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Short Stories
Posts about Short Stories
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I've been reading some stories from Angel Flores' Spanish Stories/Cuentos Españoles, a facing-pages bilingual edition of Spanish short stories from Don Juan Manuel to Goytisolo. It's kind of a tricky book to recommend other than to someone learning Spanish -- for which purpose it is extremely useful -- because the translations are close to literal, rather than literary. They serve their purpose very well, of allowing me to cross-reference when I do not understand a bit of the Spanish; but if I were just reading the English I think I would look for a more polished translation. Anyways, I am loving the book and I recommend it if you find yourself in a similar position to me, interested in acquainting yourself with the literature and language of Spain.
I'm a bit surprised by how well I can understand the old Spanish of Lazarillo de Tormes -- I am not worrying too much about recognizing verb tenses, generally it is just enough to recognize that a word is some form of a particular verb, and I can get the rest from context. The text uses a whole lot of subjunctive preterites and second-person plurals which I'm pretty unfamiliar with... Lazarillo de Tormes (you can read a bilingual edition of it here, by a translator who apparently wishes to remain nameless) is according to Flores (and confirmed by Wikipædia), the first instance of Picaresque literature. Neat! I'm not real well acquainted with this genre beyond Don Quixote and The Adventures of a Simpleton... Lazarillo is fun and entertaining but did not really draw me in, I think the narrative voice just sounds too stilted for me to really get into it -- by way of comparison the first few pages of Cervantes' La fuerza de la sangre (one of his Novelas exemplares, which you can read here) have me falling in love with his clear voice -- I have only read him in translation before, I think when I am a little better at reading Spanish I need to try Don Quixote in the original, or in a bilingual edition if such a thing exists.* Cervantes was writing only a few decades later than the author of Lazarillo so I definitely think the stilted quality of the latter is a product of the author rather than of his age
*A bilingual e-book of Part I of Don Quixote is available for free download from Fusion Bilingual eBooks. Also there is an abridged bilingual edition from Anglo-Didacto which comes with a CD of readings; my first impulse is to be skeptical of the claim that the updating of archaic forms has been "done with profound respect to the Spanish text as well as its translation in English, [and] only emphasises, more if possible, the magic of Cervantes' pen."
Hmm... today is seeming like a very comfortable day for not taking a long bike ride as I had been thinking -- instead I think I am going to lie in a hammock and read more Alice Munro stories -- these are really grabbing my imagination! Sort of a similar sound to Annie Proulx (enough so that I'm wondering how much of an influence she had on Proulx), but more self-consciously cultured and introspective, I think.
Took a short ride to Norwell this morning -- the countryside around here is beautiful! I saw a flock of birds on the road that I think were wild turkeys -- here in southeastern MA, ground zero for the first Thanksgiving. Will take a short ride to North Scituate later on and get some vegetables at the farm stand there...
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Alice Munro
Another unexpected discovery from Deedee's bookshelf is Alice Munro's Selected Stories -- I haven't really heard or read much about this author before but she's really got my ear after a couple of stories. A really distinctive, fully human narrative voice, that reminds me of a lot of different contemporary authors without being any of them.
posted evening of August 27th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
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.
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.
The story I posted about below, "Asemblea los martes" by Slavko Zupcic, is just lovely to read aloud and listen, without the stream of language being fully comprehensible at reading-aloud speed. This is like the experiences I was having with recordings of spoken Spanish earlier this year -- or like reading e.g. Faulkner or Pynchon can be, where I slip in and out of understanding language as sentences containing meaning, and hearing language as melodic, rhythmic bits of sound.* So all this is keeping in mind Dave Barber's post from Thursday, "What We Lose in Growing Up" -- the way that post resonates for me is with my constant need to craft a narrative that justifies what I'm doing, that points out how I am productively enabling my development into a better person. I was thinking, the moment of joy in the reading aloud, the unreflective perceiving language as sound, is a moment where this narrative is absent; what I'm doing now is constructing the narrative around that moment, where what I'd really like to be able to do is to communicate the moment of rapture. Not quite sure where to go from that...
Porque sí. Porque ya hemos enviado las tarjetas. Porque las invitaciones quedaron bellísimas. Porque les pusimos los cruasanes míos y las tamaras de Ernesto. Porque las hicimos con cartulina rosada. Porque les dibujamos corazones por todas partes. ...
Relaciones, visitas y olanzapina para todas, por favor.
The highlight of this issue of Zoetrope: All-Story is certainly the last story, "Tuesday Meetings" by Slavko Zupcic. It's the story of Benedict's drive-by benediction of a mental institution, as told by the inmates of the institution; specifically by schizophrenic René, who publishes the Haloperidol Eye with minutes of their Tuesday meetings with Ismael, the resident psychiatrist. The story is complex, dense, subtle, and hilariously funny; I'm not going to write about it right now because I'm still a fair ways away from understanding the Spanish text, but hopefully will return to it later on. This story by itself is worth the price of the issue; I'm definitely thinking about seeking out some of Zupcic's other work. I see he has written a book billed as a "children's novel", Giuliana Labolita: el caso de Pepe Toledo -- who knows? that might be right at my reading level. This story does not seem to be available online (no, this is wrong: the story is readable in English only at Zoetrope's site); another story of his, "Réquiem" can be read at piedepágina.com.
