READIN

Monday, January 12th, 2009

🦋 Isla Negra, Chile

Promoted from comments: Jorge links to an amazing set of photos at his Picasa account: Isla Negra is the site of one of Neruda's residences.I'm just blown away by the shades of black in this picture.

posted evening of January 12th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 2666 group read

The bolano-l mailing list is hosting a group read of 2666, starting today. I'm sitting this one out, but if you're meaning to read the book I'm guessing this will be a very useful resource. (via The Howling Fantods.)

posted afternoon of January 12th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 11th, 2009

🦋 Dad's blogging!

Over at vox.com: A Thought for Today. Interesting epigraphs.

posted evening of January 11th, 2009: Respond

🦋 Neruda resources

There seems to be a lot written about translating Neruda's poetry. Here are a couple of things I've found this morning.

• A concordance of words in all of Neruda's poems. You can also view the concordance sorted by frequency. The concordance includes the text of all of his poems, in Spanish.
• John Felstiner wrote a book about Translating Neruda.
• Esperanza Figueroa wrote an article for Revisto Iberoamericana called "Pablo Neruda en Ingles," which is cited frequently; it does not appear to be online however.
• George Schade wrote an article for Questia called "Sight, Sense, and Sound; Seaweed, Onions, and Oranges: Notes on Translating Neruda," which is online but restricted to Questia subscribers.
• Teresa Longo edited a collection called Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, with essays about reading and translating his poetry in a cultural context.
• The Universidad de Chile has a selection of Neruda's works online, with tapes of the poet reading several of his poems.

posted morning of January 11th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 10th, 2009

🦋 Word choice

So on the one hand I feel like who am I to criticize Reid's translations -- he surely knew Spanish better than I and was more familiar than I with the literature he was translating. Still I'm seeing a lot of lines in Neruda's poems that look poorly translated to my eye. But one in particular is kind of knocking me for a loop, because it just seems wrong, in a very basic and easy way. From "El desnudo":

Esta raya es el Sur que corre,
este círculo es el Oeste

This ray is the running sun,
this circle is the East

posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: 3 responses
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🦋 Repetition

The poems in Fully Empowered are kind of perfect for me to read in Spanish -- short stanzas, short lines, so I can hold them in my head while I go over Reid's translation and back over the original. And lots of repetition of words, so I can maybe get some of them into my vocabulary -- building vocabulary has always been the most difficult part of language study for me.

The repetitions seem meaningful -- certain words occur in almost every poem, like "línea" (in various senses), "caer" (in various forms), words relating to the water like "mar," "océan," "ola," "espuma,"... There are also frequent references to geography and geometry, to birds, to movement, to towers... I haven't quite put all this together yet -- the references to water make me think about Neruda being Chilean, seems like the ocean must be a pretty important part of life in Chile. (Jorge, can you speak to this?) The many repetitions of "línea" are making me think about geometry and language and again, the sea, and tying them together.

I just love the rhythm of this passage, which totally does not come through in the translation; I haven't been able to make a lot of sense of the passage, with or without the translation, but the sound of it is wonderful. From the second stanza of "Pájaro":

Cuando volví de tantos viajes
me quedó suspendido y verde
entre el sol y la geografía:
vi cómo trabajan las alas,
cómo se transmite el perfume
por un telégrafo emplumado
y desde arriba vi el camino,
los manantiales, las tejas,
los pescadores a pescar,
los pantalones de la espuma,
todo desde mi cielo verde.

posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 Poem and translation

Looking through Ellen's old poetry books I am glad to find a bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda's poetry, Fully Empowered. (Translations are by Alastair Reid, and I'm making a note to myself to look up this guy whose name is on much of the mid-century Latin American literature that interests me.) Take a look at the first stanza of the first poem in the book.

Deber del poeta A quien no escucha el mar en este viernes por la mañana, a quien adentro de algo, casa, oficina, fábrica o mujer, o calle o mina o seco calabozo: a éste yo acudo y sin hablar ni ver llego y abro la puerta del encierro y un sin fin se oye vago en la insistencia un largo trueno roto se encadena al peso del planeta y de la espuma, surgen los ríos roncos del océano, vibra veloz en su rosal la estrella y el mar palpita, muere y continúa.

The Poet's Obligation To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman or street or mine or dry prison cell, to him I come, and without speaking or looking I arrive and open the door of his prison, and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent, a long rumble of thunder adds itself to the weight of the planet and the foam, the groaning rivers of the ocean rise, the star vibrates quickly in its corona and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

A couple things -- why does Neruda say "casa, oficina, fábrica o mujer" -- is he meaning a woman is something to keep you cooped up like a house or a factory? This sounds sexist in a pretty retrograde tone which is not something I'd expect from Neruda; but then I don't really know that much about him -- think of him vaguely as progressive, which I take to imply egalitarian. "Adentro de... mujer" leads me to think of a fetus but I'm pretty sure that is not who the poem is addressed to... In the phrase "un sin fin se oye" is "un" a pronoun -- is this literally "something hears itself endlessly" -- I had thought "un" could only be an article, is this a poetic usage?

This is beautiful imagery; but I don't think I can read it closely enough in the translation to realy appreciate it -- I expect this is a failing more of my own reading than of the translation. I'm really happy to have read the observation (I think I read it first from Daniel Hahn; I've seen it referenced several places since then, most recently by Katherine Silver, so maybe it is a commonplace) that translation is a form of reading closely -- this is opening up a new understanding of how to read closely for me.

posted afternoon of January 10th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Dream Blogging

An anxiety dream last night about the code I am maintaining: a customer reported a bug, which on analysis proved to be a corruption in shared memory caused by the customer's input. When a year was specified in the date parameter, the corruption would occur -- if only month and day were specified, everything was ok. It was pretty mysterious how this would not have been discovered years ago as the section of code governing this parameter had not been modified in a long time; but the bug was pretty easy to track down and fix. Except, a little later I was talking to my boss and he thought I had told him the bug was not fixable and we would have to find a workaround. I was going crazy trying to figure out how to respond to this because I had forgotten where I had put the fix in and I had not commented it or kept any records...

Later in the night, I dreamed I was examining and modifying the source code for my dreams. It was not clear how or whether I would be able to recompile and distribute the fixes to my consciousness.

posted morning of January 10th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, January 8th, 2009

🦋 Just a recommendation

I watched Innocent Voices Tuesday night, and again tonight. I want to write a post about it but am having a hard time getting my thoughts about it into any kind of postable order. So: maybe I will write about my reaction to it later on. But for now I just wanted to let you know about it; it's very much worth your while and I had not heard about it until just recently. Here is an interview with the screenwriter Oscar Torres, whose childhood is the subject of the film.

posted evening of January 8th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

🦋 Angels

So she flew on, never losing sight of the angels, and gradually as she came closer they took on a clearer shape.

They shone not as if they were burning but as if, wherever they were and however dark the night, sunlight was shining on them. They were like humans, but winged, and much taller; and, as they were naked, the witch could see that three of them were male, two female. ...

Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know... that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

Here is a minor thing that has been bugging me about the setup of the worlds in His Dark Materials. Clearly various languages exist, and a similar set of languages exists across the parallel universes, at least those few we have seen. But Lyra doesn't seem to have encountered anybody yet she could not speak to in English. So okay: let's say (a) witches and (b) bears are both non-human, so maybe they are communicating with Lyra via some kind of extra-linguistic mechanism that just seems to be speech; or more simply and implausibly, that witches and bears speak English. And I guess it's reasonable that all the humans Lyra interacted with in the first book could have known English. But the place where Lyra and Will meet is clearly parallel-world Italy, with Italian place names and everything. So at this point you have to just say ok, well the structure of the book demands that everybody speaks English; that's fine, I'll go along with that. But! Joachim Lorenz threw a huge monkey wrench into that psychic construct on p. 135, when he referred to a building as "the Torre degli Angeli, the Tower of the Angels" and to a city as "Cittàgazze. The city of magpies." -- I found this extremely annoying because it indicates that Joachim knows the place names are in a different language than he's speaking in. Well anyway, not a huge deal or anything. End rant.

posted evening of January 6th, 2009: Respond
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