Inner workings

Reading notes on Translation Studies by Susan Bassnett:

~ p. 7: "To divorce the theory from the practice, to set the scholar against the practitioner as has happened in other disciplines, would be tragic indeed."

~ p. 9: "the arrogant way in which critics will define a translation as good or bad from a purely monolingual position again indicates the peculiar position occupied by translation vis-à-vis another type of metatext (a work derived from, or containing another existing text), literary criticism itself."

~ p. 9: "It is pointless, therefore, to argue for a definitive translation, since translation is intimately tied up with the context in which it is made."

~ p. 13: Translation "belongs most properly to semiotics".

~ p. 14: "In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril."

~ p. 16: Translation as an act of decoding and recoding... Maybe I could compare Percy's triadic theory of meaning to translation?

~ p. 32: examining both linguistic and cultural untranslatability (words vs. concepts)

~ p. 37: "The purpose of tranlsation theory, then, is to reach an understanding of the processes undertaken in the act of translation and, not, as is so commonly misunderstood, to provide a set of norms for effecting the perfect translation. In the same way, literary criticism does not seek to provide a set of instructions for producing the ultimate poem or novel, but rather to understand the internal and external structures operating within and around a work of art." (Well, that's the idea anyway...)

~ p. 38: Bassnett quoting from a translated edition of Octavio Paz's Traducción: literatura y literalidad:

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

~ pp. 43-44: "Both Horace and Cicero, in their remarks on translation, make an important distinction between word for word translation and sense for sense (or figure for figure) translation. The underlying principle of enriching their native language and literature through translation leads to a stress on the aesthetic criteria of the TL product rather than on more rigid notions of 'fidelity'."

~ p. 52: "Translation acquired an additional dimension, as writers used their abilities to translate as a means of increasing the status of their own vernacular. Thus the Roman model of enrichment through translation developed in a new form."

~ p. 56: begins to examine translations of Petrarch by Wyatt and Surrey

~ p. 66: "If poetry is perceived as a separate entity from language, how can it be translated unless it is assumed that the translator is able to read between the words of the original and hence reproduce the text-behind-the-text; what Mallarmé would later elaborate as the text of silence and spaces?"

~ p. 79: "The reader, then, translates or decodes the text according to a different set of systems and the idea of the one 'correct' reading is dissolved. At the same time, Kristeva's notion of intertextuality, that sees all texts linked to all other texts because no text can ever be completely free of those texts that precede and surround it, is also profoundly significant for the student of translation."

~ p. 83: "Pound defined his Homage as something other than a translation; his purpose in writing the poem, he claimed, was to bring a dead man to life. It was, in short, a kind of literary resurrection."

~ p. 98: Bassnett does a fascinating parallel analysis of translations by Ezra Pound and Charles Kennedy of The Seafarer.

~ p. 110: In discussing how some treat the translation of novels differently from that of poetry, she says that "a different concept of the imaginary distinction between form and content prevails when the text to be considered is a novel. It seems to be easier for the (careless) prose translator to consider content as separable from form"--when, of course, this is not really the case.

~ pp. 115-16: "Again and again translators of novels take pains to create readable TL texts, avoiding the stilted effect that can follow from adhering too closely to SL syntactical structures, but fail to consider the way in which individual sentences form part of the total structure." She judges this "a deficiency in reading" and suggests that this is "a whole area of translation that needs to be looked at more closely."

~ p. 116-17: Hilaire Belloc's "six general rules for the translator of prose texts" are listed and explained.

~ p. 118: "Every prime text is made up of a series of interlocking systems, each of which has a determinable function in relation to the whole, and it is the task of the translator to apprehend these functions."

~ p. 119: "What the translator must do, therefore, is to first determine the function of the SL system and then to find a TL system that will adequately render that function."

In search of reality

From Anne Carson's Glass and God:

ON THE RULES OF PERSPECTIVE

A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the view [sic] of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He has said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.

Where theory and practice meet

Reading notes on Can Theory Help Translators?: A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface by Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner:

~ p. 2: "[W]e theorists should seek to be descriptive, to describe, explain and understand what translators do actually do, not stipulate what they ought to do. From this descriptive point of view, it is the translators that are 'up there', performing an incredibly complex activity, and the theorists are 'down here', trying to understand how on earth the translators manage. These theorists see themselves as studying translators, not instructing them." (AC)

~ p. 8: Transposition: "This means changing the word class." (AC)

~ p. 9: Deverbalization: "It means simply that a translator or interpreter has to get away from the surface structure of the source text, to arrive at the intended meaning, and then express this intended meaning in the target language." (AC)

~ p. 10: "Roughly speaking, iconicity is the matching of form and meaning, so that the form reflects the meaning or the experience that is being described." (AC) A unification of form and content?

~ p. 15: AC: "Reverence for the source text, and the consequent insistence on literal translation, is also evident in the ideas of some modern literary translators. Nabokov is a good example."

EW: "With all due respect to Nabokov, this reminds me of the 'reverence' (or lack of confidence) we see in newly recruited translators who are overawed by the subject matter. Too scared to admit that they don't really understand a text, they translate it literally in the hope that the Real Experts will be able to make something out of it."

I'm reminded of a former post of mine from two years ago--"When fidelity is treasonous".

~ p. 16: St. Jerome as "the patron saint of translators": "When criticized for his translations by St Augustine, because they changed traditional wordings in places, he is said to have replied that 'God is on the side of the scholar'." (AC)

~ p. 20: The translator as victim of divided loyalties: "It is not always possible to be loyal to both the original writer and the readers. Sometimes it has to be one or the other." (EW)

~ p. 57: Dividing translation strategies into three groups: "Search," "Creativity," and "Textual". (AC)

~ p. 68: "Distancing is something all translators, and indeed most other creative people, know about. It means stepping back mentally from what you are creating to get a better perspective on it." (EW)

~ p. 79: Two of the best motivational strategies for translators: "Respect and variety". (EW)

~ pp. 81-82: "It reminds me of Anthony Pym's definition of translation competence (in Pym 1992b: 175ff.), which goes roughly like this: a translator needs two abilities (apart from obvious language skills, etc.). One is the ability to come up with several possibilities, several potential equivalents. The second is the ability to select the best one, for the purpose in hand. The first skill needs divergent intelligence, imagination, creativity; the second needs convergent intelligence, the ability to criticize, analyze, compare, assess." (AC)

~ p. 86: "Yes, 'Never translate alone!' is an excellent guideline." (EW)

~ p. 100: "Once we had started the job, however, some of the translators suggested that one useful theoretical concept that we could use was Christiane Nord's distinction between documentary and instrumental translation (see Chapter 4), where documentary translation 'shows what the original says' and instrumental translation 'does what the original tries to do'." (EW)

~ p. 114: Eurodicautom--a "Large multilingual term bank" (EW)

~ p. 121: It's funny that it's the academic in this discussion that tends to argue for machine translations...

~ p. 127: CELEX--a "database containing all language versions of EU Regulations, Directives, Recommendations and so on." (EW)

~ p. 131: Fire Ant and Worker Bee--an "on-line problem page" for translators.

~ p. 134: the European Society for Translation Studies

On Steiner

(Continuing with the idea of using this space to keep track of my reading...)

Cursory reading notes on George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Chapter Four: "The Claims of Theory":

~ p. 250: Novalis has a part in the idea that "all communication is translation". I wonder how this links to German romanticism and, by extension, George MacDonald?

