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Saturday, July 14th, 2012
Strange -- the first impression I am getting from Aaron Bady's essay on GarcÃa Márquez
(well besides noting his really extraordinary observation about Von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative) (and well, besides the insistent impulse that it be linked to in the same breath as to Juan Gabriel Vásquez' essay on literary influence and misunderstandings) is that it ought to be rendered in Spanish, that it could make really pleasant reading in Spanish. Some initial fumblings below the fold.
 El otoño del patriarca: olvidar vivir por Aaron Bady
Cuando los crÃticos intentan explanar el génesis del Cien años de soledad (que es él mismo un tipo Génesis), encontramos en general dos modos fáciles de acceso: el joven Gabo transcribe los cuentos fabulosos de la abuela, asà concibe en los orÃgenes modestos de la cultura colombiana, un modernismo del Realismo Mágico. O también, hay la Revolución Faulkneriana y su relato, que Pascale Casanova y sus discÃpulos proponen: acá demuestra el William Faulkner un modo particular de ser escritor en lugar periférico; y asà ha el GarcÃa Márquez aprendido a ser colombiano por leer el Mississippi , se ha juntado al Modernismo a través de imitar los Modernistas quienes lo precedÃan. Y también podrÃamos adjuntar a esos el relato de GarcÃa Márquez el periodista , y muchos otros también.
ENTREVISTADOR: Ya que discutabamos el periodismo, ¿cómo se siente ser de nuevo periodista, después de tan largo tiempo como novelista? ¿Le hace usted con otra sensibilidad o con otra visión? GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ: Siempre he estado convencido de que mi profesión verdadera es periodista...
A mi me parece el segundo volumen de la Narración personal de viajes a los regiones equinocciales, durante los años 1799 a 1804 de Alexander Von Humbolt el punto perfecto de partida: el explorador y cientÃfico distinguido se sorprendió, mientras viajaba en la selva venezolana y eludÃa los tigres y anguilas eléctricas, en encontrar a un Ben Franklin selvático:
We found at Calabozo, in the midst of the Llanos, an electrical machine with large plates, electrophori, batteries, electrometers; an apparatus nearly as complete as our first scientific men in Europe possess. All these articles had not been purchased in the United States; they were the work of a man who had never seen any instrument,who had no person to consult, and who was acquainted with the phenomena of electricity only by reading the treatise of De Lafond,and Franklin’s Memoirs.
Senor Carlos del Pozo, the name of this enlightened and ingenious man, had begun to make cylindrical electrical machines, by employing large glass jars, after having cut off the necks. It was only within a few years he had been able to procure, by way of Philadelphia, two plates, to construct a plate machine, and to obtain more considerable effects. It is easy to judge what difficulties Senor Pozo had to encounter, since the first works upon electricity had fallen into his hands, and that he had the courage to resolve to procure himself, by his own industry, all that he had seen described in his books. Till now he had enjoyed only the astonishment and admiration produced by his experiments on persons destitute of all information, and who had never quitted the solitude of the Llanos; our abode at Calabozo gave him a satisfaction altogether new.
It may be supposed that he set some value on the opinions of two travelers who could compare his apparatus with those constructed in Europe. I had brought with me electrometers mounted with straw, pith-balls, and gold-leaf; also a small Leyden jar which could be charged by friction according to the method of Ingenhousz,and which served for my physiological experiments. Senor del Pozo could not contain his joy on seeing for the first time instruments which he had not made, yet which appeared to be copied from his own. We also showed him the effect of the contact of heterogeneous metals on the nerves of frogs. The name of Galvani and Volta had not previously been heard in those vast solitudes.
Tal vez conocen ya bueno éso los expositores GarcÃa Márquezianos en español (tal vez me parezco al señor Pozo cuando inventaba de nuevo la rueda desde la periferia): no encuentro en el crÃtico inglés a ninguna referencia en este pasaje. Los paralelismos entre José Arcadio BuendÃa y el señor Carlos del Pozo son impresionantes, y impresionante es que ambos escritores llamen a la aspiración frustrada para estar a la vanguardia del descubrimiento cientÃfico como «soledad». Cien años de soledad en un momento incluso se quita el sombrero a Von Humbolt, cuando el MelquÃades senil vuelve repetidas veces en sus monólogos confusos al nombre del explorador del siglo XIX y también a la palabra «equinoccio», que es tropo Humboltiano.
↻...done
posted evening of July 14th, 2012: 1 response
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Sunday, July 8th, 2012
...Why did I write? At the end of the day, the normal thing is to read. My accustomed answer was twofold: that firstly, my poetry consisted -- though I did not know this -- of attempts to invent a personality for myself. ...And furthermore, that it was based on an elementary confusion: I believed I wanted to be a poet, but essentially what I wanted to be was a poem.
-- Jaime Gil de Biedma
quoted in Bartleby y compañia
Mi intenta en decir «últimamente sobre nada» fuera igual que cuando yo decÃa antes, «escribir sobre escribir sobre»; la iteración se puede infinitamente reflejar: una reflexión de la realidad y de una realidad reflejado. Si los espejos el otro precisamente alinean, si la recurencia puede proceder sin fin, últimamente se produce el contrario exacto de la realidad descrita, asà precisamente nada. (Lo anterior es válido en doble en relación a «hablar sobre escribir sobre...»)
posted evening of July 8th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, July 7th, 2012
... His second book was even more successful than the first, professors in North American, and some of the most distinguished ones among the academic world of those long-past days, wrote enthusiastic reviews, wrote books about the books which were commenting on the Fox's books.
