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Sunday, February 8th, 2009
...Storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superceded by the time and space of the fiction.
-- But some books (and particularly this book, as I think Coetzee is making quite clear in this chapter titled "Realism") work by inserting themselves into the reader's "real world" head, rather than creating a separate "fiction" head -- instead of rivetting plot you have long reflective sessions riffing off the book.The narrator's intrusions, reminding us that he is telling us a story, become less frequent after the first chapter -- once Coetzee has established what kind of world he is creating, they are not necessary. This is good as they could become heavy-handed. I almost want to think of this as a book of essays rather than a novel -- each chapter centers around a long prepared talk, and the characters' responses to it. A curious sort of essays, though, as the narrator/author is explicitly not invested in the arguments being made but rather in the speakers' reasons for making and methods of making the arguments and in the listeners' understandings of the arguments. Elizabeth "is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she's saying" -- but "on the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief."
 The Kafka story to which Elizabeth alludes in some of her talks is Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (at the bottom of the page), translated as A Report for an Academy. Wolfgang Köhler's book The Mentality of Apes can be read in part at Google Books; and there is some discussion of it at the Tufts Animal Cognition page. Plutarch's essay "On the Eating of Flesh" (which John fears Elizabeth will start talking about while she is at Appleton) is reproduced at the Animal Rights Library site.
posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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I watched Waltz with Bashir with clinical detachment, and without understanding that this detachment was an authentic response to how the film was composed -- that the intent was to push the audience away from the events being narrated rather than to pull us in. I was not failing to get into the movie but was understanding Folman's approach to his own lost experience -- wondering about the motivations and reactions of the people talking, "as if watching a movie" as Folman's psychiatrist friend puts it; and  was completely surprised, at the end of the film, to find myself sobbing -- this brought me full circle to the very beginning of the movie, where I had been pretty choked up over Boaz' description of the dogs he had to shoot. I was a little confused by the psychiatrist's assertion early in the film, to the effect that memory can only take us "where we want to go," that there is a human mechanism which prevents us from remembering things that will damage us. This seems wrong to me as a general statement, and counter to my experience. But maybe he had intended it only in the context of the conversation they were having.
posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind.
I started reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello today (I went to the library looking for Disgrace, but it has been misfiled -- they put my name in the computer and will let me know when/if it turns up...) and found myself just immediately struck by the spare, elegant beauty of the author's constructions. A few notes at the outset.This novel puts me strongly in mind of In Hovering Flight, there are several points of detail that the two books have in common; I have no idea yet how strong a parallel actually exists though. I talked to Joyce this morning and she said she read Elizabeth Costello last year -- so not a formative influence certainly -- and that she could see where I was coming from with the comparison. I want to call this "a novel of ideas" and to use that as a way of contrasting it with some other books I've been reading lately; every page is sending me off into reveries of reflection from which I need to pull myself back to what I was reading. I think this would be a lousy book to hear read aloud. This book is making me more interested than I've ever been before in reading Ulysses, just so I can have more of a context for understanding The House on Eccles Street.
 Oh and also: I was put in mind a bit of Peter Cole's statement that the translator of a mediæval text is "creating a fictional character" for the author of the text -- I'm not sure how much of a linkage there is to Coetzee's project here since Coetzee is not "translating" Costello's book or indeed showing it to us at all; he is imagining it like Borges does in his fictions. But obviously Coetzee is "creating a fictional character" who's an author -- so, interesting, I'll keep Cole's statement in mind.
posted morning of February 7th, 2009: 3 responses
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This morning we went over to the NJ Children's Aid and Family Services office in South Orange, for the culmination of a project Ellen has been working on with Sylvia's girl scout troop for a couple of months now, the Bright Red Bookcase. The girls collected children's books and painted a bookcase, and this morning we brought them over to the Children's Aid office along with some flyers about reading to children and signs encouraging kids to take a book home. The staff of the office were very happy to have the books on hand for their clientèle, and the girls were excited about the project. It was great being around all that enthusiasm for a little while! Ellen is writing the project up for Patch.com, I'll post some pictures when we upload them.
posted morning of February 7th, 2009: Respond
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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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