~ p. 251: These readings of I Corinthians 14 and II Corinthians 12:4 are specious at best. I see no prohibition against translation here.

~ p. 253: "Traditionally, the weight of the argument bears on poetry. Here the welding of matter and form is so close that no dissociation is admissible." I'm reminded of Eliot's essay, "The Metaphysical Poets"...and what Massimo Bacigalupo had to say on the matter:

"I find that the more unambitious the approach the better. Quasi-poets should not use translation as a means of expressing their poetic souls. The closer you look into an original the more poetry you find — even in a translation."

(This is shortly to become my MO... And hey! I could probably find this issue of The Paris Review at the university library.)

~ p. 256: Translation as an act of redemption: "As the Fall may be understood to contain the coming of the Redeemer, so the scattering of tongues at Babel has in it, in a condition of urgent moral and practical potentiality, the return to linguistic unity, the movement towards and beyond Pentecost."

~ p. 257: "It underlies the subtle exaltation in Walter Benjamin's view of the translator as the one who elicits, who conjures up by virtue of unplanned echo a language nearer to the primal unity of speech than is either the original text or the tongue into which he is translating."

~ p. 261: Translation as a unifying force: "Moreover, it established a logic of relation between past and present, and between different tongues and traditions which were splitting apart under stress of nationalism and religious conflict."

~ p. 262: Goethe to Carlyle:

"Say what one will of the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and valuable concerns in the whole of world affairs."

p. 262: "And speaking out of the isolation of the Russian condition, Pushkin defined the translator as the courier of the human spirit."

~ p. 263: "The argument against translatability is, therefore, often no more than an argument based on local, temporary myopia. Logically, moreover, the attack on translation is only a weak form of an attack on language itself."

~ p. 264: Translation transcends logic: "The defence of translation has the immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact. [...] Translation is 'impossible' concedes Ortega y Gasset in his Miseria y esplendor de la traducción. But so is all absolute concordance between thought and speech. Somehow the 'impossible' is overcome at every moment in human affairs."

~ p. 264: "The argument from perfection which, essentially, is that of Du Bellay, Dr. Johnson, Nabokov, and so many others, is facile. No human product can be perfect. No duplication, even of materials which are conventionally labelled as identical, will turn out a total facsimile." Of course, Borges explored this idea thoroughly in "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (in English as "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"). Somehow I think he had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek as he wrote it.

~ p. 291: "The translator seeks to exhibit 'what is already there'."

~ p. 308: "Poets can even smell words."

~ p. 309: "We know next to nothing of the organization and storage of different languages when they coexist in the same mind. How then can there be, in any rigorous sense of the term, a 'theory of translation'?"

~ p. 311: "An error, a misreading initiates the modern history of our subject. Romance languages derive their terms for 'translation' from traducere because Leonardo Bruni misinterpreted a sentence in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius in which the Latin actually signifies 'to derive from, to lead into'. The point is trivial but symbolic. Often, in the records of translation, a fortunate misreading is the source of new life. [...] The logic comes after the fact. What we are dealing with is not a science, but an exact art."

Thou and thou

Between buildings and meetings and appointments, I've been reading Glass and God by Anne Carson (which "conflates all but two of the pieces from Glass, Irony and God with the full text of Short Talks"). I will have to agree with Michael Ondaatje when he says, "Her long poem 'The Glass Essay' is one of the best of our time." In it, she reads Emily Brontë's poetry while on a visit to her mother in the aftermath of a five-year relationship's end.

One of the remarkable things about it is how she explicates Emily's poetry within her own poem. After quoting "I'll come when thou art saddest" in its entirety (but for the last line of the first stanza, "From evening's chilly gloom"), Carson muses,

Very hard to read, the messages that pass
between Thou and Emily.
In this poem she reverses their roles,

speaking not as the victim but to the victim.
It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou,
who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered.

It is a shock to realise that this low, slow collusion
of master and victim within one voice
is a rationale

for the most awful loneliness of the poet's hour.

Her discussion of Charlotte's comments on her sister's work adds yet another layer to the poem's multidimensionality. She walks along the moors, lies awake at night, thinks of her suffering parents, and tries to process the internal fragments of a dead relationship. It's harrowing reading, but one of the most satisfying poems I've ever experienced.

Against realism

From an enlightening interview with Marilynne Robinson:

Like all her novels, Housekeeping doesn’t seem to have been written at all; the sentences seem to have been there for ever, waiting to be discovered. This effect goes to the heart of her greatness as a writer. She rejects the realist conventions of the novel.

“The assumptions of realism as it has been practised are simply wrong. People bring a great deal of memory and also a sense of present experience to everything that they do. If you see someone doing a simple action like hanging sheets on a line, there is absolutely no reason in that person’s perception that there is anything simple about it at all. I have all the respect in the world for reality, but I think the general assumptions about it are wrong.”

She thinks in metaphors because everything is a metaphor. This is her faith - the world, not as a factual cul-de-sac, but as an unfolding revelation.

(via Maud)

Shifting gears

Things have been pretty silent around here lately due to a transcontinental move and the commencement of a taught MA (and the present lack of internet access in my room). Hopefully, this is about to change (both the silence *and* the state of my online access).

I've thought a lot about the direction I'd like this humble litblog to take, and I think the most helpful (and least dangerous) thing would be to focus on interesting things I come across during my studies. I've barely begun my reading, but already have a few things I'd like to post about. And since I am my primary audience, I look forward to keeping track of where my thoughts go in this exhilarating, complex field.

To begin with, there's this loaded little footnote in Translation Studies by Susan Bassnett that I found particularly relevant:

In his article, 'Translation in the United States', Babel VII, (2), 1968, pp. 119-24 Henry Fischbach points out that the United States has a shorter history of translation than almost any other industrialized nation of the world, and attributes this deficiency to four basic points:

(a) The political and commercial isolationism of nineteenth-century America.
(b) The traditional cultural allegiance to the English-speaking community.
(c) The American complacent self-sufficiency in technology.
(d) The strength of the myth of the Land of Promise for emigrants and their subsequent desire to integrate.

Fischbach's theory is interesting in that it would seem to show correspondences with the English attitude towards translation linked to British colonial expansion.

I was reminded of John O'Brien's infamous diatribe. He has quite a lot of righteous indignation to back his complaints about translation "hype." But from where I'm sitting, as much noise should be made as possible--even if it annoys those who go about this business the "right" way.

After all, it isn't just the "Americans" (or rather, "U.S.ians") who need certain attitude adjustments when it comes to literature from other countries.

Moving towards life

From a conversation between Jim Sheridan and Annette Insdorf, included at the back of In America: A Portrait of the Film:

JS: If I think of an idea, I usually try to put it up against the X-ray that is James Joyce. He was the only one with a good father, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

AI: Of course.

JS: A Jewish man walking around Dublin was the only good father figure in Irish literature before 1980! And in Joyce’s stories, the women were always in love with dead people: The Dead is essentially about that estrangement from the husband. And Molly Bloom is about the estrangement from the husband through the dead child. So, there was a kind of refusal by the women to engage on a loving or sexual level because of a death, which I always thought was probably like a psychological dramatization of the famine. So, I just stole a little bit from Joyce, and added the husband in love with the dead child. The attempt was to move the stone from the mouth of the grave, you know. To kind of get out of the death culture.

