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Sunday, May 31st, 2009
...I was thinking this would be a good alternate title for this blog... So the observations about pachucos don't make up the full body of the essay I was talking about yesterday by any means. It looks like on the first reading my brain turned off and did not process after the first 10 pages or so... The point of the discussion of pachucos is as a jumping-off point for drawing distinctions between the national characters of Mexico and the United States. (These distinctions are generally bald assertions of the form "Mexicans are like this, North Americans are like this", and seem pretty suspect and perhaps out-of-date; Paz does explicitly say something to the effect of, in 50 years this may all be nonsense.) This is reading more like the introduction I had been thinking it would be -- I am hoping to read more in the rest of the book, about what Solitude is and how it is an essentially Mexican attribute.
posted morning of May 31st, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, May 30th, 2009
 I am spending some time in recent days trying to figure out how to respond to the essay -- it's not a form of writing that I've traditionally read much of, but lately that seems to be where a lot of my interests are pulling me. Last night and this morning I have been reading Octavio Paz' "The Pachuco and Other Extremes", the first piece of The Labyrinth of Solitude -- I like the abstract idea of this essay a lot but have not quite connected with the particulars of how Paz explains his idea.
The abstract is contained in the first 4 pages of the essay, which are just masterfully written -- he is comparing the development of national consciousness with a person's emerging from childhood, and comes up with gems like "The adolescent is also ignorant of the future changes that will affect the countenance he sees in the water" and "To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity." "But the adolescent cannot forget himself -- when he succeeds in doing so, he is no longer an adolescent -- and we cannot escape the necessity of questioning and contemplating ourselves." In the remainder of the essay, Paz talks about the pachuco gang members he encountered in the years he was living in Los Angeles -- I haven't been able yet to wrap my head around what insight his observations here are supposed to afford into "questioning and contemplating ourselves." I'm spending some time on the train this afternoon, I'll try rereading the essay and see what I can come up with.
posted morning of May 30th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, May 29th, 2009
 So Sylvia and I watched UP tonight, and we had a blast. It is a pretty movie, and an engaging one. I don't think I would go as far as Whit, who thinks it "contains two movies," a silly action movie for the kids and a romantic drama for the adults, and that both are successful -- to my mind the silly action movie was excellent, but the romantic drama was sappy and disposable, and had the feel of something Pixar felt obligated to do. But the silly action movie was plenty for me.
I gotta ask, why 3-D? Is this the new standard for Pixar movies, that everything is going to be in 3-D? It is fun; but watching flat Pixar animation is fun too, I'm not sure this technology adds all that much to the viewing experience.
posted evening of May 29th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
We must approach spirituality with a hard kind of intelligence. If we go to hear a teacher speak, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by his reputation and charisma, but we should properly experience each word of his lecture or each aspect of the meditation technique being taught. We must make a clear and intelligent relationship with the teachings and the man teaching.
I guess part of my project in reading Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is to identify reading novels as a form of spiritual experience. I expect there is a lot of "spiritual materialism" bound up in my desire to draw this equivalency. Trungpa's notion of "properly experienc[ing] every word of his lecture" sounds to me like what I am trying to do with the books I read -- this is the filter through which I am experiencing his book.
posted evening of May 27th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Generally, we find it very difficult to give out and surrender our raw and rugged qualities of ego. Although we may hate ourselves, at the same time we find our self-hatred a kind of occupation. In spite of the fact that we may dislike what we are and find that self-condemnation painful, still we cannot give it up completely.
In the last few days I have been toying with re-reading Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism -- I'm very taken with some of his phrasings and would love to be able to identify with this text... So far I am not able to get past the self-reflective (and "materialistic") attitude that opening this book inspires in me.
posted evening of May 26th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, May 25th, 2009
Here is what is confusing me about "Instantes": what was the impetus for Mauricio Ciechanower to publish the poem under Borges' name, and for Elena Poniatowska to back him up (if I'm reading correctly) with a fabricated interview? Were they playing a joke? If so it is an excellent one -- if they were attempting a fraud in earnest it just seems really weird: why? what is the profit for them?... And then if it was a joke, was Alastair Reid in on the joke, or was he duped? He is alive and one could ask him (Poniatowska is also still kicking, don't know about Ciechanower); I don't understand why Almeida did not.
posted morning of May 25th, 2009: Respond
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I did not quite catch this last night; but it is hilarious: Almeida's article is titled "Jorge Luis Borges, author of the poem 'Moments'"; and it is prefaced with a highly relevant quotation from "Pierre Menard".
posted morning of May 25th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Saramago  has made his entry into animation! Juan Pablo Etcheverry animated "A flor máis grande do mundo" based on Saramago's book A maior flor do mundo, which doesn't seem to be in translation -- I had never heard of it before I saw Saramago's post about the cartoon just now. It is his only children's book, written in the 70's -- oops; not reading closely. The idea is from the 70's but the book was not written until 2000.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: Respond
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Huh: weird! I happened on this poem today, attributed to Borges and with a translation attributed to Alastair Reid. I was kind of taken with it, especially with the way the whole poem is subjunctive and the return to declarative voice in the final line feels kind of crushing. Checking for links with more information about this poem I find many, many pages reprinting the poem and attributing it to Borges, and also two articles (one by Iván Almeida, published in Borges Studies Online, and a shorter one by Eugenio Siccardi which refers to Almeida's piece) denying that Borges wrote this poem. I haven't read Almeida's whole article -- it's late and I'm tired, and I don't speak Spanish -- but he looks to know what he's talking about. Interesting -- what strikes me as really weird about this is attributing a translation of the fraudulent poem to Reid. I hope to have another go at the article tomorrow and see how this plays out.
