Unexplainable stories

Last winter's issue of The Quarterly Conversation contains Marcelo Ballvé's wonderfully insightful essay on the work of César Aira, providing several keys to understanding the Argentine's complex yet playful work:

Aira has staked out a very cogent and immensely influential (in Latin America) artistic position that basically says "storytelling at its finest avoids explanations, information, interpretation, etc." In a series of 1988 lectures delivered at the University of Buenos Aires, Aira was clear on this point: "The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation. . . . The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added." [...]

Aira's novels tend to begin straightforwardly, immediately immersing the reader in the climate of the story. These beginnings are done with a natural self-confidence, the entrancing self-possession of the best oral storytellers. Aira understands that to begin a story, no fancy words or purple prose are necessary. Nor are complex situations meant to be presented as such at first. The job at hand is to begin. The story must be allowed to unfold first, before it can be refolded by the author into something strange, with infinite folds—an origami monster.

All of this accurately describes Aira's novel, El mago (not yet translated into English). A lonely magician has a curious problem—he can actually perform real magic. He doesn't know how or why, but he can. One would think that this would ensure him a lifetime of fame and fortune, but the truth is quite the opposite...

He can fly, but suffers from vertigo. He can't pull money out of thin air because bills are numbered and he isn't sure what problems would result. He can't create factories or houses because property is always already owned by someone else and he wouldn't be able to give a satisfactory reason for having them in the first place. But what about simply making gold? He'd have to sell it, sign papers, and it would be too dangerous to make a living out of doing this continually. He tried using the winning numbers in roulette, but it made him nervous, and the worry and paranoia that came from going from casino to casino was just not worth it. (He'd never tried using a winning lottery number because he feared public exposure.)

But what prevents him from becoming a better magician? The sad truth is that it simply isn't his vocation. He chose the job as the best way to hide his abilities and lacks the talent and imagination to be truly great. He rents videos of different magicians worldwide, selects his favorite tricks, and uses them as his own. He always plans on improving them, but is too lazy to make the effort and so the tricks are exactly the same as the originals. He believes himself a failure for not using his talents adequately, condemned to a life of mediocrity. He has a modest apartment, but his wife and teenage children are demanding more. After twenty years in the business, he's determined to change his circumstances.

He resolves to make himself known as the Best Magician in the World at the upcoming convention for professional magicians in Panama. The rest of the story concerns itself with what Hans Chans (whose real name is Pedro María Gregorini) does once he arrives at the hotel hosting the convention and all of the things that do (and don't) happen as a result.

[Aira's] versatility is possible only because at the heart of each Aira novel there is a marvelously ingenious storytelling device—a premise, central anecdote, or plot mechanism—which Aira exploits to the nth potential. He has a vertigo-inducing capacity to suggest a cornucopia of stories even while telling just one.

The magician's basic dilemma of how to find his place among his peers and make a name for himself branches off into other smaller, yet more immediate complications (for example, how to locate the convention's program so he can know when he's scheduled to perform? Is he really the invited "star" of the show? How can he get rid of the obsessive hotel employee that won't leave him alone? And, most importantly, how can he even be sure he hasn't conjured the entire scenario?).

The answer to the magician's problems appears in the most unlikely of places. While searching for the elusive program, the magician meets three publishers who remind him of the three wise men (or "magi"—lots of potential symbolism here, especially the parallel of being at the "cradle" of a new venture). The revelation our sad magician finally experiences at the end made me laugh aloud at its sheer brilliance. Aira takes us through existential dilemmas, angst, and the ennui of infinite possibilities to the beauty of a finite, everyday solution.

At the end of this lecture, citing Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca, Aira compared the writer to a magician: "The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world."

This comparison is the key to the novel—a fable on the miraculous potential of fiction.

Aira has a genius for taking something many would wish for, turning it into a surreal nightmare, and revealing how the solution has existed all along—and is even superior to the dream. I look forward to reading more of his work.

Semana Santa

Café del Parque, Santa Marta

Holy Week, vacation time. The house has been cleaned, books organized. Family members arrive tomorrow. We'll revisit beaches we haven't seen in a while, go camping, read in the shade, and hope to get some rest amid the traveling. Will check back soon.

More on Chesterton and Borges

Guillermo Martínez's Borges y la matemática is such a fun book. The author of Crímenes imperceptibles (aka The Oxford Murders) compiled certain university lectures on the mathematical concepts found in Borges' stories specifically for those of us who "can only count to ten." I've been reading it slowly--each time Martínez discusses a Borges story, I'll stop and reread the story. It's been a wonderful way to rediscover his work and spark new epiphanies (because if anyone should be reread, it's Borges).

In reading El Aleph, I made a little discovery in its epilogue. Borges discusses his story "El muerto," and divulges that the character of Azevedo Bandeira "es también una tosca divinidad, una versión mulata y cimarrona del incomparable Sunday de Chesterton." So The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare inspired Borges--one more for the list of Chesterton-Borges connections.

Back in October, Ed linked to Gilbert Adair's wise consideration of the great GKC and The Club of Queer Trades:

Chesterton sought always to entertain - he was a reader's writer rather than a writer's writer. Yet even these light-textured tales (the members of the titular club must each practise a heretofore unheard-of profession) have, as is often the case with this author, a profoundly unsettling undertow. The Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, a great admirer, once made an intriguing claim. He said that, while Dickens' fiction piled on the agonies of poverty, neglect, violence, solitude and death, the warmth of his style guaranteed that the society he depicted never ceased to be convivial. The ostensibly breezy, life-loving Chesterton, by contrast, tended to write nightmarish fictions full of ominously lurid sunsets and wild-eyed, red-haired young poets. [...]

Even if, in Chesterton's work, crimes that seem to be rooted in the pagan and the supernatural are invariably revealed, come the dénouement, to have had a reassuringly rational basis, an aftertaste of occult perversity lingers, as it does from a proper nightmare. In short, the more one reads him, the more one begins to wonder whether this jolly, God-fearing man might just have been, in today's vulgar parlance, sick. It is, at any rate, his flesh-creeping proximity to Poe and Kafka and indeed Borges that makes him not just still readable but still curiously modern.

Chesterton's sense of humor is by turns black, biting, and playful. He exposes the strangeness and bizarre beauty of the day-to-day that we unthinkingly take for granted. The Club of Queer Trades is an excellent introduction to his work and should probably be read before The Man Who Was Thursday.

Incidentally, someone should do a study of his influence on contemporary writing. I'm pretty sure that both Jesse Ball (in Samedi the Deafness) and Neil Gaiman (in American Gods) are taking a page from Chesterton's book with the characters of Saturday and Wednesday (respectively)...

The more things change

John Dryden in 1680:

In the meantime it seems to me that the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable, is not from the too close pursuing of the author's sense, but because there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise and so small encouragement for so considerable a part of learning.

