READIN

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Au Hasard Balthazar is seeming to me like just exactly the ideal that a movie ought to approach -- i.e. that an item should be called a "movie" or denied membership in this class, according to whether it is similar to this Movie or unlike it. Is seeming like what Bergman would be like if I liked his movies better. There is an excellent trailer you can watch by clicking on the still.

Is making me wonder, also, what kind of literature there is on the subject of composing subtitles for a film. Some information and reflections in this LanguageHat thread from last summer.

posted evening of March 6th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Giovanni Pontiero's Epigraph

I got in touch with the friend to whom I loaned Blindness; she sent me the authorized translation of the epigraph I've been wondering about for the past few days.

If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe.

This is just right -- "If you can see" makes much better sense as an opening phrase than "If you can look"; and then on the second line, "If you can look" reads alright because you already have the structure set up to understand it in.

Saramago attributes this line to the "Book of Exhortations", which if I'm understanding right is Deuteronomy. It would be interesting to find out where it is in that book and see how e.g. the King James translation renders it. ...Looking further, it seems like "Book of Exhortations" is a pretty generic term -- it can refer to a lot of different prophetic writings. I wonder what Saramago's source for this line is.

posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 Film series

Ellen has organized a film series at the local library, movies about adoption. The series kicks off on Sunday afternoon, with Barbara Lee's documentary Adopted; Ellen has an interview with Lee at Patch.com.

And another piece by Ellen, in The Motherhood: What this movie has to offer to people who are not in adoptive families.

posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009

🦋 Once again, "Observe"

Saramago takes another look at the epigraph, and makes me understand that I had been misreading it in a key way:

In a conversation yesterday with Luis Vázquez, closest of friends and healer of my ailments, we're talking about the film by Fernando Meirelles, just premiered in Madrid, even though we could not be in attendance, Pilar and I, as we intended to be, for a sudden bout of chills obligated me to retire to my chamber, or confined me to bed, in the elegant phrasing in use not so long ago. The conversation soon turned to the public's reactions during the exhibition and afterwards, highly positive according to Luis and to other trustworthy witnesses... We moved from there, naturally, to talking about the book and Luis asked me if we could look over the epigraph which opens it ("Si puedes mirar, ve, si puedes ver, repara"), for in his opinion, the action of seeing [ver] encompasses the action of looking [mirar], and therefore, the reference to looking could be omitted without bias to the meaning of the phrase. I could not come up with a reason to give him, but I thought that I should have other reasons to consider, for example, the fact that the process of vision occurs three stages, successive but in some manner autonomous, which can be stepped through as follows: one can look and not see, one can see and not observe, according to the degree of attention which we pay to each of these actions. We know the reaction of a person who, having just checked his wristwatch, returns to check it when, at that moment, somebody asks him the time. That was when light flooded into my head concerning the origin of the famous epigraph. When I was small, the word "observe", always supposing I already knew it, was not for me an object of primary importance until one day an uncle of mine (I believe that it is Francisco Dinis of whom I am speaking in this brief memoir) called my attention to a certain way of looking that bulls have, which almost always, he then demonstrated, is accompanied by a certain way of raising the head. My uncle said: "He has looked at you, when he looked at you, he saw you, and now it is different, he is something else, he is observing." This is what I told Luis, which immediately won the argument for me, not so much, I suppose, because it convinced him, but because the memory made him remember a similar situation. A bull looked at him as well, and again this movement of the head, again this looking which was not simply seeing, but observation. We were at last in agreement.

posted evening of March 5th, 2009: 1 response
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🦋 The Wire

Thanks to a recommendation from SEK, Ellen and I have taken up watching The Wire -- we're starting in on Season Two this weekend. Season One was really riveting.

Anyway I notice Aaron of Zunguzungu has started writing some posts about The Wire as a "post-colonial western," pursuant to a paper he's working on -- intriguing! First post is here.

posted morning of March 5th, 2009: 3 responses
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Tuesday, March third, 2009

🦋 Learning to speak

This evening was the first meeting of the 6-week intermediate Spanish class I am taking at the local Adult School. I feel ambivalent about it -- I wonder if it's going to teach me anything I don't already know. Probably not -- what I really need is practice speaking and listening, and most of what I'm going to get in that class will be reading aloud, on a much lower level than what I already know how to read aloud. What I ought to be doing is having conversations with Spanish speakers I know -- this is where I run into the root problem, which is that I'm just generally not a very talkative guy. I was wondering this evening whether the deep longing I've always felt to learn to speak new languages is not at root a longing just to be better at speaking, to have words come more readily, to feel like I have interesting things to say.

posted evening of March third, 2009: 7 responses

🦋 Si puedes mirar, ve

Saramago is looking back on writing the epigraph for Blindness:

Si puedes mirar, ve.
Si puedes ver, repara.

I wrote this for Blindness, already a good couple of years ago. Now, when the film based on this novel is making its debut in Spain, I've encountered the phrase printed on the bags of the 8^½ bookstore and on the inside front cover of Fernando Meirelles' making-of book, which this same bookstore's publishing arm has edited with skill. At times I have said that by reading the epigraph of any of my novels, one will already know the whole thing. Today, I don't know why, seeing this, I too felt a sudden impulse, felt the urgency of repairing, of fighting against the blindness. [links are my additions -- J]

I'm curious about how to translate that epigraph. (And surprised that I don't remember this epigraph from when I read Blindness, and annoyed that I cannot go check how Pontiero translated it, because I lent it to a friend...) The sense of it is, "If you can see, see. If you can see, repair." -- Obviously this does not sound good in English because the distinction between mirar and ver is missing, and the transitive structure is lost. The literal translation of the first sentence would be "If you can look, see" -- but I'm guessing the sense of Si puedes mirar is something more like "if you are able to see", i.e. if you are not blind. It seems like ve has a more transitive sense, "see something, some injustice" (although the object is omitted, as it is with repara) -- where mirar is intransitive.

(There is an important misreading in this post, as regards the verb reparar -- see later post for the correction.)

posted evening of March third, 2009: 4 responses
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🦋 Happy Birthday, Robyn!

56 years old today and absolutely in his prime musically.

posted afternoon of March third, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Folk Rock!

A fegmaniac recommended this mix tape the other day -- I was intrigued by the mention of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and thought I'd check it out. Well I'm back to report: it's all right, and you ought to take a listen.

Most of the songs are standards; some of performances are highly unconventional. I was really taken aback at the opening of Musee Mecanique's performance of "I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore" -- the pipe organ seemed totally counter to the spirit of that song. But by the end it had won me over. There are interesting shades of meaning in experiencing that political song as a purely æsthetic phenomenon -- a truly beautiful one. The haunting vocal in Headlights' "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies" is going to stay with me for a while. Some of the straight "folk music" performances are not as interesting, but they serve nicely to leaven the weirdness of the other tracks.

posted morning of March third, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March first, 2009

🦋 Portuguese Lit

Saramago recommends as "one of the most skilled and original" of Portugal's new generation of novelists, Gonçalo M. Tavares. Doesn't look like Sr. Tavares has any works published in English yet (this might be wrong -- his translations page lists rights for most of his works having already been bought for "English in India only" -- but it's not clear that those translations have been published) but definitely someone to keep an eye out for. When he received the Saramago Prize in 2005, Saramago said "Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!"

posted evening of March first, 2009: 5 responses
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