...and even better

Two Lines has a blog! I'll be spending a lot of time reading Two Words: The Blog of the Center for the Art of Translation over the next couple of days.

Reasons my week is getting better

• At Three Percent, Dan Vitale reviews Anne McLean's translation of The Armies (Los ejércitos) by Evelio Rosero.
• Rosero's new novel, Los almuerzos, comes out this month.
• In "The Brazilian Sphinx", Lorrie Moore explores the life and work of Clarice Lispector.
• A review of Lispector's The Hour of the Star (translated by Giovanni Pontiero) appears in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.
• I'll have to comment on their take on translation as criticism soon--Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and others have gone back and forth on this issue for years...
• From Scott Esposito's excellent essay, "Horacio Castellanos and the New Political Novel": "What for Ford Madox Ford was primarily a story of infidelity in inter-war England, and for Kobo Abe was about existentialist malaise in mid-century Japan, and for Walker Percy was about the alienation of the individual in a radically mediated society, and for Kazuo Ishiguro was a story of classism in contemporary England, becomes for Moya a story of the great political subconsciousness that seethes through life in 21st-century Latin America. Each of these writers shares an interest in portraying the space between objective reality and human subjectivity. Fundamentally, they are interested in what happens as the human mind attempts to piece together a reality, though it lacks the necessary information to do so. As the diversity of these writers’ output shows, the dramatization of this gap is a very malleable tool: an individual’s quest for objective truth can interrogate realities about the cultures that range from a bottom-rung operative in a Latin American state on the verge of failure to a wealthy, privileged gentleman in a European nation at the height of empire. What is most characteristic about these novels is that vital facts about the culture each is set in are bound up at the deepest levels with the narrators’ own gradual realization that there is no such a thing as an objective reality. The process of self-discovery is contingent on comprehending one’s cultural context."
• And Suzanne Jill Levine offers an excerpt from her spectacular book (to be reissued in October), The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.

New poetry

The Latin American Review of Books has new content up for September, including a review of Maurice Kilwein Guevara's Poema by Francisco Aragón:

It’s work, then, that engages history and politics through art. “The Sound of Glass is Unmistakable” (p. 54), another emblematic piece in this vein, reads like a metaphorical micro history of South America, where Bolívar’s dream of a united continent ends, shattered:

Sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, even my mother who normally avoids the atomic sunlight like a movie star, scurry out of a hundred holes to witness the splintered cart and mangled horses, the twin condors circling, the shards of blue sky everywhere.

The range of artists and eras Guevara engages is admirably ample, and the sensibility throughout—its engagement with what I’ll call more avant-garde techniques in that they resist facile narrative, and the allusions to various events in the history of the region—places the collection, in my view, within a tradition that is arguably as Latin American as it is American. Put another way, Poema establishes the Colombian-born Guevara as the most “Latin American” of Latino poets in the United States, if not simply one of our most cosmopolitan poets, period.

And yet: if the city of Pittsburgh was a more predominant presence in Guevara’s earlier volumes, the city of steel and bridges, where Guevara was raised, continues to hold an indelible place in his imagination. “Bright Pittsburgh Morning” (p. 17) begins:

This must happen just after I die: At sunrise
I bend over my grandparents’ empty house in Hazelwood
And pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River.

Even here, though, his method insists on a narrative logic of its own—divorced from a more conventional reality.

Interchangeable biographies

From Arcadia's recent article on the friendship between Paul Auster and Enrique Vila-Matas:

Alguna vez Vila-Matas confesó que nunca dejaba de leer una entrevista a Paul Auster porque el autor norteamericano siempre le brindaba ideas para nuevos libros. Se declara uno de los más antiguos lectores españoles de Auster. “Descubrí el libro El arte del hambre y desde entonces lo leí todo —asegura—. Recuerdo con fascinación al detective de La trilogía de Nueva York. Y las dos veces que he estado en Nueva York he acabado, sin darme cuenta, en Central Park, acordándome sin querer de ese libro”. Precisamente en Nueva York se cruzaron por primera vez cuando el Instituto Cervantes los reunió, en octubre de 2007, para que leyeran fragmentos de sus respectivas obras aprovechando la edición en inglés de El mal de Montano (Premio Herralde de novela y mejor libro extranjero en Francia) y que los dos comparten la misma editorial en Estados Unidos (New Directions) y en España (Anagrama). Allí coincidieron en afirmar la importancia que tiene para ellos incluir otros libros y anécdotas literarias en sus obras y destacaron la soledad que experimenta todo escritor. “Cuanta más experiencia de la soledad tiene uno, más paradójicamente vive la sensación de que esa experiencia no es precisamente de ostracismo o de aislamiento, sino de apertura hacia los demás”, citó más tarde Vila-Matas a su camarada Paul Auster, en un artículo de prensa que tituló “De lo contrario sería Auster” y en el que se cuestionaba por qué no era Paul Auster. “Indignó a los lectores mexicanos de la revista Letras libres, porque dijeron que ya sabían que yo no era él’, declaró después el catalán. Como si buscaran con ello reafirmar su afinidad asistieron al evento vestidos casi idénticamente. Llevaban uno y otro traje negro, con sus ojos de pronunciadas órbitas y sombría apariencia de poetas malditos. Los dos convergen también en su vacilante relación con Nueva York y Barcelona, escenarios privilegiados de sus libros.