(from Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet)

The problem with "high art"

Over the weekend, I tried to pinpoint what it was about Stephen Marche's essay on Robbe-Grillet that bothered me. (I really liked Raymond + Hannah--there's no axe to grind here, just some honest questioning.) I couldn't get to a computer and wound up scribbling my thoughts in a notebook. Such a strong statement was bound to get a reaction: Daniel Green and Scott Esposito have already posted their well-substantiated views, but here are my purely subjective thoughts (for good measure).

For all I know, Marche may be right. I don't have the qualifications or the knowledge to dismantle his arguments. But there's something about this that doesn't sit well with me. As a "common reader" (whatever that really means), armed with only a BA and without any writerly pretentions, I actually enjoyed reading Jealousy...perhaps because of the challenge it presented. Doesn't any disparagement of this style of writing, this quibble with form, go against the exploration he's discussing? Granted, I have not read any of Robbe-Grillet's criticism and only a couple of interviews (and only one novel). Strict dictums such as Marche describes cannot be religiously adhered to any more than plan traditionalism should be (as he states in the essay).

But I can't help but think that the whole idea of "high art" comes with the unnecessary labels of difficulty-for-its-own-sake, sterility, and elitism only because that's what the "experts" say and so that's what people come to accept--without having read any of the actual work itself. The repuation becomes a barrier to engagement for the reader. Unfortuantely, too many people unthinkingly tend to accept these qualifiers and so deprive themselves of the pleasure of reading the work for its own sake (and even of discovering that it isn't so "difficult" after all).

I've posted about the problem of the academy's intervention between the reader and the text before. I'll also add that terms such as "difficult" and "pleasurable" create false dichotomies in that they are entirely subjective words that only serve to make judgments for others, denying individuals the right to think for themselves.

I was very interested to read about Miriam Burstein's current adventure in teaching The Erasers to a group of freshmen. I hope she posts more about the class as time goes on. This is what higher education should be about--introducing students to something different (and maybe even a little strange) and seeing what they make of it.

If only attitudes about art could be those of exploration--even adventure!--and not of holier-than-thou, too-serious boredom (regardless of whether this be the fault of critics or even of the authors themselves). Let the readers decide.

The little rat that could

Sam Savage's Firmin (previously celebrated by The Litblog Co-op) has been translated into Spanish (and twelve other languages) to critical acclaim. This morning, El Tiempo posted the laudatory article, "The novel 'Firmin,' a rat's passion for reading, has become a complete publishing phenomenon." It says that in Spain alone, over 50,000 copies of the book have been published and it is currently in its eighth edition.

The article contains a lovely little book trailer that has clips of writers such as Rodrigo Fresán praising the story, as well as showing Chilean illustrator Fernando Krahn's other drawings of Firmin. There is also a PDF of the first chapter (in Spanish) and an audio interview with Seix Barral editorial director Elena Ramírez, who says that this is the first time that a publisher in Spain has acquired the global rights (for all translations) of a book whose original language is not Spanish.

Other writers also comment on their love for this book:

Para el escritor colombiano Mario Mendoza, esta "es una novela donde se muestra el desarrollo de la conciencia a lo largo de un proceso de lectura. No leemos para acumular cultura, sino porque los libros nos permiten ver pliegues y matices en la realidad que enfrentamos todos los días. Firmin es eso: una apología de la riqueza y la multiplicidad que sólo nos puede otorgar el lenguaje".

A su turno, la escritora española Rosa Montero la define como una "aguda fábula sobre la condición humana. Un disparo al corazón".

Un personaje que como lo comenta en su crítica sobre el libro Javier Aparicio Maydeu, en el suplemento cultural Babelia del diario español El País, "conmueve para siempre con sus lecciones de humanidad, sentido del humor y aguda sátira de nuestro loco mundo, nos empuja a leer aún más y nos impide volver a gritar ¡malditos roedores!".

Elsewhere in today's edition, Bogotá inaugurates six new libraries at six stops on the city's metro line, part of a new literacy initiative.

Fallible human voices

The 92nd Street Y blog has a video clip of Robert Alter and Marilynne Robinson discussing the former's recent translation of The Book of Psalms (the viewing of which immediately improved the quality of my day):



Aside from the interesting discussion of translation and the structure of Hebrew poetry, I was captivated by what Robinson had to say about the writers of the Bible:

They feel weakness and you feel the burden of their humanity in something that is nevertheless received as being a sacred testimony. You know, I mean, it seems to me that that's one of the most poignant and powerful things about scripture--that it situates the testimony of the sacred in fallible human voices, which are only extraordinary, only more beautiful, because you sense the frailty. The frailty's insisted upon. And here we have this enormous disproportion between the grandeur of God that's reported in the psalm and the sense of the presumed triviality of the human person, the human perceiver of these stars, and so on. You know, the psalm says, You crowned human beings; you gave them the glory that they have and, therefore, even though it is, in a sense, secondary to what they are, it is also utterly real, you know. There's just an extraordinary complexity of the human presence, the human testimony in a sacred literature. It's very, very remarkable.

On Sunday night when we heard that Chávez was sending troops to our border, lines from Psalm 27 that I had memorized as a child ran through my head. Here they are in Alter's translation:

Though a camp is marshaled against me,
           my heart shall not fear.
Though battle is roused against me,
           nonetheless do I trust.

(via ReadySteadyBlog)

Personal note

This litblog is entirely about literature, not my personal life, politics, or anything else. But due to the current situation and the ramifications on myself and my family, things have slown down a little and may continue to do so in the coming days. I am a very slow (and somewhat reluctant) writer (albeit an avid reader!) and need much time and energy in order to post. Like many difficult things, I've found it incredibly rewarding and have grown to love it. I hope to continue to find joy in writing and discussing literature and not let myself get waylaid by the darkness as we continue to struggle toward peace.

I have thoughts on César Aira, Fernando Pessoa, and a marvelous little book by Guillermo Martínez (on Borges and mathematics) in draft form still waiting. This is a note to remind myself of where my energies should be channeled, regardless of the fear knocking at our door.

I think Auden would forgive me for placing this here (so I don't forget):

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Another disappointment?

Trailers for the film adaptation of Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo are now online. (I'm sure Junot Díaz is thrilled.) The film features Isabella Rossellini, Tomás Milián, Juan Diego Botto, Stephanie Leónidas, Paul Freeman, David Zayas, Steven Bauer, Eileen Atkins, Pericles Mejía, Murphy Guyer, and Carlos Miranda.

I'm disappointed that they decided to shoot it in English and don't have very high hopes for it in general.

(via El Tiempo)

Giving stuff away

Neil Gaiman explains why putting books online for free is a good thing:

I'm currently talking to Harpers about ways we can make the American Gods online reading experience a more pleasant one. And about ways to give American Gods away that would make Harper Collins happy while also making, say, Cory Doctorow happy too.