(I've loved this film since it first came out in 2002, but Sheridan's audio commentary is really wonderful as well--very rich.)

The armor of a dead man

From director Jim Sheridan’s forward to In America: A Portrait of the Film:

When I was doing my own story, I thought a lot about Bloom and his dead son, and the resonance throughout Ulysses, of Shakespeare, and of Hamlet in particular. And when I wondered if it was right to do such a personal story and cannibalize my own life, I remembered that the great Shakespeare had a child called Hamnet and that three years after his son’s death, he took out an old play and rewrote it.

And not only did he rewrite it, he went in the lonely isolation of backstage, he put on the armor of a dead man, and he clunked out on stage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. That idea has always struck me as profound. A live man in dead man’s clothes talking to his dead son, alive, in front of him, on stage and asking for revenge. Shakespeare must have been tough, I thought, to keep the deep baritone of the ghost intact.

Translating Hugo

I spent a relaxing Sunday morning finishing up my last post on the literary allusions in Anne of Green Gables while listening to a fascinating conversation between Rick Kleffel and Julie Rose, translator of Les Misérables (dated 08-07-2008 down near the bottom in his archive).

Their talk included discussion of Les Misérables as an experimental novel, the fact that she had never read it before translating it, the literary crimes of two previous translators--Charles Wilbur and Norman Denny (and it's not the Victorian who gets the harshest criticism), how she lived during the three years (and three drafts) it took to complete, thoughts on the "force of nature" that was Victor Hugo, the importance of new translations due to the rapid evolution of the English language, the role of fundamentalism in the work, its political factors, Hugo's writing process, and the novel's enduring relevance. I was impressed by her sheer love of the text and her confession that for awhile she completed only a paragraph a day. (It was wonderfully affirming.)

The only thing missing

Someone should start up an online library with thousands upon thousands of ebooks. For a small annual subscription fee, users would be able to "check out" books by receiving temporary passwords, which would "expire" when the time limit (of two weeks or so) is up. (This would probably mean that the ebooks would have to be kept on certain password protected websites and not be available for download.)

Does anyone know if anything like this exists yet? If not, I hope it's only a matter of time. Once it does, my life here will be complete. Imagine--a global lending library!

Brief resurfacing

Today was my last in this little office, running an EFL program to support several small groups in the elementary school. On Monday, I'll cover for the resident librarian for two weeks before embarking on my postgraduate work in literary translation. Here are a few things I've been gathering in the meantime...

• The magician escapes: Levi Asher's take on Paul Auster's new novel and Ed's recent conversation with Auster. (Bat Segundo continues to amaze...and make me wish that I could listen to them go on for a couple more hours at least...)
• (I would love to ask him about the Chanel No. 5 and the cheese sandwiches in The Book of Illusions--I think they tear a small hole in the narrative and upend what the conclusion appears to be.)
• Fun discussion of "meta-murders" by Sarah Weinman
  
• A "multimedia adaptation" of The Waves! (via Maud)
• Sicheii Yazhi's interesting discussion on Amazon's recent purchase of Shelfari and Abe Books and what this means for LibraryThing (my favorite). (Tim Spalding responds in the comments.)
• Wyatt Mason on Nabokov's last
  
• Daniel Samper Pisano considers the effect of global warming on global politics.
• Inara and Martha
  
• NPR presents concerts from the Newport Folk festival, which include sets by Calexico, Gillian Welch (finally, a recording of "Throw Me a Rope"!), Jakob Dylan, She & Him (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), and Steve Earle, among others.
• Maud discusses ten books that would make great films.
• Robert Pinsky on John Milton

Marvelously suggestive

James Pollock explores Anne Carson's Decreation at the Contemporary Poetry Review:

Carson has been for many years a professor of classics, she is a superb translator from ancient Greek, and in her own writing she returns again and again to the ancient roots, the classical and biblical origins of Western literature. These obsessions, self-consciously combined with her more fashionable interest in the new traditions of certain great innovators of the twentieth century like Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein, enable her, at her best, to be truly original. Merely to rank her with “the triumphant march of the avant-garde,” in Zbigniew Herbert’s sardonic phrase—cultural amnesiacs endlessly shooting at the easy target of novelty—is to miss completely much of what is most interesting and valuable in her work. In fact, Carson has always been a writer in the Romantic tradition of the sublime, a tradition stretching back through Longinus to Sappho, Homer, and the Bible. And never more so than in her recent book, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera.

The book explores, from a wide variety of perspectives, the theme of the sublime annihilation or decreation of the self. Carson borrows the term “decreation” from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, for whom the purpose of such an act was to get out of the way of God, to let God’s will prevail over one’s one. Any student of religions will recognize this as a very old idea. But one way of understanding Carson’s focus on this theme is to think of her place in literary history: as a self-consciously post-confessional poet, she is concerned with finding ways to displace the self from the centre of the work. Not, mind you, in order to replace it with the cold, inhuman babble of Language, but rather to make way for “spiritual matters”. And this, as I say, places her squarely in the Romantic tradition of the sublime. “Not I,” writes D.H. Lawrence, in his “Song of the Man Who Has Come Through”: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.” The main difference is that where English Romantics like Shelley and Lawrence speak of “wind,” Carson often speaks of the still more traditional “God.” [...]

Lest we forget that the sublime is a concept that was applied in the eighteenth century especially to certain aesthetic experiences of nature, Carson’s third essay, “Totality: The Colour of Eclipse,” considers the sublime experience of the total eclipse of the sun. She describes it as follows: “You are now inside the moon’s shadow, which is a hundred miles wide and moves at two thousand miles an hour. The sensation is stupendous.” Carson takes her literary examples this time from Archilochus, Pindar, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Annie Dillard. Surprisingly, she finds the experience is often associated in these writers with copulation, marriage, questions and doubts about marriage, and, less surprisingly, with a feeling of wrongness; in a metaphor borrowed from her own essay in praise of sleep, she compares seeing an eclipse to “waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your mind.” Taken by itself, this is the slightest of the four essays; however, when read together with the other three its images and ideas help to link all four in marvelously suggestive ways. For instance, although she never makes the link explicitly, the image of a total eclipse of the sun is perhaps her most powerful metaphor for her central notion of “decreation,” which may be understood as a kind of eclipse or annihilation of the self.

I also recently enjoyed listening to Michael Silverblatt's conversation with Carson (from January 2007) about her translations of Euripides.

More on Solzhenitsyn

Linh Dinh at Detainees points to one of Solzhenitsyn's last interviews:

SPIEGEL: And your strength did not leave you even in moments of enormous desperation?

Solzhenitsyn: Yes. I would often think: Whatever the outcome is going to be, let it be. And then things would turn out all right. It looks like some good came out of it. [...]

SPIEGEL: In 1987 in your interview with SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein you said it was really hard for you to speak about religion in public. What does faith mean for you?

Solzhenitsyn: For me faith is the foundation and support of one’s life.

SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of death?

Solzhenitsyn: No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me -- he died at the age of 27 -- and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.

SPIEGEL: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.

Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don’t. It’s enough.

Confession

I just finished solving a fun little puzzle on the Lostpedia Blog. (Yes, I'm one of those people.)

I owe what cryptogram skills I have to Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Fours Crossing by Nancy Garden. Both stories had me solving the cryptograms in the local paper when I was a kid. (In the evenings after Jeopardy!, of course.)

Thanks to Lost for helping me relive a bit of my childhood...

By the way, their book club is currently reading Carrie (a live chat will happen on the 23rd, but this discussion thread is interesting). Lord of the Flies is September's selection.

Remembering Solzhenitsyn

Too many deadlines, not enough time. It has taken me awhile to absorb the shock of this death and finally have something to offer. I reread an interview he gave in June 2005 (which discusses the challenge of democracy) and the interview his wife gave in April and feel a great sense of loss. He lived an amazing, full life--but such urgency, such purpose!

Solzhenitsyn's most recent years have been characterised by frantic activity - and an austere preoccupation with historical patterns rather than fleeting events, she added.

(One can only wonder if this pace had something to do with the October 2005 fire that destroyed many of his archives.)

A friend once recommended Daniel J. Mahoney's Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. I was fascinated by the complex ideas presented and the (yes) urgency of what Solzhenitsyn was trying to communicate. This book is an excellent exploration of the ramifications of his work (highly recommended).

So I was disappointed and troubled by the tone of many of the obituaries I read, as well as by Jane Smiley's personal response "article." She is honest (I'll give her that) and openly admits that

Russian novels are a treasure, and I have long treasured them. But, like most Americans, I, too, had a very shallow understanding of Solzhenitsyn. When he came to the US, took up residence in Vermont, and began criticizing the US and the modern world, I was surprised, put off, and then lost interest in what the old man had to say.

Yet she never confronts this loss of "interest" and simply winds up saying,

He didn't conform to anyone's program. No one could make an ally of Solzhenitsyn, at least for very long. He was prickly, he was opinionated, he was independent, he was peculiar. For this, and this alone, I thank him and honor him.

It is unfair to demand that she "understand" him, but it's unfortunate that there is no willingness to examine his criticisms. He is reduced to some type of curiosity.

This is precisely what must not happen to his work and his memory--especially now. We must be willing to analyze what he had to say and confront its implications.

More worthwhile responses can be found here:

• Levi Asher discusses the speech and eloquently compares Solzhenitsyn to Dostoevsky.
• The Millions posts "Holding a Vigil for a People's History: an Appreciation of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward."
• Geoff Wisner remembers being in the crowd at Harvard and listening to Solzhenitsyn's speech:

A cold drizzle was falling, and as the translator rolled out one section at a time, it took a while for the listeners to take in how radical it was. “This is terrible!” a middle-aged woman near me finally burst out.

As for me, I didn’t agree with everyone Solzhenitsyn said, but it was bracing to hear him inveigh against Western complacency and materialism from the same platform where President Derek Bok had been proudly announcing how much money each Harvard class has donated to its alma mater.

Tolkien and Lewis illustrator Pauline Baynes

passed away last Friday at the age of 85. When I was 8, her illustrations for The Chronicles of Narnia taught me to "read" images. It seemed that every time I looked at her lovely pen drawings, I saw something new.

Brian Sibley writes,

There are certain illustrators whose work is so intimately interwoven with the author's text as to rank as the books' co-creators. Sir John Tenniel, for example, the first illustrator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and E H Shepard who, with A A Milne, led us into the world of Winnie-the-Pooh. Similarly, Pauline Baynes' pictures of country and denizens in C S Lewis' seven Chronicles of Narnia are still - despite the recent big-screen movie imagery - the definitive depiction of that extraordinary land beyond the wardrobe...

It is a lovely personal tribute that goes on to describe her achievements, her illustration of the lost chapter of Through the Looking Glass, and the stories behind how she met J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

After producing illustrations for various books of fairy tales, Pauline Baynes' career was established when, in 1949, J R R Tolkien's publishers showed the author of The Hobbit a portfolio of her artwork. Tolkien had written Farmer Giles of Ham, a fanciful novella with a faux-medieval setting, and being dissatisfied with the pictures that had been produced for the book was looking for a new illustrator.

Pauline produced a series of witty line illustrations that perfectly caught the essence of Tolkien's story to an extent that he declared them to be "more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme." He also delighted in reporting that friends had said that the pictures had reduced his text to "a commentary on the drawings"!

Here is his full obituary in The Independent. It is very sad that she is gone, but what a beautiful life she led.

(via NarniaWeb via cleolinda)

Life-changing books

El País recently surveyed 100 Spanish-language authors about the top ten books that changed their lives. (Here is a PDF of the complete list of the authors and their choices.)

A few interesting bits:

• The top five authors turned out to be (from one to five) Cervantes, Proust, Homer, and Kafka (in both fourth and fifth place).
• Jorge Luis Borges is number one of the Latin American authors mentioned.
• Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov is number one on Horacio Castellanos Moya's list.
• Alberto Manguel's first pick was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• Javier Marías placed both Richard III and Macbeth at the top of his list.
• Proust's In Search of Lost Time was at the top of Antonio Muñoz Molina's list.
• Iván Thays has Ana Karenina at the top, with Pale Fire a close second.
• Enrique Vila-Matas' number one is Kafka's Diaries.
  

(With thanks to A.)

Beautiful mistakes

Earlier this week, Anne shared the whimsical discovery of a new word:

I was listening to “Proud Mary” and googled the lyrics to figure out the phrase “pumped a lot of tane.” The Tina Turner version is ‘tane, for octane, which makes sense as the kind of lousy, hard job someone might have in New Orleans, but wikipedia suggests, too, that the line may be a mondegreen, helpfully linking to an entry on the topic.

The coinage comes from a 1954 essay by Sylvia Wright in Harper’s:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]
And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."

I was immediately reminded of Walker Percy's essay "Metaphor as Mistake" (from The Message in the Bottle):

I remember hunting as a boy in south Alabama with my father and brother and a Negro guide. At the edge of some woods we saw a wonderful bird. He flew as swift and straight as an arrow, then all of a sudden folded his wings and dropped like a stone into the woods. I asked what the bird was. The guide said it was a blue-dollar hawk. Later my father told me the Negroes had got it wrong: It was really a blue darter hawk. I can still remember my disappointment at the correction. What was so impressive about the bird was its dazzling speed and the effect of alternation of its wings, as if it were flying by a kind of oaring motion.

Percy goes on to explore the implications of this sort of linguistic "error":

It might be useful to look into the workings of these accidental stumblings into poetic meaning, because they exhibit in a striking fashion that particular feature of metaphor which has most troubled philosophers: that it is "wrong"--it asserts of one thing that it is something else--and further, that its beauty often seems proportionate to its wrongness or outlandishness.

It's a fascinating essay that praises the lovely paradox of metaphor and the possibilities of poetic meaning:

That is to say, is it the function of metaphor merely to diminish tension, or is it a discoverer of being?

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.

Confronting misconceptions about Blake

Northrop Frye does this brilliantly in the first few pages:

• "[I]t is only by cutting out two-thirds of Blake's work that [one] will be able to wedge the rest of it in with that of the minor pre-Romantics."
• "The prophesies form what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language, and most of the more accessible editions of Blake omit them altogether, or print only those fragments which seem to the editor to have a vaguely purplish cast."
• One prevailing impression is "that Blake is to be regarded as an ultrasubjective primitive whose work involuntarily reflects his immediate mood. The Songs of Innocence are then to be taken at their face value as the ourpourings of a naïve and childlike spontaneity, and the Songs of Experience as the bitter disillusionment resulting from maturity--for when Blake engraved the latter he was no longer a child of thirty-two but a grown man of thirty-seven. It is logical inference from this that the prophecies can reflect only an ecstatic self-absorption on which it is unnecessary for a critic to intrude."
• "It is pathetic to read his letters and see how buoyant is his hope of being understood in his own time, and how wistful is the feeling that he must depend on posterity for appreciation. And it was not only recognition he wanted: he had a very strong sense of his personal responsibility both to God and to society to keep on producing the kind of imaginative art he believed in. He despised obscurity, hated all kinds of mystery, and derided the idea that poets do not fully comprehend what they are writing."
• Frye insists that "all of Blake's poetry, from the shortest lyric to the longest prophesy, must be taken as a unit and, mutatis mutandis, judged by the same standards."
• He also believes (quite logically) that Blake should "be placed in his historical and cultural context as a poet who, though original, was not aboriginal, and was neither a freak nor a sport."
• "Further, Blake's poems are poems, and must be studied as such. Any attempt to explain them in terms of something that is not poetry is bound to fail."
• Also, "No one who has read three lines of our straightforward and outspoken poet can imagine that he wished to be pursued by a band of superstitious dilettantes into the refuge of a specialized cult. Whatever Blakes prophecies may be, they can hardly be code messages. They may need interpretation, but not deciphering".

Taking a deep breath

This article made me grit my teeth and (at least) inspired me to repost this Flannery O'Connor quotation (and make part of it bold while I'm at it):

There are those who maintain that you can't demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards.

(via The Literary Saloon)

Praising Dillard

Amber Ruth Paulen at Descriptedlines has written a lovely response to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Above all and all, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book of praise; it’s like sitting in an old-fashioned pew and a man of no certain religious leaning says, “All take out your psalms.” And so you get your singing voice ready, but these little ditties were written by Annie Dillard and she wants you to trip over her words. Not the words really, but the “ideas,” she wants you to go slowly, learning how to sing as she does. What stunning poetics and what oddball facts! One must pass one sentence twice-by for sometimes the reflection off the words cause a over-white gleaming blur, like a flash, like the sun glinting off a the scales of a fleet-finned fish or a crystalized beautiful thought.

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.

Transcending time

Once upon a time I contemplated taking a master's course on William Blake. There were so many aspects to his work that my undergrad English classes inspired me to explore, and I wanted to keeping learning about him. His theories on art and the imagination seemed to link him more closely to the metaphysical poets than the Romantics (in my humble opinion), and having been lucky enough to see an exhibit of his work at the Tate, I wanted to understand more about his holistic vision of reality.

I bought a used copy of Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake a few years ago, but have only now begun reading it.

Holy crap.

I'm only on page 68, but my mind has been officially blown. Frye is examining everything I've ever suspected about Blake, offering a refreshing look at one of the most misunderstood poets in the English language. The timeliness of Frye's work is also compelling. As he says in the preface,

I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.

Frye penned this passage in 1969. There's a special urgency to what he has to say as well, and this beautifully wise work of literary criticism (that also encompasses philosophy and theology) deserves a wide readership today. I look forward to continuing my journey through this spectacular book.

Despite the "delicate original"

Wyatt Mason defends translated literature and takes a look at Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States, an examination of how literary style "survives translation":

Most discussions of translation take this generalization as unquestionable truth: If only the translator were more careful, or more gifted–or merely competent!–the delicate original would not have arrived in shards and tatters, ruined for readers, upon our shores.

The trouble I have with this conventional wisdom is how patently it flies in the face of practical experience. If translations were so routinely terrible and so generally unreadable, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Flaubert and Stendhal and Kafka and Proust and Mann—whose translators have been mocked and derided by generations of critics—would have had no hope of finding readers beyond their respective shores. Given that these writers have readers around the world, the ire and indignation felt by those who take at translators comes not over the errancy of translation but its adequacy: however error-ridden and technically troubling a translation might be—the syntax clumsy, the vocabulary misleading, the dialogue wooden—translations have nonetheless managed, somehow, to convey their sources sufficiently for their originals survive, not to say thrive, far from home.

That “somehow”—a compelling mystery—is explored in a fine new book by British writer Adam Thirlwell.

And on to the wish list it goes...

Update, 24 July: As promised, Mason has posted his interview with Thirlwell. Happily, they discuss several nuts-and-bolts issues concerning the latter's translation of Nabokov's "Mademoiselle O," as well as specific issues of translation in general:

Did the practice of translating “Mademoiselle O” produce any changes in your thoughts on the nature of translation?

I realized more precisely than ever that the problems with content and form were more complicated than I had thought. Often, the phonetic tricks, like alliteration, were quite easy to mimic: what proved recalcitrant were the small elements, like songs, or slang, or objects. And I became aware of the more personal problem: how to avoid one’s own tricks, or even, how to avoid the excessive imitation of the original writer’s tricks—how to prevent their later style from dominating one’s version of the earlier style.

There's also a nice tip of the hat to Roberto Arlt and Macedonio Fernández.

Peaceful Sunday

Yesterday was beautiful. Millions of us in over 60 countries around the world marched together for peace and the release of the hostages held here in Colombia. It was also a beautifully historic celebration of our Independence Day.

• Audio and video from El Colombiano
• Audio and video from El Tiempo
• More video from El Espectador
• Colombia Reports notes that 10 million marched in Colombia alone.
• According to El Espectador, there were zero homicides in Colombia yesterday.
• English video news coverage, a summary of events, and a slideshow of photos can be seen at the BBC.
  

"A Dios le Pido" was sung in Paris and "La Gota Fría" en Leticia. Simultaneous concerts lasted until nearly 5.00 p.m. in Cali, Medellín, Barranquilla, Bogotá, and many other cities across the country. Time will tell whether our cries for freedom for the hostages will be heard, but the world can no longer be in doubt as to what our hearts believe.

Rilke and self-identity

A.N. Wilson reads Rilke:

If you have ever read W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, you will realise that this cult book of the 1990s is heavily influenced by the Malte Laurids notebooks. Rilke completed it in 1909, when he was 34.

The book takes the form of meditations by a young Danish aristocrat, living a lonely and impoverished life in Paris and observing the extraordinary street "characters" of that city. [...]

The central question of the book is self-identity. It ends with a retelling of the Prodigal Son, who runs away from home precisely to escape being loved on his family's uncongenial terms. In his return, he wonders whether he is ready for the love of God - about which, in his reading of St Teresa of Avila, he has already meditated.

He wonders, moreover, whether God is ready to love him. If I had to teach creative writing, I think I would use this book as a text.

So many bad books - either novels or autobiographies - charge artlessly into their theme, assuming that the author's soul is (a) interesting and (b) self-evidently existent.

Rilke's prose masterpiece reminds us of the questionability of either statement.

Given the connection Wilson makes between Rilke and Sebald, it would be interesting to read Laird Hunt's The Exquisite alongside The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (since the former was inspired by The Rings of Saturn).

(via The Literary Saloon)

Literary translation workshop

The University of East Anglia hosts the British Centre for Literary Translation 2008 International Literary Translation Summer School, which kicks off next week:

This year major names in world literature – both authors and translators – will be attending. They include British writers Giles Foden and George Szirtes, Irish poets Gabriel Rosenstock and Paddy Bushe, Spanish mystery and children’s author Carmen Posadas, and Angolan novelist and journalist José Eduardo Agualusa.

Delegates will arrive on Sunday July 20 from as far afield as Lebanon, Angola and Brazil. This year the following languages will be translated: Irish, English, Arabic, Italian, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

"Irish appears on our programme for the first time, and we are delighted to welcome Gabriel Rosenstock and Paddy Bushe, who are both active as poets and translators,” said Dr Valerie Henitiuk, BCLT associate director.

“The enthusiasm and creativity sparked by bringing these and other brilliant literary figures together with such talented participants make this summer school a quite extraordinary experience.”

Founded in 1989 by the late WG 'Max' Sebald, the BCLT is Britain’s foremost centre for the development, promotion and support of literary translation. The BCLT residential summer school has been a highlight of the literary calendar since 2000. Each year acclaimed writers and translators gather for an intense week of translation workshops, panel discussions, and talks. The event culminates in multilingual readings of the work accomplished.

Recognition

From Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (see Literary Mama for an excellent review):

Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar: prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a previous civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly and without misunderstanding.

Midweek links

• The Bat Segundo Show may be no more. I can't even begin to talk about what this podcast has meant to me--especially as someone who lives outside the U.S. The loss is incalculable. Update, 18 July: There's still hope--lots of it.
  
• Open Book, a collaborative online "writers on writing" project by Slate and NYU, posts its maiden episode: an insightful interview with Junot Díaz. Although the interview feels a little rushed, I loved how openly in debt he is to his reading. While working on a draft, he thinks of the books he loves and if they would say, "This page can't hang out with us"--into the trash it goes. (via The Millions)
• Matthew Tiffany quotes from a recent interview with the inimitable Wendell Berry.
• Miriam Burstein discusses Jennifer Egan's The Keep, perfectly describing my own frustrations with it.
• Anne Fernald reads Woolf's letters and has her grandmother to thank.
  
• Tim of Baby Got Books questions potential misreadings of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances.

Written on the body

“I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”

- Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

Contrariwise is a marvelous collection of literary tattoos that includes lines from Dante, Wilde, Eliot, Cummings, Creeley, Kerouac, Shakespeare, Whitman, Frost, Winterson, Gaiman, Sophocles, Plath, Joyce, Vonnegut, Blake, etc., etc. It's enough to get me thinking about lines of my own...

(via Grasping for the Wind)

Finding a way into the Wake

One of the most interesting sections of Umberto Eco's Experiences in Translation is his discussion of the decisions James Joyce made in the French and Italian translations of Finnegans Wake. The Italian translation

is certainly not an example of 'faithful' translation. Yet many have written that, to understand Finnegans Wake, it would be a good idea to start with his Italian translation of it. Perhaps, or rather certainly because, on seeing the text wholly rethought in another language, one can understand its deep mechanisms, over and beyond the insistence on this or that play of quotations.

Setting aside the mind-boggling idea that Finnegans Wake can even be translated, the fact that Joyce undertook to take nearly 700 pages of "Finneganian" and basically rewrite it in other languages isn't simply a testimony to his genius, but is also a way for readers to enter into the text and find out how it works. For example:

Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate. Did they never sharee you ebro at skol, you antiabecedarian? It's just the same as if I was to go par examplum now in conservancy's cause out of telekinesis and proxenete you. For coxyt sake and is that what she is?

Eco explains the allusions in English and then examines how Joyce rendered it in Italian, illustrating how Joyce was more interested in linguistic playfulness to convey underlying themes than he was in "the letter of the original."

Existential downfall

Just read this wonderful article on René Girard. He's still publishing--at 85:

He explained to James Williams, in an interview included in The Girard Reader, the epiphany that was connected with the writing of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: "I started working on that book very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking, and of course recognizing mimesis is a great debunking tool because it deprives us moderns of the one thing we still have left, our individual desire."

"The debunking that actually occurs in this first book is probably one of the reasons why my concept of mimesis is still viewed as destructive," he said. "Yet I like to think that if you take this notion as far as you possibly can, you go through the ceiling, as it were, and discover what amounts to original sin. An experience of demystification, if radical enough, is very close to an experience of conversion."

He described his eventual realization this way: "The author's first draft is a self-justification." It may either focus on a wicked hero, the writer's scapegoat, who will be unmasked by the end of the novel; or it may have a good hero, the author's alter ego, who will be vindicated at novel's end.

If the writer is a good one, he will see "the trashiness of it all" by the time he finishes his first draft—that it's a "put-up job." The experience, said Girard, shatters the vanity and pride of the writer. "And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible," Girard said.

(With thanks to Brook.)

Free at last!

Los liberados son:

Contratistas estadounidenses

* Keith Stansell
* Thomas Howes
* Marc Gonsalves

Civil

* Ingrid Betancourt

Ejército colombiano

* Teniente Juan Carlos Bermeo
* Subteniente Raimundo Malagón
* Sargento Segundo José Ricardo Marulanda
* Cabo Primero William Pérez
* Sargento Segundo Erasmo Romero
* Cabo Primero José Miguel Arteaga
* Cabo Primero Armando Flórez

Policía

* Cabo Primero Julio Buitrago
* Subteniente Armando Castellanos
* Subteniente Vianey Rodríguez
* Cabo Primero Jhon Jairo Durán

(see also)

I am crying tears of joy. A day for the history books... Thank God.

The Impossible Dream

From Umberto Eco's introduction to Experiences in Translation, translated by Alastair McEwen:

Every sensible and rigorous theory of language shows that a perfect translation is an impossible dream. In spite of this, people translate. It is like the paradox of Achilles and the turtle. Theoretically speaking, Achilles should never reach the turtle. But in reality, he does. No rigorous philosophical approach to that paradox can underestimate the fact that, not just Achilles, but any one of us, could beat a turtle at the Olympic Games.

Rue du Départ

Notes on the fifth and final part of Against the Day (see also Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four).

~ p. 1074: Quite an eye-catching Freudian slip: "Reef, Stray, and Ljubica returned to the U.S. pretending to be Italian immigrants." Of course, it's not Stray (Reef's first wife), it's Yashmeen. Which makes me wonder if there's an alternate version to this story that didn't get completely edited out or if it was simply a proofreader trying to have some fun...

~ p. 1076: A worthwhile topic:

Jesse brought home as an assignment from school "write an essay on What It Means To Be An American."

"Oboy, oboy." Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities. "Let's see that pencil a minute."

"Already done." What Jesse had ended up writing was,

It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.

"That's what they call the 'topic sentence'?"

"That's the whole thing."

"Oh."

It came back with a big A+ on it. "Mr. Becker was at the Cour d'Alene back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that."

~ p. 1077: A recurring theme:

"The world came to an end in 1914."

~ p. 1078: Kit is confronted with

a startling implication of Zermelo's Axiom of Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun.

"Because one emits light and the other doesn't, don't you think."

Kit was taken aback. "I don't know."

He spent awhile contemplating this. Zermelo had been a docent at Göttingen when Kit was there and, like Russell, had been preoccupied with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. He was also notorious around the beer halls for a theory that no expedition could ever reach either of the poles, because the amount of whisky needed was directly proportional to the tangent of the latitude. Polar latitude being 90°, this meant a value approaching infinity--Q.E.D. It didn't surprise Kit much that the peculiar paradox should be traceable in some way back to Zermelo.

~ p. 1081: Here is more evidence and an expansion of my theory from Part Three, p. 596 that the Afghani dirhan around Yashmeen's neck is the "ancient coin" of the novel's cover. Lord Overlunch explains Kit's visit to Shambhala via a certain stamp:

"I like to look at these all carefully with the loupe at least once a week, and today I noticed something different about this ten-dirhan design, and wondered if possibly someone, some rival, had crept in here while I was out and substituted a variant. But of course I found the change immediately, the one face that was missing, your own, I know it well by now, it is, if you don't mind my saying so, the face of an old acquaintance...."

"But I wasn't..."

"Well, well. A twin, perhaps."

I still tend to think that the dirhan is Yashmeen's and the image is Shambhala after all.

~ p. 1084: The Chums' wives are going to have babies and suddenly the writing has switched to the present tense:

As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity--it is an acceptance of sky.

Glorious life continues...as the novel ends.

~ p. 1085: "They fly toward grace."

The Anne-girl arrives

one hundred years ago today.

More of Montgomery's literary allusions

This went up yesterday at Blogging Anne of Green Gables.

Here are the wealth of references found between Chapters 7 and 19 (from Anne's prayers to the Debating Club concert):

~ Marilla determines to "send to the manse tomorrow and borrow the Peep of Day series". (The copyright of the edition linked to here says 1925, but I imagine it was around in other forms years before that.)

~ Anne learns the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4).

~ Enough to make Lewis Carroll smile:

Marilla was as fond of morals as the Duchess in Wonderland, and was firmly convinced that one should be tacked on to every remark made to a child who was being brought up.

~ Anne on Sunday school:

"Then all the other little girls recited a paraphrase. She asked me if I knew any. I told her I didn't, but I could recite, 'The Dog at His Master's Grave' if she liked. [This is the best I could do.] That's in the Third Royal Reader. It isn't a really truly religious piece of poetry, but it's so sad and melancholy that it might as well be. She said it wouldn't do and she told me to learn the nineteenth paraphrase for next Sunday. I read it over in church afterwards and it's splendid. There are two lines in particular that just thrill me.

Quick as the slaughtered squadrons fell
In Midian's evil day.

I don't know what 'squadrons' means nor 'Midian,' either, but it sounds so tragical. I can hardly wait until next Sunday to recite it."

These lines seem to be from an old Christmas carol, "The Race that Long in Darkness Pined." (I can just hear her.)

~ "I sat just as still as I could and the text was Revelations, third chapter, second and third verses. It was a very long text. If I was a minister I'd pick the short, snappy ones."

~ After meeting Diana for the first time:

"Don't you think Diana has got very soulful eyes? I wish I had soulful eyes. Diana is going to teach me to sing a song called 'Nelly in the Hazel Dell.'"

Later, when Marilla goes to ask her about the infamous amethyst brooch, Anne is

shelling peas by the spotless table and singing "Nelly of the Hazel Dell" with a vigour and expression that did credit to Diana's teaching [...].

And here it is (as well as some additional background history):

In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping,
Nelly lov'd so long!
And my lonely watch I'm nightly keeping,
Nelly, lost and gone.
Here in moonlight often we have wander'd
Thro' the silent glade;
Now where leafy branches all point downward;
Little Nelly's laid.
All alone my watch I'm keeping
In the Hazel Dell,
For my darling Nelly's near me sleeping.
Nelly, dear, farewell.

~ Anne quotes Rachel Lynde quoting...Benjamin Franklin?:

"Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.' But I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed."

I first encountered this line in Poor Richard's Almanack, but I've also seen it attributed to Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Many (most?) of Franklin's quotations were lifted from other sources, so Mrs. Lynde would be relieved to know that she isn't actually quoting a "Yank."

~ Amid the amethyst brooch tragedy, Marilla remembers Luke 9:62:

"Oh dear, I'm afraid Rachel was right from the first. But I've put my hand to the plough and I won't look back."

~ In Diana's list of reasons why Anne shouldn't leave school:

"and Alice Andrews is going to bring a new Pansy book next week and we're all going to read it out loud, chapter about, down by the brook. And you know how you are so fond of reading out loud, Anne."

~ I think Proverbs 25:21-22 was a favorite passage of Montgomery's--it's mentioned many times in her work (and probably comforted her amid the trials of her living situation). It's certainly a favorite of Anne's. After confessing the truth of the mouse-drowned pudding sauce, Anne tells how Marilla

"just carried that sauce and pudding out and brought in some strawberry preserves. She even offered me some, but I couldn't swallow a mouthful. It was like heaping coals of fire on my head."

And when Anne accepts Mrs. Barry's apology,

"I felt fearfully embarrassed, Marilla, but I just said as politely as I could, 'I have no hard feelings for you, Mrs. Barry. I assure you once for all that I did not mean to intoxicate Diana and henceforth I shall cover the past with the mantle of oblivion.' That was a pretty dignified way of speaking, wasn't it, Marilla? I felt that I was heaping coals of fire on Mrs. Barry's head."

~ When Mrs. Barry first separates them, Anne states,

"My heart is broken. The stars in their courses fight against me, Marilla."

This is from the story of Deborah in Judges 5:20.

~ Anne misses Diana's welcome when she goes back to school, inspiring Montgomery to quote from the fourth canto of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage":

The Caesar's pageant shorn of Brutus' bust
Did but of Rome's best son remind her more

Then Psalm 139:14 is invoked as

"the next morning a note, most fearfully and wonderfully twisted and folded, and a small parcel, were passed across to Anne."

~ Anne's pronouncement,

"But really, Marilla, one can't stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?"

foretells the penchant of Montgomery's 1929 titular heroine in Magic for Marigold:

She had picked it up from Aunt Marigold and from then to the end of life things would be for Marigold interesting or uninteresting. Some people might demand of life that it be happy or untroubled or successful. Marigold Lesley would only ask that it be interesting.

~ Numbers in the Avonlea Debating Club Concert: Prissy Andrews "climbed the slimy ladder, dark without one ray of light" in "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight" by Rose Hartwick Thorpe.

~ Sam Sloane recites "How Sockery Set a Hen" [scroll down for passage].

~ Mr. Phillips "gave Mark Antony's oration over the dead body of Caesar".

~ And the aforementioned moment when Gilbert recites "Bingen on the Rhine" (while Anne stonily ignores him by reading "Rhoda Murray's library book"). Diana says,

"Oh, Anne, how could you pretend not to listen to him? When he came to the line,

There's another, not a sister

he looked right down at you."

It probably rankled all the more since it had been a favorite of hers.

~ This Japanese site has a good collection of the primary sources listed in the novel.

Against the Day

Notes on the fourth part of Against the Day (see also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three).

Since I've finished, it's been interesting to think about how the multitude of characters and locations actually serve to diminish distances. Yes, it's a sprawling, expansive, huge novel--but reading large chunks at once really left me with the impression of the tightly knitted, interconnected nature of global community. Nothing happens in isolation, but is a consequence of other occurrences, decisions, and seemingly "random" events.

It's also interesting that although the focal point of the novel is World War I, we never actually see it take place. Rather, the narrative deals with the events that lead up to it and then the aftermath.

~ p. 735: Dally's dilemma about Kit:

What did she want? Wasn't this just Merle all over again? That alchemy, the magic crystals, the obsessive assaults on the Mysteries of Time, she'd really believed once that she had to get away from that before it drove her as crazy as her Pa, and now, would you just look, here she was getting it back, here was another lunatic, somebody this time leaving her, to go search for an invisible city over the edge of the world.