And from this moment on, the Fox felt -- with good reason -- that he was content; the years passed by without his publishing anything.
Well, people started talking. "What's up with the Fox?" -- when he showed up right on time for cocktails they would come up to him and be like, You ought to publish something more.
-- But look, I've already published two books.
-- And good ones, too! -- would come the reply -- That's exactly why you should publish another one!
And here the Fox did not say anything, but thought to himself: "What they're really looking for, is for me to publish a lousy book. But because I am the Fox, I'm not going to do it."
And he didn't. "Fox is the smart one."
The Black Sheep and other fables
Augusto Monterroso
 It's the funniest thing -- somehow I had gotten it into my head that the title of Bartleby y compañia was Bartlett y companÃa -- this despite many times of reading the correct title, and of writing it out, and even of ordering it on Amazon [and it occurs to me now that I have not really read anything, anything that sticks in my memory, about it, just references to the title]... thinking it had something to do with the quotations dude. (And to be sure there are a lot of quotations in the text -- that's not really here nor there though.) This is my introduction to Vila-Matas and it sure is a pleasant one. The idea of "un cuaderno de notas a pie de página que comentaron un texto invisible" is just about exactly what I am wanting to be reading right now -- and here I am experiencing that reverse-projection which I refer to as identification with the text in spades, I feel like the first chapter of the book is written in my voice. Thanks for the impetus, Richard. (And I am going to throw caution to the wind disregarding the hinted warning in Jean de la Bruyère's epigraph. Tal vez soy yo entre los otros a quienes la gloria consistirÃa en no escribir, pero...)
posted afternoon of July 7th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, July 6th, 2012
Está bien te dices
Déjalo sencillamente
Transpirar acerca de ti
Solamente hunde
En el momento ajeno
Luego harás.
Se llama ésto «técnica»,
Técnica desechable.
posted evening of July 6th, 2012: Respond
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Tuesday, June 5th, 2012
In the array of inexplicable matters which is the universe, which is time, a book's dedication is surely not the least arcane. It is presented as a gift, a boon. But excluding the case of the indifferent coin which Christian charity lets drop into the indigent's palm, every gift is in truth reciprocal. He who gives does not deprive himself of what is given. To give and to receive are identical.
Like every act in the universe, dedicating a book is a magic act. It could be considered as the most pleasant, the most fitting manner of giving voice to a name. And now I give voice to your name, MarÃa Kodama. So many mornings, so many oceans, so many gardens of the East and of the West, so many lines of Virgil.
Jorge LuÃs Borges
inscription to La cifra:
May 17, 1981
Juan Gabriel Vásquez' column from last week is fun: "About a Magic Act" is about dedications, spinning off from his dedication of The Secret History of Costaguana to his daughters, and the difficulty his various translators have had in rendering “que llegaron con su libro bajo el brazo†in their target languages -- apparently, so he learned, it is not the case in every language, that a baby can arrive with a loaf of bread under its arm (it looks at first glance like nacer con el pan debajo del brazo means roughly, "be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth") -- Anne McLean rendered it, "For Martina and Carlota, who brought their own book with them when they arrived." He looks at dedications from GarcÃa Márquez, Juan Carlos Onetti, Camilo José Cela, Joyce, Hervé Guibert, Shakespeare, Borges... My own very rough translation of the Borges dedication Vásquez refers to is above.
posted evening of June 5th, 2012: 2 responses
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Saturday, May 19th, 2012
 Speaking as I was the other day of epigraphs, here is a nice one (from one of my birthday books) --
De otros diluvios una paloma escucho-- Ungaretti, 1925
(epigraph to Antonio Dal Masetto's La culpa, 2010)
I am taking this to be a reference (or more vaguely an allusion) to the dove that returns to Noah, a message of hope.
posted morning of May 19th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, May 18th, 2012
The beauty of the Virgilian Lottery has little in common with Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky.â€
My latest translation is up on The Utopian: Juan Gabriel Vásquez' column from two weeks ago, Reading Your Fortune. (Original Encontrar la suerte en los libros, at El Espectador.)
posted morning of May 18th, 2012: Respond
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Monday, April 30th, 2012
I got word yesterday that Metamorphoses, the journal of literary translation at Smith College, accepted my translation of Slavko Zupcic's story, "Tescucho, Italia" -- nice! This is the first piece that I have had accepted after submitting it to a couple of magazines and being rejected. Glad I kept sending it out. It will appear in the fall 2013 issue of Metamorphoses.
posted evening of April 30th, 2012: 1 response
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Sunday, April first, 2012
My latest endeavor into translation hits the streets today: To Troy, Helen, by Fernando Iwasaki. This is my second translation to appear in Words Without Borders; their April issue is devoted to fiction about sex. (The sentence they pick as the header for the story, "She had undressed me then as if she were peeling a piece of fruit," is nice. It's one of a couple of Iwasaki's similes that I find I can't precisely grasp but that I still have enough of a muddled understanding of to render well. And it gives a nice sense of the story's verbal feel.)
posted afternoon of April first, 2012: Respond
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Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
 — Death takes us all. — That was all we would say when customers asked us how we had made the decision to go into the funeral home business here next to the medical school, when they asked us how we could have chosen such a name for our business as Bárbula Copies.
posted evening of March 21st, 2012: Respond
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