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away -- the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I'm devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

I like giving stuff away. I think it's sensible. [...]

During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, "Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books," and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams' publisher, with a 'write in and get your free book' ad in Rolling Stone. They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the best tool for selling books.

As he points out in an interview with the Guardian,

"It's much more about gaining an audience than about some one-to-one correlation," he said. "It's a question of how do you find new writers." People often come to new authors in a library, on a friend's bookshelves, or by a personal recommendation, he explained. It "doesn't always begin with a financial transaction. I very much doubt that I discovered a single one of my favourite authors by buying a book." [...]

"The problem is not people who read books for nothing," he said, "it's people not reading books at all. You're fighting the fact that people don't read recreationally [any more]. Anything that can help has got to be a good thing."

I also agree with Bud about the ease of reading PDFs and think that if more books would become available this way, I wouldn't really need an eReader. I'm currently on page 92 of American Gods and it's occurred to me that a lot of people are probably unaware of how much reading online they already do. I've probably read what amounts to thousand-page volumes in blog posts in the past year alone...

Díaz's problem with Vargas Llosa

No hay nada más injusto que lo justo.
Nothing is more unjust than what is just.
--Lope de Vega

Last September, Callie took down a few book recommendations that Junot Díaz gave at a local reading. He mentioned Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? and made a rather startling statement:

"Goldman is a genius. After reading his work, I threw all my Mario Vargas Llosa books out the window. That guy is a criminal."

Having read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I know that Díaz isn't crazy about Vargas Llosa's depiction of the Trujillo regime in La Fiesta del Chivo (believing that even this is too tame) and considers Julia Álvarez's En el tiempo de las Mariposas to be the better book. But why "criminal"?

It took me two days to read Goldman's heartbreaking, incisive account of Father Gerardi's murder, the Guatemalan government's involvement, and the subsequent trials. Aside from being such a riveting story, I deeply appreciated Goldman's ability to clearly yet meticulously follow this Byzantine example of the nature of politics in Latin America. He does a compelling job of conveying the fantastic nature of what happens without giving in to exoticism or hyperbole. I also very much identified with his personal connection to his work and the complexity of what it means to belong to two very different countries.

Towards the end of the book, Goldman himself explains his view of Vargas Llosa's essay, which supports ¿Quién mató al obispo?: Autopsia de un crimen político by Maite Rico and Bertrand de la Grange--a defense of two of the accused military men and a completely different take on who the culprits could be:

It is reasonable to assume that when Mario Vargas Llosa wrote his essay on the Gerardi case and on the book Who Killed the Bishop? for El País, he was convinced of the truth of what he was writing. It may have been overly eager, unguarded ideological sympathy or prejudice; or the vanity of a Great Man of Letters, seduced, after many decades of adulation, into a sense of his own infallibility; or a case of what Borges had in mind when he wrote that no man, outside his own specialty, is not gullible; or some combination of these that led the distinguished novelist to accept at face value an extraordinarily controversial book's most far-fetched assertions as facts not requiring independent verification, and then to join his voice to the book's smears and accusations.

I read this as a cautionary tale of the ideological danger of being outside of Latin America for too long. European myopia is infamous around here--so much confusion and wrong interpretation of what actually goes on boiled down to a simplistic left and right dichotomy. And even that isn't fully understood.

As someone unfamiliar with the case before reading Goldman's book, it is very tempting to take "sides"--but I have not read the Rico-De la Grange book or any other information about the case. I can see where the arguments and counter-arguments fit, and the possible weak spots of Goldman's account (although it is incredibly well researched and seems to blow their theories apart). Some think Goldman didn't address the whole story. Ilan Stavans' review for the LA Times takes a more measured approach in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of Goldman's account.

The Guatemala Solidarity Network's blog briefly explains the situation (and I find myself agreeing with their conclusion):

One of the aspects of this publication is the involvement of outsiders in writing about the internal workings of the Guatemalan criminal justice system in one of the most high profile cases that pitted many power blocks against one another: the Catholic church, the military, organised crime, and the political establishments past (Government of Alvaro Arzu) and of the moment at the time (Alfonso Portillo).

Francisco Goldman as US writer of Guatemalan origin steps into the debate following Maite Rico (Spanish) and Bertrand de la Grange (French) book "Quien mato al obispo?". In it, they point to the complicity of parts of the Catholic church, the human rights community and organised crime in the murder of Juan Gerardi. They maintain that the military men Byron Lima Estrada and Byron Lima Oliva (sentenced to 30 years prison) are innocent of the murder.

Rico and De la Grange's account was supported by many outsiders, including famously Mario Vargas Llosa in El Pais. When Goldman suggests in his book that Rico and De la Grange received money from Arzu to write their book, they responded angrily and in sarcastic tone in El Periodico. According to Inforpress Centroamericana is wasn't the only time Rico and De la Grange had been accused of receiving Government money for a book. Suspicions were raised that the Mexican Government had participated in the publication of their book (Marcos: La Genial Impostura) critical of subcommandante Marcos. It's a very tangled web to be sure. Whatever the truth, anyone following this tragic episode in any depth, beginning with the events of 26th April 1998, gets the nagging sense that the whole story and all its ins and outs, will ultimately remain elusive. At the very least, Goldman's work has reignited a hope that the contrary will one day be true.

Opinions can be dangerous things. Well-respected individuals can't be too careful about which ideas they support and the implications of lending credibility to an issue without researching it thoroughly. We could all stand to be more careful.

NOTE: The Open Society Institute hosted a forum with Francisco Goldman, in which he discussed his book and how he became serious about writing it. It's a fascinating listen...

I wonder when this book will be translated into Spanish?

Shadows of the plain truth

Having finished reading and jotting down my notes on Kirstin Allio's Garner yesterday, I've begun reading the relevant thread at The Litblog Co-op. (Litblog archives in general are so much buried treasure. I always have to remind myself to not let the immediacy of the Internet get in the way of all the wonderful stuff that's already been written.) Although I have a clear idea of the ending (after reading it twice), others didn't, which made me reexamine my own conclusions. (I'm tempted to specifically discuss it here, but refuse to spoil anything for those who haven't read it.) Yet I would agree with the general consensus that it's the beauty of the language that makes this such a memorable novel.

The electricity went out yesterday at school, so in between classes, I sat in the heat (windows wide open for the occasional breeze), and lost myself in its pages--a vague drowsiness blurring the boundaries of the outside world while I read, as if in a dream. Kassia Krozser describes this very well,

Quiet voices demand your full attention. You turn off the stereo, maybe head to a corner of a your backyard, away from the everyday life sounds. You don't want to miss a moment of the voice. This is reading at its best. You become one with the book.

