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Friday, February 6th, 2009
Another nice line from Jonathan Galassi, from the translation panel: Peter was saying something I feel, which is that when you look at a line of poetry in another language, it has -- all the secrets and the music and the magic of it are right there in the actual words, and I feel, I maintain that you can inhale that and know that even if you don't know a word of what it is, that somehow the nature of the language is right there...
The translator is a proselytizer and philanthropic in that sense, is that's where he's working for someone else, as well as himself, for this other person that he's identified with in some way.
Cole:
And that's part of the pleasure and neurosis of it all, a sort of that giving out and resentment, we all know about...
Galassi:It's like writing a biography of someone -- there's a period where the biographer always hates the subject. Cole:
Well with mediæval literature I think it's more like writing a novel, because you're creating a fictional character; nobody knows who that mediæval writer is... but definitely that sort of transference.... [Freud] said dreams are translations, in his letter to Fleiss, he said that psycho-neurosis is brought about by a failure to translate certain materials, and that repression brings about that failure, because we are reluctant to enter into the displeasure that the labor of translation brings on. -- I know that feeling! Grossman:
Well I do transference better than anybody else, because I fall in love with every writer I translate. And I know the deepest insight into the natures of those people; beginning with Cervantes, and on up. And I have never hated the writer. There have been times when I say I'm never getting off of page 371; I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to translate this page; but always I've felt such a deep connection to the writer.
posted evening of February 6th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
A new local website for South Orange/Maplewood/Millburn is now online at Patch.com. And one of the contributors, none other than Ellen! Her author page is here; AOTW she has three stories up:
posted evening of February 4th, 2009: Respond
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I'm watching a panel discussion on The World of the Translator over at the beautifully named Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (via 3%) -- a nice chance to get inside the heads of some extremely accomplished translators. I enjoyed this exchange:
Jonathan Galassi:
A translator is just someone who decides to do it. There are degrees that you can get; but it's really an existential decision that you make, that you're going to commit to working with someone else's work. I think there are probably a lot of psychoanalytic reasons for that, but -- there's several different types of translators sitting at this table, people who do it for a living, whatever you want to say about that, others who do it avocationally, like me, and maybe Peter, I'm not sure if you would put yourself in that, vocationally but not remuneratively, whatever, but -- we're all doing the same thing, the conditions may be different, the time constraints are different, but the actual work is the same. When you get right down to it.
Peter Cole:
I never wanted to be a translator, I had no intention whatsoever of being a translator; all through my college education, as a poet, I was always distancing myself from translating. In the 70's, there were many, I think, the prevalent attitude I encountered in English departments was to avoid translation, that translation was some sort of debased currency, a watered-down, de-eroticized version of English, that it just lacked that kind of primal contact, and I, ah, had a notion early on, kind of a Harold Bloomian riff, that my own poetry in English would somehow come out of Hebrew. And that was, like a lot of my notions, fairly delusive, because I didn't know Hebrew. And I grew up more or less like Joe in an assimilated Jewish family; I had some Hebrew from day school, but it was just, you know, kind of mechanical; but I thought this was something I needed to look into, and I was working in Providence, Rhode Island after I graduated from college in 1980, and I saw a notice that a British poet was coming to Brown to give a reading, a guy named Dennis Silk, who, Saul Bellow writes about him, in To Jerusalem and Back, so I went there and thought this would be my key, I'd been reading a lot of Judaica, Near Eastern mythology and all that, but all in English, and in walks this incredibly eccentric-looking guy, sort of, you know the Quasimodo hunch, big bushy eyebrows, and he gave a very good reading, and afterwards I had to ask one of those annoying questions, like I think, his early work when he was living in England seemed kind of Yeatsian, and then after 30 years of living in Israel, he had this much kind of more jagged, broken quality; more interesting to me too, his work; and I asked him, not knowing that after 30 years in the country he still barely spoke Hebrew, was it the influence of Hebrew that did this to your poetry? And he looked at me and he said, "Do you know Hebrew?" and I said "No, but I'd like to learn." And then he looked at me again, he said, "How long have you had this problem?" -- In a sense, that notion of, not the "problem of translation" the way people usually talk about it, but translation as this kind of dis-ease, not so much as healing almost but as this kind of chronic, persistent discomfort, that you learn to live with; before I even got to actually translating other people's works, I was drawn to that for whatever reason.
