little else in common.) This line seems key, following on the information of the heresy and of John of Pannonia's intention to argue against it:

Aureliano deploró esas nuevas, sobre todo la última. Sabía que en materia teólogica no hay novedad sin riesgo...*

This news troubled Aurelianus deeply, principally the last bit of news. As he was well aware, there can be in theological matters no innovation free of risk...

Aurelianus is broadly read; he feels guilty at not being completely familiar with his library. (I know the feeling!) Here are some of the sources he uses in constructing his (ultimately too complex, too laboriously researched) refutation of the Monotoni:

• On the Failure of Oracles, from Plutarch's Moralia.
• Euripides' Bacchæ (in which Pentheus claims to see "two suns").
• Origen's De Principiis -- Aurelianus quotes Origen's denial that Judas will betray Christ a second time.
• Cicero's Academics -- Cicero rejects as ludicrous the possibility of multiple parallel universes.

Oh and one more source, the book which started the whole ball of heresy rolling is the twelfth volume of Augustine's City of God (Chapter 13), miraculously left undamaged when the barbarians ransacked a monastic library a century before Aurelianus' birth. What a fascinating story this is!

* Update: Well and also,

Cayó la Rueda ante la Cruz, pero Aureliano y Juan prosiguieron su batalla secreta. Militaban los dos en el mismo ejército, anhelaban el mismo galardón, guerreaban contra el mismo Enemigo, pero Aureliano no escritó una palabra que inconfesablemente no propendiera a superar a Juan.

The Wheel fell before the Cross; but Aurelianus and John continued their secret battle. They both rode forth in the same army, strove for the same prize, made war against the same Enemy; but Aurelianus did not write a single word which was not -- inconfessibly -- directed at overwhelming John.

** (Note that Naturalis Historia is also one of the books which Borges leaves with Funes (the memorious) the second time he sees him.)

posted afternoon of May 28th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Farting Around

I was in St. Marks Bookshop last night (on my way to meet some friends for a wonderful dinner at the Ukranian National Home) when this fantastic book caught my eye... Almost the perfectly ideal book to buy on one's way to (what amounts to) a meeting of the Thomas Pynchon Fan Club.

Not just the cover (what caught my eye initially) is great, either; Dr. Allen's voice is a joy to read. Here is her description of the book, from the introduction:

We might think of this book as "drutling," a term that, according to John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, applies to a "dog or horse that frequently stops in its way, and ejects a small quantity of dung at intervals." It farts around, its progress nonteleological, visiting topics as the wind blows, spending too long on some ideas, returning to spend even longer on them, and undoubtedly omitting more than it digresses upon.... The fart, which disposes of the body's waste gases, is the sign par excellence of the futile endeavor: we fart around when we do nothing useful.

Dinner at the Ukranian National Home was just great. This seems like one of the very best places in the city for having dinner and chatting with a largish group of people, at least on a night when they are not busy -- only one or two other tables were occupied, and the warmth and intimacy of the dining room (and the Obolon) made everybody comfortable. I had the halušky (thick homemade gnocchi) with sauerkraut.

posted morning of May 28th, 2010: 1 response
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

🦋 Homeric scribblings

I've been thinking about asemic writing over the past few weeks, and I was happy to notice this passage (which I had forgotten completely) when I was rereading "The Immortal" this morning:

Quienes hayan leído con atención el relato de mis trabajos, recordarán que un hombre de la tribu me siguió como un perro podría seguirme, hasta la sombra irregular de los muros. Cuando salí del último sótano, lo encontré en la boca de la caverna. Estaba tirado en la arena, donde trazaba torpemente y borraba una hilera de signos, que eran como letras de los sueños, que uno está a punto de entender y luego se juntan. Al principio, creí que se trataba de una escritura bárbara; después vi que es absurdo imaginar que hombres que no llegaron a la palabra lleguen a la escritura. Además, ninguna de las formas era igual a otra, lo cual excluía o alejaba la posibilidad de que fueran simbólicas. El hombre las trazaba, las miraba y las corregía.