I found the feeling the novel gave me evoked in Ed's use of "mesmerized" (and even "warm bath"!), as well as Heather Birrell's sense of being "enthralled in a near-hallucinogenic manner by Allio’s prose."

Dan Wickett does a good job of reviewing it. I just wanted to add some observations that I haven't already seen discussed elsewhere.

Much is obvious about the stoicism and repression in the lives of Garner's citizens. What isn't so apparent is the understated way in which Allio reveals their darker aspects. For example, I was well into the novel before I realized (with a slow shock) that Willard Heald reads much of the mail he delivers (when he decides it worthy of being delivered at all). I supposed that since he's the town's self-appointed historian, he believes his activities justified and has no qualms.

The other surprise was the revelation of who it was who actually burnt down Franklin Abbott's home--and the subsequent realization of the motive (p. 181). It's a passing mention that Willard writes to himself in tiny, offset, parenthetical prose--but what is equally shocking is the townspeople's (seemingly) calm acceptance of the fact. Is the event perceived as "normal"? Or is it more a matter of everyone's unwillingness to admit to the insanity of the act? (I tend to think the latter because it harmonizes with the horribly casual conversation that ensues at the end as Buck Herman "shoulders the weight of the girl"--just as he would a sack of the potatoes he's so nonchalantly discussing.)

Heald's participation (or should I say intentional non-participation?) in the various questionable circumstances of Frances, Abbott, Bickley, and even Asa Robinson amount to a chilling complicity with outright evil.

But as Kirstin Allio points out,

Ambiguity provokes tension. Ultimately, I think the story is more powerful if it remains less delineated. I hope the tension in Garner is compounded by Willard Heald’s voice bleeding into the text – he is that dangerous person who tries to speak for all. Where does Heald stop and Garner begin? Where does he read the town, read the mail, write the town, love the girl?

That being said, there are clues everywhere [...], and I hoped very much to elicit close readings. Words are shifty characters.

The text on the book's cover is about Heald, for starters. But as much as he writes and admits to himself, there are also things to which he is blind. At first I didn't believe that he knows what actually happened to Frances because his ability to consider another's perspective is completely subsumed by his own ("weak, unwise owl eyes"). In other words, he thinks he understands everyone else, but to him, other people are just mirrors that reflect his own propensities. This is why he doesn't think twice about the god-like decisions he makes. But as I reread the beginning, I found it on page 11. He knows. Of course, whether or not he believes himself to be at fault is another matter entirely.

Yet as far as ambiguity goes, I was much more perplexed by the fate of Hal Bickley than that of Frances Giddens. What had Abbott actually done? Was it merely a perceived threat, or something much more final? Again, Heald is there to lend a frightening cruelty to the scene:

So she loved her husband. Well he would fling such love from a brutal height so that nothing of its body would reach the earth.

If indeed it is a murder that has occurred, it precedes Frances' own death. But again, the town's reaction is not given. Is this yet one more example of the complicity of their silence? This event takes place in "Part Four: Abbott's Return." Is there a more sinister reason for the title? Does he, in fact, "return" to another violent act?

The various mentions of the lithium water found in the streams of Garner caught my attention as well and made me immediately think of bipolar disorder. In searching for more information, I read that lithium can be found in granite and found a page that discussed lithium's presence in water. It doesn't seem like it would affect anyone who drinks it, but the very mention of it was interesting.

Another aspect of this novel I love are the meditations on womanhood and the characters of Frances and Mrs. Heald. As tragedy nears, Frances begins to voice her own quiet resignation:

Became a woman, she forced herself to say it under her breath, and in her voice it sounded poor and defeated. She began to watch the boarders with envy.

Flipping through the book as I was writing my notes, I accidentally read this last sentence as, "She began to watch the borders with envy." Not only are her own boundaries being crossed, but elsewhere, Allio states, "Willard's voice insinuates, so that the man of the borders violates the borders." I didn't catch the interplay between "boarders" and "borders" until after I'd finished the book, and seeing how violation inverts the natural order, I also understood how the "boarders" served various purposes of misdirection as well.

Allio conveys volumes in slight passages of piercingly subtle words:

Dozens of first pregnancies were lost for modesty. The corset too tight, the housework exhausting, the appetite weakened so that the man bellowed about the waste in his house and the woman simply stopped preparing her own portion.

and

Beauty shifts its weight, thought Mrs. Heald, to lean harder upon new places, to bruise the places it uses as footholds, to leave tracks across hips and behind the knees.

and

Secrets, Frances put down despite her pledge to quit the diary, are the shadows of the plain truth between us.

Allio also succeeds in creating a wood nymph of a girl that is at the same time fully flesh and blood. She conveys her love of nature in a poignant manner that made me think of A Girl of the Limberlost or even L.M. Montgomery's beloved novels (on Anne, Emily, Pat, Jane, Valancy, Marigold, the Story Girl, Kilmeny, etc.). It was amazing to see how little sentimentality Allio uses while infusing Frances with life--a life that endures beyond her death.

There is only one thing that bothered me--the line on the back cover that reads, "When Frances's body is found in rain-swollen Blood Brook, the town begins to unravel"--as if her death is a catalyst rather than a result (or symptom). The entire novel is concerned with events before her death (including the possible violent death of another character), and in the case of Malin Nillsen's section (years after the fact), she doesn't even know Frances has died.

Van Gogh and the movies

People who say that all of the great books have already been written are just not paying attention. I picked up Steve Erickson's Zeroville having never read anything of his before and with very little idea of what it was about. The Josef von Sternberg line that serves as the epigraph ("I believe that cinema was here from the beginning of the world") isn't merely some cute quotation, but an encapsulation of one of the novel's (many) themes and something the reader should seriously consider after finishing the book.

I'll leave the real reviews of this engaging and complex work to the real reviewers and instead focus on one element that caught my attention. Vikar is an ex-divinity student who wound up studying architecture. The presentation of his final project doesn't go as well as hoped:

In fact the committee chairman's fury had nothing to do with the lion or axe but with the fact that the small model church had no door. "There's no way in!" the chairman thundered, and even as the years passed, by the time Vikar got to Los Angeles he couldn't be sure whether leaving out the door had been inadvertent: "I believe," Vikar had answered in all innocence, "it's more that there's no way out."

The allusion to Van Gogh and his doorless Church at Auvers (painted in the last year of his life) is striking. His letters to Theo help explain his intent (as I sheepishly quote this):

The foreground of The Church at Auvers is brightly lit by the sun, but the church itself sits in its own shadow, and "neither reflects nor emanates any light of its own." After Van Gogh had been dismissed from the evangelical career he had hoped to continue in the Borinage, he wrote to his brother Theo from Cuesmes in July 1880, and quoted Shakespeare's image from Henry IV, Part 1 ("And I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a peppercorn, a brewer’s horse: the inside of a church!" — Act 3, Scene iii) of the dark emptiness inside a church to symbolize "empty and unenlightened preaching": "Their God is like the God of Shakespeare's drunken Falstaff, 'the inside of a church.'"