Instantes
(no por Borges)
Si pudiera vivir nuevamente mi vida.
En la próxima tratarÃa de cometer más errores.
No intentarÃa ser tan perfecto, me relajarÃa más.
SerÃa más tonto de lo que he sido, de hecho
tomarÃa muy pocas cosas con seriedad.
SerÃa menos higiénico.
CorrerÃa más riesgos, harÃa más viajes, contemplarÃa
más atardeceres, subirÃa más montañas, nadarÃa más rÃos.
IrÃa a más lugares adonde nunca he ido, comerÃa
más helados y menos habas, tendrÃa más problemas
reales y menos imaginarios.
Yo fui una de esas personas que vivió sensata y prolÃficamente
cada minuto de su vida; claro que tuve momentos de alegrÃa.
Pero si pudiera volver atrás tratarÃa de tener
solamente buenos momentos.
Por si no lo saben, de eso está hecha la vida, sólo de momentos;
no te pierdas el ahora.
Yo era uno de esos que nunca iban a ninguna parte sin
termómetro,
una bolsa de agua caliente, un paraguas y un paracaÃdas;
Si pudiera volver a vivir, viajarÃa más liviano.
Si pudiera volver a vivir comenzarÃa a andar descalzo a principios
de la primavera y seguirÃa asà hasta concluir el otoño.
DarÃa más vueltas en calesita, contemplarÃa más amaneceres
y jugarÃa con más niños, si tuviera otra vez la vida por delante.
Pero ya tengo 85 años y sé que me estoy muriendo.
 A little more: Almeida says Reid did publish this translation, in Queen's Quarterly of Autumn 1992, and seems to be a bit mystified as to why he would have done that. "Perhaps the history of literature is the history of grand errors in reading." Almeida finds the original author of this poem to be Nadine Stair of Kentucky, published in the March 27 1978 issue of Family Circle (Almeida bizarrely calls the magazine Family Circus). ...According to Bryon Crawford, the author's real name was Nadine Strain.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: 3 responses
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Wow, sometimes a passage of  reading just sends you scrambling for reference materials... A izquierda y a la derecha, absortos en su lúcido sueño, se perfilan los rostros momentáneos de los lectores, a la luz de las lámparas estudiosas, como en la hipálage de Milton. This comes from the dedication at the front of Borges' El hacedor -- Borges is dedicating the book to his deceased countryman Leopoldo Lugones, and imagining a library where he would give the book to Lugones. "To the left and to the right, absorbed in their lucid dream, the momentary faces of the readers are outlined in the light of the studious lamps, as in the hypallage of Milton." Wait -- the what of Milton? Wikipædia is useful as normal -- "studious lamps" is a hypallage, an application of the adjective to a different word than the one it's actually describing. Now I was curious and wanted to know why Borges was making reference to Milton here. So I looked; and in the course of surfing around trying to figure it out, made a very useful discovery. In Dreamtigers, Mildred Boyer translates "lámparas estudiosas" as "bright officious lamps" -- why? A search for that phrase brings one directly to the source passage in Milton -- Paradise Lost IX.103-4: Terrestrial Heav'n, danced round by other Heav'ns,
That shine, yet bear their bright, officious lamps I spent a little while trying to figure this one out -- is "officious" rendered as "estudiosas" in the Spanish translation of Milton? That would not make a lot of sense, and besides I'm sure Borges read Milton in English. Ultimately I think it is just a really weird choice on Boyer's part -- Borges is not quoting Milton, he's alluding to him, but Boyer seems to be committed to a reading that says Borges is quoting Milton -- and thus makes the usage not be a hypallage but simply an incoherency. But look at how Andrew Hurley translates the passage in Collected Fictions:To left and right, absorbed in their
waking dream, rows of readers' momentary profiles in the light of
the 'scholarly lamps,' as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives
would have it. This is a little wordy maybe -- but it communicates the image in Borges' piece precisely, indeed it allows me to see the image much more clearly than I had when I was grappling with this unfamiliar word "hypallage".I came across Hurley's translation in an essay he wrote for Cadernos de Tradução, the journal of the translation department at Universida de Federal de Santa Caterina in Florianópolis, Brasil: What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges [PDF]. It is a magnificent article and I want to post about it in more detail, but I strongly encourage anyone interested in Borges to read it. One of Hurley's points in this piece is that the hypallage is a key element of Borges' style. In the following sentences, Borges refers to two more instances of hypallage: the "arid camel" from Lugones' own Lunario sentimental, and Æneid VI.268: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (approx. "They passed in darkness under the lonely night through shadow." -- according to Borges, a line that both "employs and surpasses this artifice.")You can hear Borges reading this dedication at Poema en audio. Lots more of his readings there too, which I haven't begun to check through yet.
posted evening of May 20th, 2009: 7 responses
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