Those who have been reading my story attentively, will remember that a member of the tribe had followed me -- like a dog might follow me -- up to the formless shadow of the walls. When I emerged from the final cellar, I found him in the mouth of the cave. He was stretched out on the sand, where he was languidly tracing and erasing a row of symbols like the letters in a dream, letters which one is on the verge of understanding when they flow together. At first I thought it was some kind of barbarian alphabet; but then I saw how absurd it was, to imagine that men who had never arrived at the spoken word would get to writing. Furthermore, none of the shapes was the same as any other; that excluded, or rendered unlikely, the possibility that they were symbolic. The man was drawing them, then examining them and updating them.

posted evening of May 26th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

🦋 Poetry

Breyten Breytenbach is blowing me away with the depth of his insight and the eloquent rhythm of his elocution in his Intimate Stranger. It is a prose work, or something like a prose work -- I'm sort of tempted to call it poetry written in really long lines which look like paragraphs... Here he is explaining some of the difference between poetry and prose:

...Poetry is a precise and tactile tongue, even though it can be called ‘universal’ because it always speaks poetry; irrespective of the language it inhabits or hides in. “Poetry is my mother tongue.” (Yang Liang)

Visual art is a language with its own alphabet. Music is a language replete with intent and with meaning and yet without words. These and other forms of artistic expression are the primary or original languages. They differ from our everyday working verbal tools -- philosophy, science, theology, sociology and politics -- in that they're not dependent on a consensus of lexical or contextual meaning. The languages of creativeness certainly also mean (they may even make sense and sentences), but the meaning is carried by the totality of means at their disposal: color, texture, echo, absense, shape, etc. They are both non-elusive and endlessly allusive.

Every sentence of this slim book contains a vast structure of meaning and I'm having to back up and reread a lot as I take it in... What do you do with a sentence like "What's left is the ash of the poet's craft which will be remembered embers to be recalled and read like runes and stones and bones still smoldering in the streets of wind and water, so beautiful and so bleak." -- other than admire it, run your tongue over the words, repeat it to yourself as you stare off into the distance?

This is the first work of Breytenbach's I've read -- previously I had only heard of him from Coetzee's Summertime. I'm in love with his authorial voice, at least in this work where he is speaking directly to me the Reader -- "fishing for memory in time"; "inventing consciousness"; he says the working title was On the Art of Being Intimate with Strangers, and I certainly get the impression that he is being intimate with me. I wonder what his poetry is like, if I will be able to get the same feeling from work that is not explicitly addressing me.

posted morning of May 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

🦋 Dreams and Heaven

How exciting! On the occasion of my birthday Saramago has posted a cryptic and tantalizing note on his blog (which he has retitled "Saramago's Other Notebooks"):

Aside from the conversations of women, it is dreams that sustain our world in its orbit...

posted morning of May 18th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, May 16th, 2010

🦋 Reading Dickens aloud

I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don't know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn, at a dead loss—for as to sherry, my poor dear mother's own sherry was on the market then—and ten years afterwards the caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence half penny short—as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to endeavor without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go "meandering" about the world. It was in vain to represent to her that some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted from this objectionable practice. She always returned, with greater emphasis and with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her objection, "Let us have no meandering."

Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.

-- David Copperfield

posted afternoon of May 16th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, May 15th, 2010

🦋 British books

I wonder how much J.K. Rowling's diction actually resembles Charles Dickens', and how much that is a figment of my imagination inspired by their nationality and by the audio book format. I've been listening to Bleak House on tape for the last few days, and loving it (though to be honest, I don't think I would be digging it as much if I had not read the book already); my previous experience with audio books is mostly overhearing the Harry Potter books that Sylvia listens to from noon to night... but the expressions (and the characters' names) in Bleak House are definitely reminding me of Rowling! To be sure, Robert Whitfield (who is reading Bleak House) has a similar voice to Jim Dale's, and similar affectations -- I wonder if the creaky old-person's voice is a standard element of audiobook-reader training...

Anyway, I got the idea that Sylvia might enjoy reading Dickens. So when we were at the bookstore today, I bought her a copy of David Copperfield, which neither of us has read, which I am hoping she will read and recommend to me... Virginia Woolf called it, in a pull-quote on the back cover, "the most perfect of all the Dickens novels."

posted afternoon of May 15th, 2010: Respond
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