(It's interesting that this Wikipedia entry uses Kathleen Powers Erickson's book, At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh as a source. She's probably no relation...but it's interesting.)

I found it especially telling that Soledad (which means "loneliness" or "solitude" in Spanish) smashes the structure by hurling it against a hotel wall, also destroying the certain object Vikar had placed inside (at the altar).

At the point where Erickson writes, "Vikar doesn't know it, but everything now has been reset to zero", we begin to go backwards. The previous section gives him "visions of smashing Soledad in the face with a Coke bottle" and his perceptions have now been inverted. He has come full circle, and his views of Solitude and the movies will no longer be the same.

By the time I reached the ending (a type of this event also occurs in Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but with much more impact here), I could do nothing but breathlessly close the book and sit thinking...and thinking...

Dissertations could be written about this novel.

Much more (and better) information can be found in Bookslut's interview with Steve Erickson, as well as his recent appearance on The Bat Segundo Show. There are also many more links to other articles and interviews on his site.

Venuti elaborates

Lawrence Venuti responds to questions regarding his recent article (which I mentioned here), elaborating further on what publishers can do to enlarge the context in which works of translation can be received:

To be clear about my argument, I don’t recommend that a publisher choose texts that can be seen as “representative” of a foreign culture. My point is rather that the publishing must be done strategically, so that a foreign work in translation can achieve a level of intelligibility in terms that are specific to the foreign culture, not merely to the receiving one. How can our reading of foreign works approximate the forms of reading that they receive in their own cultures? Those forms of reading are bound by multiple contexts, linguistic and literary, cultural and social, contexts that gave rise to the works in the first place, but that may also shift with different readerships who bring divergent kinds of knowledge to their reading. [...]

More than one publisher needs to take an interest in the writing of a particular foreign culture at the same moment. Publishers shouldn’t look at their colleagues as competitors but as contributors to the construction of cultural patterns from which they themselves as well as their readers can benefit. Patterns of selecting foreign works for translation tend to harden into canons, producing valued yet highly selective representations of foreign literatures. This is one reason why we often see a publisher translate the same foreign writers or the same kinds of foreign writing. The choice of material becomes familiar, and readers who are challenged by the differences of foreign writing in translation might gravitate toward familiarity. Publishers as well as translators need to be vigilant about these possible effects of their decisions because for every foreign work that is admitted many, many others are excluded and the resulting image of a foreign culture can only ever be partial—both incomplete and biased toward the reigning tastes of the translating culture. Any notion of a “representative” selection of foreign works needs to be rigorously examined and resisted. [...]

Just think of all those reading groups that publishers now try to cultivate for their books. As a reading group moves from one book to the next, its choices are usually motivated by the members’ personal tastes or interests along with what they’ve heard in the media about a book. What if the group had a program of exploring a set of books from a foreign literary tradition? Could current publishing trends in the US support that program? If so, for how many languages and cultures? [...]

I’d want to avoid anything that suggests building a context is simply another scholarly activity. Readers who read for pleasure get part of that pleasure from automatically comparing what they’re reading to previous reading experiences. Those experiences always come into play, even if selectively, depending on the current read. We build up reading experiences that shape later ones. Yet anglophone readers can’t do this much with foreign literatures because of the dearth of translations (and the relatively small number that remain in print or accessible).

But I am now completing a project that tries to compensate for the virtual lack of any translated context in which to read the work: a book by a contemporary Catalan poet, Ernest Farrés, in which each poem is based on a painting by Edward Hopper. [...] So I’m banking on what the anglophone reader will bring to my translation, a familiarity with Hopper’s mythic images, perhaps some sense of the English-language poems that have been written about Hopper (by noted American poets like John Hollander, Edward Hirsch, Stephen Dunn—the Hopper authority Gail Levin has compiled a little anthology of these poems). Against this backdrop Ernest Farrés’s book is absolutely stunning in its ambitiousness, its wit, and the depth of its interpretations of the visual images. (Or so I think).

It would help this project greatly if a body of Catalan poetry, past and present, were available for anglophone readers of poetry. But I’m trying to work around that absence in various ways—including the language I use in the translations: an American vernacular that draws on words and phrases which Hopper and his wife, the painter Jo Nivison, actually used in their speech and writing, but that at the same time matches the Catalan poet’s penchant for colloquialisms, among various other forms of the language (e.g. the standard dialect, jargon from the social and natural sciences, foreign borrowings). I am also compensating for the lack of context by creating a section of endnotes that identify allusions in the Catalan poems and quote comments that Hopper and Nivison made on the paintings and their circumstances. These notes will point up the continuities and disjunctions between the poems and the paintings, highlighting the biographical slant that Farrés himself has taken in his book, his ventriloquism of Hopper. Finding a publisher who will be interested in printing a small number of color reproductions, just some to go along with the poems that can most benefit from the images, is another strategy. It is a rich and complicated project, experimental in a unique sort of way, fitted to the contingencies (notably the lack of Catalan poetry in translation) and relying on the continuing interest in Hopper’s work.

(via The Literary Saloon)

On Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet has died. I expect that many more tributes and analyses of his work will surface in the coming days. His unique perspective on the nature of reality can be found in his demanding but very necessary work. I have only read one of his books so far, but it was a heady experience that I look forward to repeating. As I once noted, Roland Barthes (in "Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet") describes his style very well:

For Robbe-Grillet, the function of language is not a raid on the absolute, a violation of the abyss, but a progression of names over a surface, a patient unfolding that will gradually "paint" the object, caress it, and along its whole extent deposit a patina of tentative identifications, no single term of which could stand by itself for the presented object. [...]

Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space.

I love how Jealousy calls for such scrupulous close reading--a "detective" novel that leaves the reader noting clues on the nature of existence rather than on a mere (questionable) crime, due to the systematic erasure of subjectivity achieved.

It is sad to know that no more words will flow from his pen, but it is hoped that his books will be read with even greater attention.

(via ReadySteadyBlog)

Tapping out the messages that signify communion

Raymond and Hannah take no photographs. In three days, it won't be as though it never happened, but close enough. Species and languages die out every day. The whole world is clamouring with lost things, and every day an army of mourners—editors, lecturers, curators, writers, archivists—rush to preserve the frailest relics of everything we love that vanishes. The vanishing makes us all want to burst into song and to burn something and to blow up. Every library is an incomplete encyclopedia of the vanishing's spread. The stuff we call the material world is leaves that go green to turn red and fall off, and stones ground to smooth pebbles to become dust, and our own bodies and the bodies of those we love.

She is to leave for Jerusalem to study Torah at an Orthodox yeshiva for nine months. Her last week in Toronto, she meets Raymond, who is struggling to complete his doctoral dissertation on Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. The inevitable happens, leaving them at opposite ends of the world with only words and memories to connect them...