Day-off links

• Our lovely little city was founded on this day in 1525, and so we all get to stay home on a Tuesday.
• Darby climbs aboard the Inconvenience and inevitably, irrevocably gets it.
• Marcelo explains why literature "no longer exists in its own sphere, self-referential, imbued with a sense of mission and exceptionalism"--and tosses Sebald and Aira into the mix.
• ReadySteadyBook hosts a gratifying essay on Cortázar by Kit Maude.
• The Quarterly Conversation is beautifully redesigned.

Of interest

• Scott Esposito writes about the necessity of supporting the literary outlets we love and why he's begun to pay writers of The Quarterly Conversation (one of the best literary journals out there).
• The official website of Kate Summmerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher has completely sucked me in. (Too bad there's no ebook version of the novel yet! I'd really like to read this one.) Update: Stay away from Maureen Corrigan's NPR review. She gives away the identity of the killer! I am deeply annoyed and disappointed.
  
• Jenny Davidson offers a fascinating account of her adventures in research in preparation for the sequel to The Explosionist.
• Mark Sarvas has embarked on his Summer of Roth: "The majority of readers see only finished reviews but I want to show you what goes into a sausage – the things I notice, the patterns I detect, the strengths and weaknesses. And then, as I turn to Indignation and prepare my review, I will give you some specific glimpses into that process – the preparation, the contemplation and the composition."
• A new Alina Simone song is up at NPR Music.

Beyond yourself

Matthew Cheney posts a really wonderful snippet from Lydia Millet's conversation with Jonathan Lethem (found in the current issue of BOMB Magazine):

Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten.

An antidote for dehumanization

In an essay in the print version of January's Arcadia, columnist Margarita Valencia discusses W.H. Auden, beginning with one of his essays on Shakespeare:

Auden asegura que lo que Yago hace con Otelo es un experimento científico, uno que culmina exitosamente en la medida en que logra convertir a Otelo en un objeto. "Conocer en el sentido científico significa, en últimas, tener poder sobre lo que se conoce. [...]", añade Auden. "Siempre es posible reducir a los seres humanos al estatus de cosas completamente conocibles desde el punto de vista científico y totalmente controlables". Esta fantasía de control total gracias a la ciencia, tan característica de la modernidad a la que Auden dio voz en su poesía, aun acompaña y sostiene las discusiones sobre el valor de las artes y de las humanidades, una de las manifestaciones más penosas de la insustancialidad cultural que pugnó por dominar el discurso en torno a la cultura en el siglo XX.

It's an insightful look at The Dyer's Hand and the increasing relevance of Auden's poetic philosophy in a climate of voluntary self-deception.

She concludes by affirming,

No puedo imaginar un mejor antídoto para la deshumanización que la poesía, cuyo único propósito, si es que ha de tenerlo, es desintoxicarnos y desencantarnos diciendo la verdad.

Anne Enright in Cartagena

The second event we made it to at this year's Hay Festival (the first being a screening of Paraíso Travel and Q&A with author Jorge Franco and screenwriter Juan Rendón) was a conversation between Anne Enright and Arcadia director, Marianne Ponsford.

(This great photo is from the Cartagena Hay Festival 2008 blog, taken by photographer Daniel Mordzinski.)

Before the event, we received free copies of a lovely little publication by Arcadia and Juan Valdez: Primeras páginas: Los escritores de Bogotá 39 en sus propias palabras—the first pages of works by the Bogotá 39 from 17 Latin American countries (as The Literary Saloon has already mentioned). Here is the PDF and also the html version.