The stories in this issue of Zoetrope: All-Story are getting better and more absorbing as I work my way through the magazine -- probably a product of my growing focus and attention. I just finished reading (for the third time, I think I've got it now) Antonio Ungar's "Hypothetically" (online here) -- it reminded me a bit of Waiting for Godot except with only a single tramp. It's a brief (5-page) fable about wanting to change one's circumstances, but in the end just going on. It takes place in three scenes: the narrator's friend Pierre witnesses a brutal argument ending in murder in the house next door; he fantasizes about leaving London and his job and changing his life; then a month later he is with his friends, celebrating a new 2-year contract from his employer, talking about moving in with his girlfriend and applying for British citizenship. In the last sentences he turns to the narrator "como preguntando algo"; his friend can only "inclinar un poco la cabeza y felicitarlo, con la copa arriba, ensayando la mejor de mis sonrisas."
This fable runs the risk of being over-determined -- a similar story has been written often enough that if Ungar dwelled too much on the framework of the fable, it would be boring and trite. But I get the impression he knows this -- most of the story is the first scene, quickly setting up Pierre's life and thoughts and then describing the argument and the crime with a keen realism which contrasts nicely with Pierre's detachment. The second and third scenes are quite brief and work really well this way -- Ungar does not spend time driving his point home, and because he passes it so lightly along, its impact is much greater.
I've been enjoying the stories in Zoetrope: All-Story's Latin American fiction issue. Reading them very slowly, moving back and forth between the Spanish and the translation; this is definitely helping get them anchored in my thoughts...
I saw the populous sea that surrounds the islands, and in the sea saw nets and in the nets saw multitudes of shrimp and prawns, saw them populating long familial tables below smiling faces, saw dishes of avocados in slivers and slivers, making a green zebra out of the ceramic, saw oxtail gleaming under chili cream sauce, saw squid and octopi drowning in their ink, saw plantains, mameys, star apples, sapotes, sweetsop, chirimoyas, mangos, saw extra-large lobsters letting their fragrance touch all noses equally...
This is a passage where rhythm is really key. Take a look at the original:
Vi el populoso mar que rodea la isla, y del mar vi redes y de las redes vi muchedumbres de camarones y langostinos, los vi poblando largas mesas familiares bajo rostros risueños, vi fuentes de aguacates en lascas y lascas y lascas, haciendo de la cerámica una cebra verde, vi rabo de toro encendido bajo crema de ajÃ, vi pulpos y calamares ahogados en su tinta, vi plátanos, mameyes, caimitos, zapotes, anones, chirimoyas y mangos, vi langostas de talla extra larga dejando que su olor tocara por igual todas las narices,...
...What to say? I like the English passage, and there does not seem to be any mistranslation (though "in slivers and slivers" is not great), but it does not hold a candle to the Spanish.
Update: Jim Tucker posts his own attempt at an English translation in comments, and does it very well indeed.
I find very interesting the idea (which I found at La Bloga's interview with Daniel Alarcón, on the occasion of Zoetrope: All-Story's publishing its new Latin American Issue) that Latin American literature has fallen captive (at least as it is seen from North America) to the legacy of GarcÃa Márquez -- that diverse strands of work are "interpreted through the single, constricting and somewhat outdated lens of magical realism." This issue looks like it will do something to push back against that tendency; I'm looking forward to reading it and perhaps to looking at Diego Trelles Paz' anthology of new authors (authors under 40, those born after Cien años de soledad), El futuro no es nuestro.
Alarcón and Trelles Paz have more to say about the legacy of Cien años de soledad (which "we would describe -- without exaggeration -- as perfect") in the editor's note to the Latin American issue.
cleek (the Internet's most reliable source for amusing links) sent me to The 20 Most Bizarre Craigslist Adverts of All Time at the Telegraph. I laughed out loud at #16; but I had been chuckling pretty steadily all along.
reading just sends you scrambling for reference materials...
with minutes of their Tuesday meetings with Ismael, the resident psychiatrist. The story is complex, dense, subtle, and hilariously funny; I'm not going to write about it right now because I'm still a fair ways away from understanding the Spanish text, but hopefully will return to it later on. This story by itself is worth the price of the issue; I'm definitely thinking about seeking out some of Zupcic's other work. I see he has written a book billed as a "children's novel", Giuliana Labolita: el caso de Pepe Toledo -- who knows? that might be right at my reading level. This story does not seem to be available online (no, this is wrong: the story is readable in English only at 
it closes with a dazzling description of the Cuban cuisine that the narrator is missing. The entire long paragraph is well worth your while, I'm just going to quote a bit of it:
At In Medias Res,
Russell Arben Fox 