Abelard and Eloise turned absence into the substance of their fever, and grew old in the expectation of no reward.

Raymond and Hannah poured themselves into light signals fluttering in the space over the Atlantic. They sit at desks taking notes and are lovers.

In Raymond + Hannah, Stephen Marche structures the emails and events of the couple in ways that resemble poetry with the practice of placing brief summaries in the margins of each "stanza," rather than numbered lines. We follow their separate preoccupations with their studies in between the messages they're able to send to each other across the sea.

Hannah, on the authority of Torah:

Another curious Jew, Eliezer, called the walls to witness that he was right in his dispute with Joshua, an argument concerning the purity of ovens. A river ran backwards for him. A tree uprooted itself, and finally a voice from heaven called out that Eliezer had judged properly. The walls leaned, but did not collapse. Joshua pointed out that miracles should never decide questions of real importance, such as the meaning of the Torah. God had already had his say. Because Eliezer was right, but proven only by means of heaven, he was declared anathema.

Raymond, on The Anatomy of Melancholy's dictum, "Be not solitary, be not idle":

Reading requires two conditions: solitude and idleness. It takes gall to end a thousand-page book with instruction that could fit on the back of a matchbook and rule out the two conditions necessary for reading in the first place. Like ending a global encyclopedia of cookery with the advice: Best to eat potatoes only. And of course you must take the advice, because you are done reading. Your solitude and idleness are over, and you must go do something, you putz, Raymond.

The emails themselves are typical enough, although the lack of epistolary conflict seems a bit unrealistic (even though something horrible does happen). But after all, Marche appears to be more concerned with the lovely form and language of this work than the plot, which is completely fine with me. It's one of the more aesthetically fulfilling reading experiences I've had in the past few months.

The future of languages

(Photo of David Crystal by Daniel Mordzinski at the Cartagena Hay Festival 2008 blog.)

After the Hay Festival Anne Enright event on Saturday (26 January), we were fortunate enough to attend a lecture by prolific author and linguist David Crystal on “The Future of Languages.” It was a fascinating talk, especially for those relatively new to the issue. I'm very interested in reading some of his work (particularly The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left). Here are the notes I could decipher from my Moleskine pages (any and all factual errors are mine).

He began his talk by saying that this last decade has been the most exciting time in history since 10,000 years ago when writing began. Developments include the supreme significance of the Internet, the recognition of English as a global language (the first books began appearing on the subject ca. 1997-1998), and the discovery of endangered languages.

There are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages in the world. Half will die in the 21st century. One language dies every two weeks. He quietly added, “One died last Saturday.” The last woman to speak Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, had died in Alaska the week before.

Most languages exist along the equator, but they are dying out all over the world. Of these, 60 languages have only one speaker left. He asked us to "imagine being the last speaker of a language.” What would that be like? He described the huge responsibility they feel and the immense pressure weighing on their shoulders. They want it documented before they die and are desperate to give as much information as possible, because there is always the hope that another generation will want it back.

Languages can be brought back from the dead if they are written or recorded. It happened with Hebrew, as well as an aboriginal language in Australia in the 1890’s. This last one had been recorded, and now children are learning it today.

It is crucial for languages to be written down. One third of languages in the world have never been written down (about 2,000). And if a language completely disappears, it’s as if it never existed. A culture leaves evidence behind, but when a language dies, it leaves nothing.

Why should we care? Some think it’s all for the best and want only one world language. But monolingualism does not guarantee peace (as exhibited by Vietnam, Rwanda, and Cambodia). On the contrary—multilingual countries (such as Canada, India, and Belgium) tend to be more peaceful.

Why should we care? Because language expresses identity. We not only use it to communicate, but to express individual identity. (The former deals with the head, but the latter, the heart.)

He mentioned how more people care about the issue these days. 21 February is International Mother Language Day. 26 September is the European Day of Languages. The U.N. has declared 2008 to be the Year of World Languages.

Multilingualism is a basic human good. More people are multilingual than monolingual in the world. Countries with colonial histories tend to be monolingual and try to control the language use of the rest. Multilingualism is an index of diversity (also a basic human good), as well as a demonstration of intellectual adaptability.

Every language has its own vision of the world (e.g., such as with untranslatable words). Only 6,000 visions of the world exist…and half are dying out.

Rescuing these languages is not an economic imperative but a cultural one (an expression of what it means to be human). Can a dying language be saved? In some cases, yes. What is needed is:

• A bottom-up attitude. The people themselves must want to save it.
• Top-down support. All aspects of government must want it, from local to national (this includes UNESCO initiatives).
• Money.

To promote multilingualism, there must be the financial means in order to have everything written and recorded. Training teachers, publishing books, etc.

It could actually be done with $200,000 a year for five years. That means a total of $600 million for all of the languages that are endangered. What is $600 million? Less than 1 day's profit for OPEC. It's also the amount Bill Gates makes in half a day.

The difficulty is in getting the public’s attention. This is why the Internet is so magical. Obviously, the people would need a terminal and electricity in order to have access, but it’s possible. Nowadays it’s easy to give an endangered language a public presence.

In the 1970’s they began reviving Welsh; the Internet guaranteed its future. But the future of a language is only as secure as the interest of its teenagers. Being online has helped to encourage this. For example, the Navajo now talk online in their own language.

The Internet is now multilingual. In 1995, 90% of it was in English. In 2000, 75% was in English. By 2003, there were more hosts in languages other than English. This is just the beginning. Most of China and Africa are not online (only about 5% of the population of each country). Only 12-15% of South America is online. The balance of languages online will soon reflect the balance of languages in the real world.

The future of language is the future of society. The dominant language is the dominant culture. In the future, it could be Chinese or Arabic or Spanish (which is presently the world’s fastest-growing language). But one must be careful in this line of thinking: there is no close link between the arrival of a global language (such as English) and the death of others. In the United States and Australia, yes this is the case. But English hasn’t taken over Latin America. Political suppression does exist, though (the Chinese have suppressed speakers of other language; in Africa, Arabic and Swahili have had an aggressively dominant role).

Languages have always died. Why is this happening at such a faster rate now?

• Natural disasters kill and fragment the population, causing displacement (a language really dies when the second-to-last person dies and there is no one left to talk to).
• Political reasons (genocide or strategy)
• Globalization (no isolated place)

We will be better able to understand this phenomena once there is a better understanding of the impact of the Internet.