~ p. 738: Andrea Tancredi rails against the massive buying and selling of art (what Scarsdale Vibe is up to, because after all, everything comes back to chasing light):

"It's not the price tag," Tancredi cried, "it's what comes after--investment, reselling, killing something born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death."

~p. 744: An artist's redemption:

He was a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists, too much so for the world, even the seen world they were trying to redeem one little rectangle of canvas at a time.

~ p. 749: From Yashmeen's letter to her "father":

"For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it, and the tragic hour into which it is passing?

"Mathematics once seemed the way--the internal life of numbers came as a revelation to me, perhaps as it might have to a Pythagorean apprentice long ago in Crotona--a reflection of some less-accessible reality, through close study of which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given world."

~ p. 757: An amusing exchange:

"Fond of the English, are you sir."

"I love Gweat Bwitain! Lord Salisbuwy is my wole model!"

~ p. 761: The curse of Tamerlane's tomb

~ p. 762: "Invisible birds, collecting against the night, sang boisterously."

~ p. 777: Lieutenant Prance sets Kit straight on the matter of American history--how political or economic motives are exposed as religious ones.

~ p. 779: The Tunguska event becomes one of the central moments of the novel, affecting all characters and upsetting the balance of nature. It's fascinating how Pynchon explores the possible implications of a historical fact, tying together the various mathematical theories and ideas that coalesce throughout the story. Reading this list of literary references to the event, I was a little surprised by the connection that is made:

Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, puts forth a complex explanation for the Tunguska event, centering around the idea that an expedition near the North Pole unearthed a sentient geological being which, after being transported to the Tunguska area, proceeded to unleash rage-fueled destruction on the humans that transported him.

It looks like I'm going to have to reread it (someday), because I did not pick up on that at all. (This probably has something to do with the fact that it took me nearly a year to make it half-way, and then only a few weeks to finish the rest.)

~ p.782: Someone's conclusion about the Event's cause:

"Exactly what I'm saying. Time-travel isn't free, it takes energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from the future."

~ p. 793: Shambhala is revealed in the aftermath of the Event, but then so are the Chums:

What it would take the boys longer to understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world, and that for the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala, their protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before the earthbound day.

This is another thing I didn't fully realize: the Chums of Chance are fictional characters to this world of "real" people. Fictions within the fiction, finally exposed.

~ p. 794: The theory that Tesla had something to do with it is discussed. (The Tom Swift reference is particularly funny.)

~ p. 805: "As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucinaion, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day."

~ p. 809: A nice little history lesson describing the events leading up to WWI. (Much more intelligible than what gets stuck into history texts these days.)

~ p. 815-16: Yashmeen on the verge of her revelation:

Just for the instant, the matter was illuminated, unequivocally, something as obvious as Ramanujan's Formula--no, something of which Ramanujan's Formula was a special case--revealed why Riemann should have hypothesized one-half as the real part of every ζ(0), why he had needed to, at just that point in his thinking...she was released into her past, haunting her old self, almost close enough to touch--and then of course it was gone again and she was more immediately concerned with the loss of her hat [...].

I love Peter Keough's idea that the formula of the Quarternionist's beloved Hamilton (i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1) "relates to the structure of the book, each term in the equation applicable to each of the novel’s five sections". I think there's a lot more of this sort of thing going on, and (again) I'd love to read a mathematician's take on it.

~ p. 845: The European Question, "this bad daydream toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified."

~ p. 867: The description of Penhallow's painting, The Iron Gateway, expresses "his meditation on the fate of Europe" and depicts "shadowy multitudes trooped toward a vanishing line over which broke a hellish radiance." I'm immediately reminded of the vision of the future that the Chums saw from the Time machine--fictional fictional characters peering into the horror of reality.

~ p. 892: So there is doom and gloom, and then this:

"Who, 'Pert? Why she's the most naïvely trusting person I know."

"The woman gets jealous of oatmeal, Hunter." Dally had recently walked in on Ruperta with her face inches from a bowl of steaming porridge, addressing it in a low, vicious snarl [...] while her four-year-old niece Clothilda sat patiently nearby with a spoon and a milk jug.

~ p. 896: Ruperta nearly goes the way of Remedios the Beauty.

~ p. 930: "Frank respected this--who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love."

~ p. 934: Anarchists' Golf reminds me of Calvinball.

~ p. 936-37: The map depicting the Renfrew/Werfner "Interdikt" phosgene trap that Lew discovers in London falls into the hands of Cyprian, Yashmeen, and Reef:

Cyprian had been closely scanning the map with a Coddington lens. "Here then, the line-segment of interest seems to be labeled 'Critical Line'--Yashmeen, isn't that Riemann talk?"

She looked. "Except that this one's horizontal, and drawn on a grid of latitude and longitude, instead of real against imaginary values--where Riemann said that all the zeroes of the ζ-function will be found."

The connections don't simply describe each other, they infiltrate meaning.

~ p. 942: Jenny:

"This is our own age of exploration," she declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?"

~ p. 947: Henry Adams crops up again: there are "dynamos" connected to the Interdikt, tied to the eventual destruction of Europe. (I really do need to find out what else Pynchon has said about him. It's amazing how necessary "The Dynamo and the Virgin" is to understanding what he's up to in this book.)

~ p. 953: The Interdikt's true weapon:

"It seems that isn't a gas weapon, after all," said the motoros. "'Phosgene' is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent. [...] From military experience with searchlights, it was widely known how effectively light at that candle-power could produce helplessness and fear. The next step was to find away to project it as a stream of destructive energy."

"Fear in lethal form," said Cyprian. "And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once--"

"A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula."

~ p. 957: "The Manichæan aspect had grown ever stronger--the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by the unyielding doubleness of everything. Part of the discipline for a postulant was to remain acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the presented world."

~ p. 960: Father Ponko:

"When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as 'taking away' his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world."

~ p. 973: "Her love for Ljubica being impenetrable and indivisible as a prime number, other loves must be accordingly reevaluated."

~ p. 983: The meteorites of Mexico: "a gigantic one known as the Chupaderos, whose fragments, weighing in all perhaps fifty tons, had been taken away to the Capital in 1893." Which, of course, was back when our story began, at the World's Fair in Chicago.

~ p. 991-92: Once again, light as flesh:

"In the same way," amplified Günther, "that our Savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh among Christian peoples. It is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind."

~ p. 1018: The Chums of Chance "had voted, finally, to disafilliate."

~ p. 1020: "The corollary, Chick had worked out long ago, being that each star and planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy."

~ p. 1023-24: Miles remembers Ryder Thorn and what he wanted him to remember in Flanders, before the beginning of the end:

"Those poor innocencts," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at the beginning of this...they must have been boys, so much like us.... They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand 'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative--unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death."

This novel is (among many other things) a lament for World War I--something the world has never recovered from.

~ p. 1036: Living pictures:

"See, every photographic subject moves," Roswell explained, "even if it's standing still. It breathes, light bounces off, something. Snapping a photograph is like what the math professors call 'differentiating' an equation of motion--freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close. So we figured--if shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primative and release it back into action...even back to life..."

~ p. 1048: The potato-salad recipe discussion reminded me of Carl Solomon and the infamous food-fight incident at CCNY around the time (I think) Pynchon was at Cornell.

~ p. 1057: Lake's fate:

Instead she was alone with the sort of recurring dream a long-suffering movie heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant at last.

~ p. 1062: A technological advancement is simply the means by which love can be communicated.