Interesting tidbit: the first translation project of Edith Grossman's, was the short fiction CirurgÃa PsÃquica de Extirpación, by Macedonio Fernández.
posted evening of February 4th, 2009: Respond
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José Arcadio BuendÃa no logró descifrar el sueño de las casas con paredes de espejo hasta el dÃa en que conoció el hielo. This (in chapter 2 of Cien Años de Soledad) seems like the first really strong punchline of the book. There have been plenty of chuckles throughout the first chapter and the beginning of the second, but this one absolutely cracked me up. My memory of reading the translation suggests that there are a lot more to come.
posted evening of February 4th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, February second, 2009
A really intriguing experience as I was reading The Amber Spyglass with Sylvia this evening -- we were reading about the deliberations of the Consistorial Court of Discipline, and my internal picture of it was based on the Magisterium scene from the movie of The Golden Compass; and it was dragging. Then I remembered what I had been thinking about last week, and re-imagined the scene as animated, in the style of Studio Ghibli. And the reading picked right up!  The internal imagery got a lot more interesting, the story seemed more real. Maggie's note in comments that His Dark Materials is based on Paradise Lost has me really intrigued over the past week. I'm dying to find out which of the details of plot are in Milton, and how Pullman has transformed them.
 (The Authority's Clouded Mountain fortress totally makes me think of Laputa: The Castle in the Sky.)
posted evening of February second, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, February first, 2009
I just finished Senselessness -- nothing prepared me for those last sentences. Probably need to reread the book without the preconceptions I had going in.
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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...wanting to tell everything once I'd been encouraged to start talking, down to the hairs and the smells, spill it all out to a point of satiety, compulsively, in a kind of verbal spasm, as if it were an orgiastic race that would culminate in my total abandon, until I was left without secrets, until my interlocutor knew all he wanted to know, in an exhaustive confession after which I would suffer the worst possible backlash.
(Wow, has Castellanos Moya spent much time in the blogosphere?...) I want to refine my previous declaration about this work being a dark comedy, and say instead that it does not fit into a genre. I'm a little surprised because it's such a brief book, it seems like too little space for such a lot to be going on. But each chapter now is changing how I want to categorize the book; so I think the best approach is to call it sui generis.
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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Thanks for linking this video, Dad! "Mind Wall", by Towa Tei. Note: if you click the little square icon in the bottom right, you can view this video on your full screen, recommended. Also, there is higher-quality video available; for some reason you can only request it after you have started playing the video -- click on the up-arrow icon in the bottom right, one of the options that comes up will be "HQ".
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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It strikes me midway through that I have been reading Senselessness wrong, that I have been reading it as "foreign" when actually it's a comic piece similar to other works I'm familiar with. I was expecting it for some reason to be more on the order of Innocent Voices but it's not that at all. Reminiscent of wartime slapstick like the first portion of Gravity's Rainbow? Not as fully realized as that, I think, and the narrator's misogyny really strikes me as off, in a way. Like it's impossible to sympathize with it unless it were being made fun of, and I sort of can't read where the author is coming from here. But the powerful memory of that pearl of pus between my legs made me understand that this was an issue of first things coming first, that my strategy for repudiating Fátima could wait, and that first I had to stop the infection, so, swiftly, perhaps with the speed of one possessed, I made my way toward the enormous wooden door, crossed the filthy street teeming with beggars and street vendors, and entered the corner drugstore to find a pharmacist who could give me a prescription for the strongest possible penicillin to treat the disease I had caught. Got my first real laugh in the book here -- kind of black comedy I'm thinking as I review the passage -- and clicked Oh, I see, this is a funny book not (or not only) a grim one...
posted evening of February first, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
YepRoc Records has posted video of Robyn and friends singing "Up to Our Nex", from the November 22nd show at Symphony Space -- presumably this is part of the documentary film they're making of that tour.
On stage with Mr. Hitchcock are (from left to right) Amir El Saffar, Terry Edwards, Gaida Hinnawi, and Tim Keegan. The song will be released on Goodnight Oslo. Thanks for the link, Woj!
posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: Respond
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