In the Q&A, the first question dealt with entities that officiate the “standards” of a language (such as the Real Academia Española) and whether these organizations have positive or negative effects on a language. Professor Crystal responded that 30 of these exist worldwide and were mainly founded for political reasons (entities where language and politics are intertwined). Control is a form of power and can be expressed in the restriction of a language, creating an “elite” vs. “common” dichotomy. He cautioned that an academy that doesn’t understand the real developments of a language will eventually lose touch with what is actually happening to that language. He said that if Britain had had a royal academy of language, everyone else would be “wrong” and differences would be stifled—yet it’s the diversity of English that has strengthened it. Spanish is diversifying rapidly (just as English did). All varieties of a language must be respected. Language changes whether an academy exists or not.

The next question was the (inevitable) question as to whether or not the Internet is “degrading” language. He responded that there is no anarchy on the Internet—people have to be able to write well enough in order to make themselves understood. Rather, people are exploiting and exploring changes to language. The Internet allows us to be informal and it’s the novelty of it that has helped create those alterations (such as with texting and instant messaging). He said that it’s not a disaster, but an exploration of possibilities; it’s not erasing language, but adding variety and increasing expressive richness. But, of course, it must be managed. Children must be taught the various styles of writing and learn not to mix them up. This is why we have teachers.

Another question dealt with the fear that if English is introduced into a culture, it would cause a deterioration of that culture’s language. Professor Crystal frankly stated that he doesn’t see this happening. The use of English as a functional language doesn’t affect a culture. One’s ideology or culture does not change; one’s identity does not change simply because a second language is learned. It’s a theoretical rather than a practical argument.

Someone else asked about how the meaning of untranslatable words can be recorded if their meaning is untranslatable. He said that recordings are made and many discussions take place between the native speakers and the linguists in an attempt to capture a word’s meaning. Sometimes the native speaker will try to explain it to the linguists in the latters' own tongue.

The last question asked if artificial languages, such as Esperanto, are useful. He replied, “Yes, of course! Languages only exist if they’re useful.” He explained that although the reasons for it have changed (the politics of it, etc.), it still has its role.

I discovered Professor Crystal's own blog while I was looking up the links to this post. I was delighed to read what he wrote about his exprience in Colombia:

Before we went, our friends and colleagues expressed the hope that we would not be kidnapped. That is the bad image which Colombia still has, even though it's largely based on events that took place years ago. Problems there still are, of course, down in the south, and there are still some no-go areas in the cities. But these are city problems, not Colombia problems, applicable as much to London and Liverpool as to anywhere else. Be sensible, follow local advice, and you'll be fine - as indeed we were.

More than fine. We had a great time, Hilary and I. Colombia is a truly beautiful country. Bogotá, at 10,000 feet, nestles at the foot of a swathe of hills covered with luxuriant vegetation. From the top of one of these, you can see the whole city below you - a rare sight, in my experience. This was Monserrate, a pilgrimage church which we reached by a funicular railway. Thousands of people make a visit, especially on a Sunday, and - as pretty distinctive-looking tourists - we were noticed and warmly welcomed. I received a new identity there too (see below). Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, is a walled city - the largest former military emplacement in the Americas, the guidebooks say. It's a splendid location for a Hay-type festival, with several fine large old buildings acting as venues for talks and gatherings. Enthusiastic audiences, as always at Hay. And the massive walls give the place an intimacy not too far removed from that which you get at the festival site in Wales. It's slightly warmer than the average Welsh day, though, it has to be said - around 30 degrees, more or less.

On the Mabinogion

A post of Imani's reminded me of something else that I've been meaning to mention--Oxford University Press has published a new translation of The Mabinogion. Translator Sioned Davies explains:

Certainly, poets were acquainted with traditional stories, as reflected in the many allusions scattered throughout their work; yet it would seem from the surviving evidence that verse itself was not used for extended narrative in medieval Wales––the preferred medium, unlike most Indo-European countries, was prose. The situation, therefore, was not only a complex, but surely a dynamic one: despite the hierarchical legal structure, one could expect a certain degree of interaction between the various professional ‘performers’ as they entertained at feasts and gatherings. Moreover, there are examples within the Mabinogion themselves of personal narratives arising out of informal conversation at table, as in the Second Branch when Matholwch, king of Ireland, tells his table companion Bendigeidfran the history of the Cauldron of Rebirth. It would appear, therefore, that storytelling was the domain of both the professional and the amateur, while the numerous words for ‘story’, as reflected in the tales themselves, point to a wide range of forms within the narrative genre.

In order to fully appreciate the Mabinogion, we have to understand the effect that this oral milieu had on the written tales. Oral and performance features are an integral part of their fabric, partly because the authors inherited pre-literary modes of narrating, but also because the written tales were composed for oral delivery, so that their reception and dissemination continued to have an influence on both style and structure. Indeed, one of the overriding concerns of this new translation has been the attempt to communicate to readers the exhilarating power of performance.

I must also add that it was through reading The Mabinogion and work by Lloyd Alexander and Stephen Lawhead that gave me a deep affection for Welsh mythology that sometimes verges on prejudice when I think of the French and their silly love triangles.

Disquietude

The Blog of Disquiet is a brilliant idea of Matthew Tiffany's: a place for various people to post their thoughts on Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, creating "a blog from inside the text." My first contribution went up over the weekend.

There's also another interesting project afoot. Marcelo Ballvé of Sancho's Panza is translating the anonymous 19th century Uruguayan text, The Book of Disengagements on a blog of the same name.

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.

Peirce on doubt

Ovi Magazine's "Charles Sanders Peirce and the Presuppositions of Science":

One of his early discoveries was that, despite Descartes’ cogito, scientific intelligences do not begin their activities in and intellectual vacuum. There are presuppositions of science and scientific method and they basically fall into two large classes: religion and common sense. Peirce speculated that scientific activity is based upon religion, whether or not the scientific intelligence is aware of it or not, because the ideals of that method presuppose a search for the truth about a reality not yet known. This idea of faith or basic beliefs being the base of science can be found in both Aquinas [sic] Summa and in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Moreover, Peirce sees knowledge as a means of stabilizing our habitual behavior in response to doubt. [...]

Pierce rejects Descartes [sic] “paper doubt,” a doubt considered merely as an intellectual exercise, and sidesteps the whole issue of epistemological skepticism. His foundational, scientific metaphysics accordingly begins with phenomenology, the way things are presented to us in experience. He is particularly concerned with the difference between belief and doubt. Real doubt ensues when recalcitrant experience, which is not reflection, causes us to waver in our beliefs. A belief, as Peirce understands it, is not some kind of intellectual disposition to assent to a proposition, but a behavioral habit manifest in action. Therefore, when real doubt ensues it disrupts our usual behavioral patterns. Cartesian doubt, on the other hand, can make no difference to the way we act.

(Emphasis from original article...via Books, Inq.)

In the quiet heart of concentration

Reading some of Bud's thoughts on Adam Zagajewski led me to find a starting point with Mysticism for Beginners (translated by Clare Cavanagh). I would read a few poems between the books I was able to find in my yearly trip to a North American library, and the spare simplicity of his lines were perfect for those winter days. Here are a few I scribbled down for myself.