Among them was a page from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao translated into Spanish. (I eagerly look forward to its publication here as I would love to have more people read it.)

Marianne Ponsford began by asking Enright how old she was when she started reading. She replied that she began reading when she was very young. There were always many books in the house and she read everything she could get her hands on since the age of three (she would read her older sisters' books too). She didn’t worry about not understanding and even attempted Ulysses at age 14—she loved its musicality. But when it was discovered what she was reading, her parents took it away from her and put it up in the attic until she turned 18.

She confessed that like most adolescents, she read in order to discover information about sex. She read Lolita for the same reason, but when she came to the scene, she was very disappointed in its lack of specific technical information.

Ponsford commented that reading tends to be perceived as a solitary activity. Did she have a tendency to solitude when she was young?

She said that there were five children in her family and what reading provided you with was space—perhaps the only space that you had. But the family would also read together at the table...and she would also do her homework in front of the tv. People wonder how she’s able to write with small children in the house and she says that she now has absolutely no problem focusing with noise around.

After some discussion about the international school in Canada she attended at 16, she was asked about her breakdown. Enright declared that she is a "great believer" in breakdowns—"especially if you can have one while you’re young." She said that death is very enchanting to the young—that is, until they actually see it firsthand. Her breakdown came in her late 20’s and led to depression and thoughts of suicide. But she said that it’s very good for writers to have their personalities deconstructed in such a way. This is why she’s very patient with miserable (i.e., depressing) writers. There’s hope in their work and the possibility of resolution.

Ponsford then asked her about motherhood and made the comment that not very many heroines in novels are mothers. Enright replied that mothers don’t have stories—children do. A woman’s narrative stops as soon as she begins to have children. She said this was one of her challenges in writing The Gathering.

Ponsford commented that she finds her novels to be about the writing, the beauty of her language. And she has two children, so she’s been able to see language develop firsthand. She asked, "What have they taught you about language?"

She replied with her theory that all writers have "big mothers"—women with a very important, prominent place in their lives. When her daughter was learning how to speak, she would repeat what she heard and so speaking became an act of "feeding each other language." "All language takes place between ourselves and our mothers, which is why mothers can’t be written about."

She was then asked about a comment she once made about being uncomfortable in the presence of a nursing mother. Enright explained that in the act of nursing, there is too much love, too much need present. (Too much to bear looking at.) Ponsford asked if this could be used as an excuse to avoid feeling or sentimentality in her work. Enright replied, "Goodness is a great mystery" and she finds herself writing about "the emotions with which we are helpless." Men tend to write about killing, about the emotional incontinence in the act of ending the life of another human being. She, on the other hand, is interested in the emotional incontinence of loving someone. "It is a terrible thing… It is an absolute."

Ponsford asked about the lyrical quality of her writing and if she ever wrote poetry. She replied that poetry was too sacred to be embarked upon, but that she was capable of writing really good sentences and that’s good enough for her—because poets must go beyond that. She offered the work of Paul Muldoon and Anne Carson as examples—that with them, the "sentence goes somewhere very strange and very enjoyable."

She was then asked about writing being a painful process and she said that "the secret of writing is writing." She loves the creative process—getting in the flow of it and just writing unthinkingly. She mentioned meeting John Banville in an airport and asking him about the Booker. He said, "It’s terrible, terrible. The book is just terrible." He thought The Sea was the worst book ever. So she made the point that writers' emotions about their own writing is useless—that a work is what it is, independent of what the writer thinks of it. "Writing is about controlling your mood."

Ponsford brought up the idea that it’s taboo for women to be angry and asked her what she thought. Enright discussed her character Veronica and said she was very angry (at that stage of her grief). But she’s also angry at her world, at her family—the fact that her parents had children arbitrarily and never considered what it would take to truly care for each one. Veronica is angry—"but never at her children." And she only falls apart when they’re asleep.

Ponsford observed that book seemed to deal with the violence of male desire. Why male desire? Enright quipped that that would be her next book’s theme—the violence of female desire. But in this case she was interested in misogyny, in men hating women. She said that it was because she was in such a happy and settled place in her personal life that she could go over to the dark side and explore those things.

She was then asked if there were any advantages to being a woman writer. Enright said, "It’s wonderful." That it’s really a wonderful time to be a woman and a writer because in the past, some had to leave their children in order to write, but now she’s free to do both. "What a privilege."

Ponsford asked about The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and how she could write it having never been to Paraguay. She said that her excuses for that are always 1) that she was pregnant and 2) that she couldn’t go in 1855. She said she was "just making it up." She didn’t want truth to get in the way of the story she had to tell—and she recommends writers to do the research after they write (to see how well they got it).

But Eliza Lynch was a historical figure. She read a 1950’s biography about her and she was interested in Irish women outside of the establishment.

Ponsford asked her if Gabriel García Márquez was an influence. She said that someone had told her that the only way to read him was in the original Spanish and so she read four pages of him a day with a Spanish dictionary on hand. She said his sentences are "like honey dripping off a spoon."

She was then asked about the butterflies she used in Eliza Lynch. Ponsford compared them to Rushdie’s in The Satanic Verses (the original inspiration obviously being Gabo’s Cien años de soledad). Enright explained that the butterflies in her novel came from the fact that butterflies tend to congregate in that way around "animal piss" and so it was a good image for her to use since Eliza was a beautiful woman who fed on human misery.

Ponsford asked her about something she once said about ideology being the end of art. Enright asserted that she believes this to be true. For example, with Marxism—"ideology ossifies." The stranglehold it exerts over a work must be broken for it to be of any use. Ideology is "awful for a writer" because writing is about stripping things down to their essence.

Ponsford asked if there were any other Latin American writers who influenced her and Enright mentioned Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. She went on to say that magical realism posed an interesting problem. That it is essentially "metaphor made flesh" and that it is "a very Catholic thing to do." She said that people who don’t like magical realism tend to be more at the center (perhaps more literal-minded). But she said that women must write more of it because sometimes it’s the only way to convey their experience. (I was reminded of Junot Díaz again and his thoughts on the immigrant experience and science fiction.) She went on to say that unmetaphorical books are written by people who know and own the world: "I can’t. It isn’t stable. I don’t possess it. Even in my own books, I don’t entirely know what’s going on."

She said she doesn’t know where she is going when she writes. She’s "used to the dark"—"not afraid of it anymore."

Ponsford then asked about her experience in winning the Booker. She confessed, "I have no filter" and that the strangest aspect to it all is the people who now read things she wrote ten years ago. She doesn’t remember some of the things she said and these things now get quoted back to her. It’s "very strange and very daunting." Prizes and all that come with them don’t matter creatively, but they do affect one’s persona.

Ponsford asked if her writing will be affected by it from now on. Enright quoted an old Irish song that says, "I know where I’m going, I know who’s going with me." She said, "I know how to sit at a desk"—which is one of the most important things for a writer. Emotions don’t count. She was reminded of a Lewis Carroll saying: "Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today." She said that’s how it is with the critical world—there is never jam today.

"All books are failures." She said they were enjoyable failures, but that there is always a creative shortfall in the written word. Written words solidify the work.

In closing, she said she loved meeting Marianne and that she was "honored to be in Colombia." During the Q&A, she was asked if it were true that one must "write what you know." She responded that "we know a lot" and many "unexpected things" as well. But the imagination is also very important and there must be a balance. Writing is also about developing self-knowledge. She says she agrees with what Dickinson says, "There are worlds in our heads."

Someone else asked about her writing about motherhood. She said that it’s "sacred ground" and that there’s a difference between the social idea of motherhood and one’s actual mother. There is the Catholic idea that motherhood is the epitome of "sublime suffering." She declared that religion is a mechanism for the oppression of women, but that they do it extraordinarily well. It’s the priest who is the one who says that she’s the most important person—and this is why she must do everything and sacrifice everything for her family.

A question came about her literary preferences. She replied that she’s a restless reader—that reading is work nowadays because she can’t help but think of what she could’ve done better. Also, "I don’t do hierarchies." She never places one writer above another as far as "importance" is concerned. She said she has "friends" like Alice Munro—the writers one reads who are like old friends. But she’s really just "impatient with all of them." And tastes change. She used to love Lolita, but not so much anymore. Perceptions change with time. Nabokov is not a "fallen idol," there is just a different perception now from when she was young. But she said she loves Joyce—that The Dubliners still makes her cry.

(I had said that I wouldn’t post these long quasi-transcriptions…but it was all so interesting!)

Colombian litmag

Over the weekend, a friend told me about Colombian cultural magazine El Malpensante. Definitely something to keep an eye on:

El Malpensante es una revista literaria, pero no académica. Se fundamenta en el texto escrito de manera refinada, inteligente y perspicaz, y aunque por ello tiene un objeto paralelo al que estudia la academia, no suscribe una visión rígida de las letras. Preferimos aquellos textos, inclusive de actualidad, que a nuestro juicio no dependan de la moda o de la coyuntura presente y que puedan leerse casi con el mismo interés uno o dos años después de publicados. Por otra parte, El Malpensante considera una obligación descubrir nuevos talentos y rescatar escritores olvidados.

This is why the internet exists

Currently exploring the excellent new issue of The Quarterly Conversation. So far, I've read through the brilliant pieces by Marcelo Ballvé, Scott Esposito, and Javier Moreno. And there's even more to get to...

Translation goodness

Issue 8 of The Quarterly Conversation is up and I very happily read great interviews with three Spanish-to-English translators: C.M. Mayo, Natasha Wimmer, and Chris Andrews. Also, there's Javier Moreno's excellent essay on his Bolaño diagram (which I spent some time with earlier), Derik Badman's review of The Last Novel by David Markson, and many more good things. I've quoted some highlights below, but all of these interviews should be read thoroughly. Fascinating stuff.

C.M. Mayo:

The whole idea of Tameme is to make the literature accessible to someone who reads only English, and at the same time, accessible to someone who reads only Spanish. So writers are together whom, normally, would not be. For example, the first issue of Tameme featured Margaret Atwood and Jaimes Sabines. These are great names--yet many even very well read Mexicans have never heard of Margaret Atwood, while few English speaking readers have heard of Jaime Sabines. At the same time, having the text side-by-side makes the reading experience that much richer. Many people have told me they read Tameme to help them improve their Spanish. It's also an exercise for literary translators. Literary translation is an art; five literary translators would translate a given piece in five different ways. So, as a translator, one can engage with the text critically. I find the translator's notes the most interesting.

(Thanks to this piece, I've added a couple items to my wishlist and have discovered the wonder that is Tameme. I look forward to the day when something similar exists for Colombia.)

Natasha Wimmer:

There are lots of things I try to avoid, but I mostly try not to slavishly adhere to general rules--translation is all about exceptions. Often, though, I try to avoid automatically using cognates when there might be a better translation of a particular word. I'm not generally too worried about putting too much of my own voice into the translation--I don't think there's really much space for that, except possibly in dialogue, which tends to require a freer translation than expository prose. When it comes to words and phrases in the original language, I certainly try to avoid the Spanglish effect, but I think a few carefully chosen expressions left in Spanish (and most place names, too) are inevitable and even desirable. [...]

One of the main challenges of the translation was getting the rhythm of Bolaño's sentences right. He is never predictable and can be intentionally awkward, and sometimes it was hard to strike the right balance in English--I often felt an urge to smooth over ungainly constructions, but restrained myself, then realized in reading them over that they were perfectly calibrated. Ultimately, this was probably one of the most satisfying parts of working on the translation, too. Otherwise, I loved the humor. It's always more fun to translate something funny.

Chris Andrews (on the translator "getting in the way"):

I mean producing a translation that is unduly distracting, which I guess can happen if it isn't quite complete, so that the syntactic patterns of the source language creep into the target language a bit too much and make the translation more syntactically odd than the original, or if the translation goes over the top and becomes showy. But I don't much like pronouncing on this sort of thing because I'm no doubt guilty of under- and over-translating myself, and the whole business of translation studies can be a distraction from the works themselves, which are way more interesting in the end.

I loved his recommendations. More authors to pick up... Now that I've finished reading novels by Laura Restrepo and Mario Mendoza, I'll keep an eye out for the writers he mentioned: Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Juan Villoro, Antonio José Ponte, and others. It helps me hope that it's only a matter of time before the advantages of being able to find and read these works in the original Spanish will outweigh the disadvantages of having limited access to English-language titles.

Medellín's poetry

According to the Poetry International Network,

The Medellín International Poetry Festival shares this year's Swedish Right Livelihood Award with Indian rights activist, Ruth Manorama and Daniel Ellsberg, the former US Defence Department official who leaked secret Pentagon documents during the Vietnam war.

The prize committee cited the "The Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín" for promoting peace in what it called one of the most violent cities in the world. The Right Livelihood Award for justice, peace and truth-building, often referred to as "the alternative Nobel Prize", was founded in 1980 to honour work ignored by the prestigious Nobel prizes.

The latest edition of Prometeo, the journal of the Medellín festival, includes work by over 60 poets from five different regions of the world.