From "Long Afternoons":

Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze
that sees but doesn't penetrate; tell me how to cure myself
of silence.

From "Three Angels":

But still, the second angel mumbled shyly,
there's always a little joy, and even beauty
lies close at hand, beneath the bark
of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration,
and another person hides in each of us--
universal, strong, invincible.
Wild roses sometimes hold the scent
of childhood, and on holidays young girls
go out walking just as they always have,
and there's something timeless
in the way they wind their scarves.
Memory lives in the ocean, in galloping blood,
in black, burnt stones, in poems,
and in every quiet conversation.
The world is the same as it always was,
full of shadows and anticipation.

From "Houston, 6 p.m.":

Poetry calls us to a higher life,
but what's low is just as eloquent

and

Poetry summons us to life, to courage
in the face of the growing shadow.
Can you gaze calmly at the Earth
like the perfect astronaut?

The literary allusions of Lemony Snicket

Favorite moments from The Hostile Hospital:

Page 35: Brett Helquist's wry little parody of Willie Guthrie's "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitar.

Page 76 (discussing "Ana Gram"):

"It could be the name of one of the white-faced women," Klaus said.

"Orlando!" Sunny said, which meant "Or the one who looks like neither a man nor a woman."

Page 140:

They visited Room 201 and sang to Jonah Mapple, who was suffering from seasickness, and they gave a heart-shaped balloon to Charley Anderson in Room 714, who had injured himself in an accident, and they visited Clarissa Dalloway, who did not seem to have anything wrong with her but was staring sadly out the window of Room 1308, but nowhere, in any of the rooms that the volunteers marched into, was Violet Baudelaire, who, Klaus and Sunny feared, was suffering more than any of the other patients.

Page 142:

"O.K.," a volunteer called, consulting the list. "The next patient is Emma Bovary in Room 2611. She has food poisoning, so she needs a particularly cheerful attitude."

Page 147 (Klaus to Sunny):

"Maybe [Count Olaf] made up a new name for Violet, so we couldn't rescue her. But which person is really Violet? She could be anyone from Mikhail Bulgakov to Haruki Murakami. What are we going to do?"

Cartagena bookstores

All of the books we bought on this Hay Festival trip were purchased at the Librería Paideia. We discovered another great little place that sold books and music, Forum Discos y Libros (as we were leaving). But most of our time was spent at Ábaco Libros y Café for the following reasons...

Depersonalizing translation

Lawrence Venuti is required reading for the program I'll be embarking on later this year, so I was especially interested to read The Literary Saloon's discussion of Venuti's essay, "Translations on the Market," from the current issue of Words Without Borders. (He has also reviewed Venuti's The Scandals of Translation. Twelve pages of Eco's The Name of the Rose missing from the English translation?? How do these things happen?).

I was particularly intrigued by this part:

Focusing on a single foreign text or a single foreign author winds up exacerbating this process: it mystifies the loss or sheer destruction of the foreign linguistic and cultural contexts and therefore gives the false and misleading impression that any literary work can be understood on its own. This encourages an essentially romantic notion of original genius that militates against the contextualized reading, the implicit comparisons among texts, which informed readers always do. To enable English-language readers to understand and appreciate a translation, publishers must restore in English at least part of the context in which the foreign text was written. With individual publishers each pursuing their own single-minded focus, this context is unlikely to emerge. [...]

I am suggesting that with translations publishers must take an approach that is much more critically detached, more theoretically astute as well as aesthetically sensitive. They must publish not only translations of foreign texts and authors that conform to their own tastes, but more than one foreign text and more than one foreign author, and they must make strategic choices so as to sketch the cultural situations and traditions that enable a particular text to be significant in its own culture. Translators too need to participate in these choices, since their expertise is invaluable in assessing the losses and gains in the translation process. But they must regard translation in more self-critical ways than is generally the rule today, when translators tend to take a belletristic approach to their work, making impressionistic comments which show that they, like publishers, find writing to be primarily personal, a form of self-expression or a testimony of their aesthetic kinship to the foreign author. Publishers and translators alike need to depersonalize translation and to become aware of the ethical responsibility involved in representing foreign texts and cultures. What a sad time it is for intercultural exchange when publishers and translators look abroad and see mainly opportunities to imprint their own values.

His solution is that

publishers can coordinate their efforts, banding together to select a range of texts from a foreign culture and to publish translations of them. This sort of investment cannot insure critical and commercial success. But in the long run chances are that it will pay off handsomely by laying the foundations for an informed readership that will not feel inadequate before translations from a particular foreign language and will actually be eager to sample new texts from it.

Why does such brilliant common sense sound so daunting to implement? Publishers must reconsider their approach to translated works and cooperate with each other to create a broader context in which these works can be more readily received. I look forward to reading further discussion on the matter.

UPDATE: Chad Post at Three Percent weighs in.

New words for an old academy

A new edition of the Breve Diccionario de Colombianismos was recently completed by the Academia Colombiana de la Lengua and features many "new" words.

Some of the "colombianisms" to be added include:

* Abeja: Ser muy vivo, listo, aprovechado.
* Afrijolar: Endosar obligaciones o responsabilidades en forma indebida.
* Apartamentero: Ladrón experto en hurtar bienes de los apartamentos.
* ¡Aguanta!: Voz que los pasajeros dirigen al conductor de un vehículo para que se detenga. [As anyone who has nearly fallen off a bus knows very well!]
* Bacán: Referido a una persona estupenda, excelente.
* Bareto (vareto): Cigarrillo de marihuana.
* Biyuyo: Dinero.
* Camello: Empleo. Carga, fastidio.
* Chimba: Bueno, bonito.
* Descrestar: Engañar, producir admiración.
* Faltón: Dicho de las personas que no cumplen las obligaciones o compromisos.
* Gadejo: Ganas de joder.
* Gomelo: Joven de clase media o alta que se viste en forma llamativa y usa un lenguaje peculiar.
* Jincho: Borracho. Lleno de alimentos, de dinero, de piojos, etc.
* Neura: Mal humor.
* Parche: Sitio de reunión de jóvenes. Grupo de dichos jóvenes.
* Pico y placa: Limitación. Horario del tránsito vehicular urbano en ciertos días.
* Pichurria: Cosa insignificante, de poco valor.
* Pipiciego: Cegato, corto de vista.
* Rabón: Molesto por algo.
* Rumbearse: Tener trato incidencialmente erótico con una persona.
* Traga: Enamoramiento. Novio o novia.
* Tusa: Despecho por razones amorosas.
* Voleo: Ajetreo.

Colombia soy yo

Millions of people from over 130 cities around the world took to the streets today to protest against the FARC and to plead for peace and the freedom of all hostages. Here are a few images from our demonstration today in Santa Marta: