Friday, October 1, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Oxford Bodleian: Artificial Language in John Aubrey Exhibit
At this 350th anniversay of the Royal Society--June 2010--I visited the brief but beautiful display of Aubrey's work, especially interested in "artificial language" vis a vis Borges on Wilkins' universal language, Wilkins having been the "architect" of the R.S. (1668), the same society that "purified" the English language a century or so later; Wilkins quoting Thomas Harriot: "He contrived an alphabet for the American language, like devils." Jonathan Swift (1726) parodied attempts at artificial (or new) languages, i.e. philosophers seeking universal communication culminating with Wilkins attempts.
A.L. failed for two basic reasons: 1) you can't reduce reality to "a series of tables"
2) you can't persuade others to adopt: freedom.
But think about this: newsspeak etc: subliminal brainwashing does indeed persuade or lull others to adopt...
sjl
A.L. failed for two basic reasons: 1) you can't reduce reality to "a series of tables"
2) you can't persuade others to adopt: freedom.
But think about this: newsspeak etc: subliminal brainwashing does indeed persuade or lull others to adopt...
sjl
Monday, July 19, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Neo-Goth Sherlock Holmes--or Borges Redux?
Sherlock Holmes in the Prism of Borges
I couldn’t help viewing with Borgesian bifocals Guy Ritchie’s latest “avatar” of super thinker Holmes played by a louche neurotic Robert Downey Jr. whose dependable sidekick Dr. Watson is updated by an edgy Jude Law, the best looking Watson to-date. The good doctor in this version threatens out of exasperation to abandon but still stands loyal (like his staunch original) to his cocaine-addicted comrade. These current reincarnations of the famous pair are far sexier and more physical—veritable James Bonds of the fist and the gun, with a taste for the ladies—than Conan Doyle’s restrained if jocular Victorian duo. There is also an explicit homo edge—Downey interprets Holmes as a rakish dandy when he’s not hallucinating or fiddling—as when the two men meet with the doctor’s fiancée (whoever thought of Watson as the marrying kind?) whom Downey succeeds in alienating. After all, she gets between him and his handsome pal at the Royale, Oscar Wilde’s favorite Cafe.
In his own stories Borges improved on the mechanical duality of Conan Doyle’s complementary doubles who, in Borges’ view, were merely replaying another gimmicky twosome, idealistic Don Quixote and earthy sidekick Sancho Panza. Interestingly, Guy Ritchie’s version (Holmes’s nemesis played by a sinister Mark Strong has a Draculesque touch) dilutes the complementarity by making hero and sidekick more identical, adding a dab of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The doubles multiply with the chick-flick addition of two ladies, the doctor’s aforementioned fiancée and Holmes’s love interest, a seductress/villain played by Rachel McAdams (at the service of evil Moriarty) who is a double agent, obeying her menacing employer yet yielding to the charms of Downey’s Holmes, taking her cues perhaps from Bond’s Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.
Getting back to Borges: the film is a veritable amalgam of the detective genre so dear to Borges who paid homage to it with his ‘Death and the Compass’—a tale of two with one homo-suicidal mind. Indeed its most Borgesian dimension is its borrowings from Poe, Christie and most especially G.K. Chesterton’s ‘nightmare’ titled The Man Who Was Thursday: the film’s climactic scene occurs in Parliament, suggesting Chesterton’s vast political conspiracy which turns out to be the work of one man with many masks. Chesterton’s Catholic touch doubtlessly helps paint a dark foreboding London as a nightmarish labyrinth whose center is occult.
The match between Holmes and Moriarty is between reason and magic: science battles against the supernatural as rapid fire foreshadowings and explanations incessantly sweep the narrative back, forth, and around each crime. Endless repetitions of plot and characterization, spiraling variations transcend the individual—detective and criminal are potentially interchangeable in an ongoing cycle that also transcends this film. Whether or not they recognize it, Borges has possessed the unconscious of filmmakers and spectators alike, this spectator, certainly.
By Suzanne Jill Levine
I couldn’t help viewing with Borgesian bifocals Guy Ritchie’s latest “avatar” of super thinker Holmes played by a louche neurotic Robert Downey Jr. whose dependable sidekick Dr. Watson is updated by an edgy Jude Law, the best looking Watson to-date. The good doctor in this version threatens out of exasperation to abandon but still stands loyal (like his staunch original) to his cocaine-addicted comrade. These current reincarnations of the famous pair are far sexier and more physical—veritable James Bonds of the fist and the gun, with a taste for the ladies—than Conan Doyle’s restrained if jocular Victorian duo. There is also an explicit homo edge—Downey interprets Holmes as a rakish dandy when he’s not hallucinating or fiddling—as when the two men meet with the doctor’s fiancée (whoever thought of Watson as the marrying kind?) whom Downey succeeds in alienating. After all, she gets between him and his handsome pal at the Royale, Oscar Wilde’s favorite Cafe.
In his own stories Borges improved on the mechanical duality of Conan Doyle’s complementary doubles who, in Borges’ view, were merely replaying another gimmicky twosome, idealistic Don Quixote and earthy sidekick Sancho Panza. Interestingly, Guy Ritchie’s version (Holmes’s nemesis played by a sinister Mark Strong has a Draculesque touch) dilutes the complementarity by making hero and sidekick more identical, adding a dab of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The doubles multiply with the chick-flick addition of two ladies, the doctor’s aforementioned fiancée and Holmes’s love interest, a seductress/villain played by Rachel McAdams (at the service of evil Moriarty) who is a double agent, obeying her menacing employer yet yielding to the charms of Downey’s Holmes, taking her cues perhaps from Bond’s Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.
Getting back to Borges: the film is a veritable amalgam of the detective genre so dear to Borges who paid homage to it with his ‘Death and the Compass’—a tale of two with one homo-suicidal mind. Indeed its most Borgesian dimension is its borrowings from Poe, Christie and most especially G.K. Chesterton’s ‘nightmare’ titled The Man Who Was Thursday: the film’s climactic scene occurs in Parliament, suggesting Chesterton’s vast political conspiracy which turns out to be the work of one man with many masks. Chesterton’s Catholic touch doubtlessly helps paint a dark foreboding London as a nightmarish labyrinth whose center is occult.
The match between Holmes and Moriarty is between reason and magic: science battles against the supernatural as rapid fire foreshadowings and explanations incessantly sweep the narrative back, forth, and around each crime. Endless repetitions of plot and characterization, spiraling variations transcend the individual—detective and criminal are potentially interchangeable in an ongoing cycle that also transcends this film. Whether or not they recognize it, Borges has possessed the unconscious of filmmakers and spectators alike, this spectator, certainly.
By Suzanne Jill Levine
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
world of the translator
We’re In This Together, Individually: Report from a Roundtable Discussion on “The World of the Translator”
by Nicolle Elizabeth
20 January 2009
Poet Jorie Graham once said, “It is the poet’s dream to communicate. To say what we’re really saying.” And if you think about how hard it is to truly come clean in your own sentence, your own work’s paragraph, and then turn that into distilling another poet’s communication, from another time, and another language—one which you might not even speak, you sort of have the craft of the translator. It is a psychological, historical, metaphysical, grammatical, sensual labyrinth of a relationship with another author that few have the passion to sustain, and the round table discussion at the Philoctetes Center in New York’s swank Upper East Side was full of these people.
Peter Cole, MacArthur Fellow and literary-poet-around-town, Edie Grossman, responsible for Don Quixote’s translation as we know it, Peter Constantine, publishing darling and go-to, quick-turnaround translator and Columbia-ite, Qui Xiaolong who was the first poet to successfully and commercially translate Yeats, Eliot and Freud into Chinese, and Johnathan Galassi, publishing legend, poet, and partially responsible for the recent Bolaño-mania, were all moderated by translation legend, Suzanne Jill Levine, who started translating Borges and Cortázar in the late sixties when South America and Mexico were booming into the public view. Levine opened up the roundtable asking, “Why were we drawn to translating?”
The conversation would stay here for two hours. Every author agreed, it was an individualized task. “The translator is working for someone else, this writer they’ve identified with.” Said Galassi. Edie Grossman, sipping her water and making no bones about past business disagreements with Galassi, seated to her left, said, “I’ve always felt a deep connection to the author.” “The love-making of being a translator,” said Cole. And Levine, noted foremother of the translation canon turned the conversation toward Xiaolong, fellow political wall-breaker. “There was a saying,” Xiaolong said: “China wants to realize modernization—But modernist literature was pretty much banned. Unless it had been spoken by Marx or Lenin, it wasn’t to be translated. So, I picked up Freud.”
This had me wondering if the pull to become a translator comes from the same urgency to create original work. That is to say, are these people helping the author (sometimes from the grave) say something, or are they creating, themselves? Galassi said, “A work in translation is a way of doing poetry.” Are translators broadening political territories and blurring cultural differences, or are they just taking a walk though mimetic mind-strengthening work? Essentially, what I was hoping to hear was something to the effect of, “Translated works are just as good as works originally in English, it just takes longer to get them going, which is the only reason 200,000 books were published in English last year and 380 were published from other languages into English, and I do this to share great work with people who need it in English.”
What I heard instead, again and again, was that translating, was an individualized process, meaning that the translators at the table (save for Xiaolong and Levine) were really saying they were working through the works of another, not translating to help get beautiful literature out to the general public. This scared me, these people are the biggest in the biz, and here they are, admitting it’s all about personal art, and money; they admitted money was a factor, not politics.
I thought, somebody bring me some hope, somebody tell me you’re letting the author speak through you, not using the author, and then Edie Grossman said, “The narrative voice has to have a certain authority,” and I thought, we’re back on track. Galassi smiled and took it a step further, opening the floor to a fight nobody wanted to touch, by saying, “There’s an imperialist value involved, that we the editors know what this text should be.” To which Peter Cole responded by bringing it back to art, but generous art: “It’s listening, a tone has been struck, and now I have to repeat that tone.”
And the sounds of millions of people chanting in the streets started ringing in my ears, people saying beautiful things, “Vive La France,” I imagined reporters sending information back from Vietnamese frontlines after interviewing townspeople, translating humanity so the world could know what was happening.
I thought, it might be a lone art, but it’s sharing another artist’s word with the world, and thank Jesus somebody’s doing it. “I sometimes translate out loud,” said Edie, “Your eye forgives everything.” I imagined thousands of translators, up late at night, echoing to themselves, to the air, to the rest of us, works that had been written in the past, yet to be shared, doing it because they knew it must be done, because we are responsible for passing on the word, communication.
“The World of the Translator” was a roundtable discussion at The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination in New York City, held on January 17, 2009. For participant bios and more information visit the Philoctetes Center Website
Nicolle Elizabeth is a Brooklyn-based fiction writer, editor and observer. She won the 2007 National Outstanding Haiku contest and won’t let anybody forget it.
by Nicolle Elizabeth
20 January 2009
Poet Jorie Graham once said, “It is the poet’s dream to communicate. To say what we’re really saying.” And if you think about how hard it is to truly come clean in your own sentence, your own work’s paragraph, and then turn that into distilling another poet’s communication, from another time, and another language—one which you might not even speak, you sort of have the craft of the translator. It is a psychological, historical, metaphysical, grammatical, sensual labyrinth of a relationship with another author that few have the passion to sustain, and the round table discussion at the Philoctetes Center in New York’s swank Upper East Side was full of these people.
Peter Cole, MacArthur Fellow and literary-poet-around-town, Edie Grossman, responsible for Don Quixote’s translation as we know it, Peter Constantine, publishing darling and go-to, quick-turnaround translator and Columbia-ite, Qui Xiaolong who was the first poet to successfully and commercially translate Yeats, Eliot and Freud into Chinese, and Johnathan Galassi, publishing legend, poet, and partially responsible for the recent Bolaño-mania, were all moderated by translation legend, Suzanne Jill Levine, who started translating Borges and Cortázar in the late sixties when South America and Mexico were booming into the public view. Levine opened up the roundtable asking, “Why were we drawn to translating?”
The conversation would stay here for two hours. Every author agreed, it was an individualized task. “The translator is working for someone else, this writer they’ve identified with.” Said Galassi. Edie Grossman, sipping her water and making no bones about past business disagreements with Galassi, seated to her left, said, “I’ve always felt a deep connection to the author.” “The love-making of being a translator,” said Cole. And Levine, noted foremother of the translation canon turned the conversation toward Xiaolong, fellow political wall-breaker. “There was a saying,” Xiaolong said: “China wants to realize modernization—But modernist literature was pretty much banned. Unless it had been spoken by Marx or Lenin, it wasn’t to be translated. So, I picked up Freud.”
This had me wondering if the pull to become a translator comes from the same urgency to create original work. That is to say, are these people helping the author (sometimes from the grave) say something, or are they creating, themselves? Galassi said, “A work in translation is a way of doing poetry.” Are translators broadening political territories and blurring cultural differences, or are they just taking a walk though mimetic mind-strengthening work? Essentially, what I was hoping to hear was something to the effect of, “Translated works are just as good as works originally in English, it just takes longer to get them going, which is the only reason 200,000 books were published in English last year and 380 were published from other languages into English, and I do this to share great work with people who need it in English.”
What I heard instead, again and again, was that translating, was an individualized process, meaning that the translators at the table (save for Xiaolong and Levine) were really saying they were working through the works of another, not translating to help get beautiful literature out to the general public. This scared me, these people are the biggest in the biz, and here they are, admitting it’s all about personal art, and money; they admitted money was a factor, not politics.
I thought, somebody bring me some hope, somebody tell me you’re letting the author speak through you, not using the author, and then Edie Grossman said, “The narrative voice has to have a certain authority,” and I thought, we’re back on track. Galassi smiled and took it a step further, opening the floor to a fight nobody wanted to touch, by saying, “There’s an imperialist value involved, that we the editors know what this text should be.” To which Peter Cole responded by bringing it back to art, but generous art: “It’s listening, a tone has been struck, and now I have to repeat that tone.”
And the sounds of millions of people chanting in the streets started ringing in my ears, people saying beautiful things, “Vive La France,” I imagined reporters sending information back from Vietnamese frontlines after interviewing townspeople, translating humanity so the world could know what was happening.
I thought, it might be a lone art, but it’s sharing another artist’s word with the world, and thank Jesus somebody’s doing it. “I sometimes translate out loud,” said Edie, “Your eye forgives everything.” I imagined thousands of translators, up late at night, echoing to themselves, to the air, to the rest of us, works that had been written in the past, yet to be shared, doing it because they knew it must be done, because we are responsible for passing on the word, communication.
“The World of the Translator” was a roundtable discussion at The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination in New York City, held on January 17, 2009. For participant bios and more information visit the Philoctetes Center Website
Nicolle Elizabeth is a Brooklyn-based fiction writer, editor and observer. She won the 2007 National Outstanding Haiku contest and won’t let anybody forget it.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
No Time For Comma Reports
Underdog vs. Top Dogs:
Read this on UC Regent Top Dog Blum:
Blum Rap FROM SILICON VALLEY NEWS
Turns out Senator Dianne Feinstein isn't the only one in her family with an ethics problem
By Peter Byrne
I HAVE reported recently in these pages the history of United States Sen. Dianne Feinstein's 2001-2005 conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's former stake in two war contractors, URS and Perini corporations. Unfortunately, the senator is not the only one in her family with an ethics problem. In March 2002, Gov. Gray Davis appointed Blum to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California. For the next three years, both URS and Perini benefited from construction contracts awarded by the Regents.
A "conflict of interest" is defined as using a governmental position for personal gain. But since the laws governing official ethics are written by people who often have actual or potential conflicts, they are packed with loopholes and are basically unenforceable. So if you're waiting for Feinstein or Blum to be indicted, dream on. Nevertheless, we serve history by documenting such trespasses.
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San Jose.com Real Estate
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In 1992, former regent Willis Harman enthused to the San Jose Mercury News about the pleasures of appointment because "this is definitely a great club to belong to, because the majority of members travel in fairly high circles. Through them, you tend to meet others in high financial, business and society circles." The current crop of regents is full of such politically savvy business folks as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal financial adviser and longtime business partner Paul Wachter. Blum was a genuine catch for the club, which, it turns out, was already doing business with him.
In May 2001, URS announced the award of "a contract from the University of California at Los Angeles to perform construction-management services for the $150 million replacement project for Santa Monica Hospital."
URS, which designs and sells advanced weaponry, also held a $125 million design and construction contract at UC's Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab. So URS had substantial interests in UC capital projects when Blum, its principal owner, became a "decider" on construction planning and awarding contracts.
Perini was similarly situated. When Blum became a regent, the construction firm of Rudolph & Sletten was midway through building dorms and a dining hall for UC-San Diego under a contract with the Regents. After Blum's appointment, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed by the Regents, hired Rudolph & Sletten as the construction manager and general contractor for a $48 million nanotech laboratory, the Molecular Foundry.
(Construction management and general contracting are not normally awarded to the same firm, as the construction manager is supposed to oversee general contracting costs. By the nanolab's dedication in March 2006, the project had gone over budget by $4 million.)
On Oct. 4, 2005, Perini Corp. announced the acquisition of Rudolph & Sletten while it was still building the Regents' nanolab. It paid $53 million cash for the $700 million-a-year construction firm. Shortly thereafter, Blum divested his Perini stock at a substantial profit.
Back to URS: On May 26, 2005, 50 UC-Berkeley students interrupted a meeting of the Regents to protest the Blum-URS-Los Alamos conflict of interest. Nevertheless, UC's general counsel ruled that Blum's ownership of a university contractor while a sitting regent was not a conflict—which is illogical but not surprising given that the regents have a long history of tolerating ethical conundrums. But the Los Alamos and Santa Monica Hospital deals were only part of Blum's ethical problems. Public records available at the UC-Berkeley Facilities Services website show that, after Blum joined the board, URS wrote portions of the Long Range Development Plan for UC-Berkeley: the sections on hydrology, air quality and hazardous materials. These construction projects will change the face of the campus and cost hundreds of millions of dollars through 2020.
In an expensive act of privatizing a governmental function, Blum's URS was hired by the Regents on July 29, 2005, to provide "program management services" for the development of a $200 million Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium and a substantial expansion of the Haas School of Business. The university delegated URS to manage the planning, design, contracting and construction of the mammoth project for an initial fee of $4.5 million. So far, according to a UC-Berkeley representative, URS has been paid $1.7 million.
In November 2005, Blum resigned from the URS board of directors and also divested his investment firm of about $220 million in URS stock. In April 2006, the Feinstein-Blum family made a $15 million "gift" to UC-Berkeley. The expanded business school is slated to house the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, which will encourage students to study the effects of global poverty upon political radicalism.
Words fail me.
Read this on UC Regent Top Dog Blum:
Blum Rap FROM SILICON VALLEY NEWS
Turns out Senator Dianne Feinstein isn't the only one in her family with an ethics problem
By Peter Byrne
I HAVE reported recently in these pages the history of United States Sen. Dianne Feinstein's 2001-2005 conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's former stake in two war contractors, URS and Perini corporations. Unfortunately, the senator is not the only one in her family with an ethics problem. In March 2002, Gov. Gray Davis appointed Blum to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California. For the next three years, both URS and Perini benefited from construction contracts awarded by the Regents.
A "conflict of interest" is defined as using a governmental position for personal gain. But since the laws governing official ethics are written by people who often have actual or potential conflicts, they are packed with loopholes and are basically unenforceable. So if you're waiting for Feinstein or Blum to be indicted, dream on. Nevertheless, we serve history by documenting such trespasses.
Advertiser Links
San Francisco.com Real Estate
Moving to the Bay Area just became easy. Let San Francisco.com show you all the homes currently for sale.
San Jose.com Real Estate
Relocating to San Jose or Silicon Valley? Let San Jose.com introduce you to some expert area real estate agents.
In 1992, former regent Willis Harman enthused to the San Jose Mercury News about the pleasures of appointment because "this is definitely a great club to belong to, because the majority of members travel in fairly high circles. Through them, you tend to meet others in high financial, business and society circles." The current crop of regents is full of such politically savvy business folks as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal financial adviser and longtime business partner Paul Wachter. Blum was a genuine catch for the club, which, it turns out, was already doing business with him.
In May 2001, URS announced the award of "a contract from the University of California at Los Angeles to perform construction-management services for the $150 million replacement project for Santa Monica Hospital."
URS, which designs and sells advanced weaponry, also held a $125 million design and construction contract at UC's Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab. So URS had substantial interests in UC capital projects when Blum, its principal owner, became a "decider" on construction planning and awarding contracts.
Perini was similarly situated. When Blum became a regent, the construction firm of Rudolph & Sletten was midway through building dorms and a dining hall for UC-San Diego under a contract with the Regents. After Blum's appointment, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed by the Regents, hired Rudolph & Sletten as the construction manager and general contractor for a $48 million nanotech laboratory, the Molecular Foundry.
(Construction management and general contracting are not normally awarded to the same firm, as the construction manager is supposed to oversee general contracting costs. By the nanolab's dedication in March 2006, the project had gone over budget by $4 million.)
On Oct. 4, 2005, Perini Corp. announced the acquisition of Rudolph & Sletten while it was still building the Regents' nanolab. It paid $53 million cash for the $700 million-a-year construction firm. Shortly thereafter, Blum divested his Perini stock at a substantial profit.
Back to URS: On May 26, 2005, 50 UC-Berkeley students interrupted a meeting of the Regents to protest the Blum-URS-Los Alamos conflict of interest. Nevertheless, UC's general counsel ruled that Blum's ownership of a university contractor while a sitting regent was not a conflict—which is illogical but not surprising given that the regents have a long history of tolerating ethical conundrums. But the Los Alamos and Santa Monica Hospital deals were only part of Blum's ethical problems. Public records available at the UC-Berkeley Facilities Services website show that, after Blum joined the board, URS wrote portions of the Long Range Development Plan for UC-Berkeley: the sections on hydrology, air quality and hazardous materials. These construction projects will change the face of the campus and cost hundreds of millions of dollars through 2020.
In an expensive act of privatizing a governmental function, Blum's URS was hired by the Regents on July 29, 2005, to provide "program management services" for the development of a $200 million Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium and a substantial expansion of the Haas School of Business. The university delegated URS to manage the planning, design, contracting and construction of the mammoth project for an initial fee of $4.5 million. So far, according to a UC-Berkeley representative, URS has been paid $1.7 million.
In November 2005, Blum resigned from the URS board of directors and also divested his investment firm of about $220 million in URS stock. In April 2006, the Feinstein-Blum family made a $15 million "gift" to UC-Berkeley. The expanded business school is slated to house the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, which will encourage students to study the effects of global poverty upon political radicalism.
Words fail me.
Monday, August 17, 2009
ALTA CONFERENCE 2009 FEATURES SCRIBE
Roundtable Discussion: Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe
Moderator: Jill Gibian
Panelists: Steve Bradbury, Lisa Bradford, Beth Pollack, Suzanne Jill Levine
This roundtable celebrates the second edition of Suzanne Jill Levine’s landmark text on translation, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Originally published by Graywolf Press in 1991, The Subversive Scribe is slated to be republished by Dalkey Archive Press (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) in October 2009 with a newly revised and extended introduction. Dalkey Press prides itself on being “subversive” by selecting texts that in some way challenge preconceived notions just as Jill Levine has consistently challenged our preconceived notions about literary translation. Visit ALTA website at http://www.utdallas.edu/alta/
Moderator: Jill Gibian
Panelists: Steve Bradbury, Lisa Bradford, Beth Pollack, Suzanne Jill Levine
This roundtable celebrates the second edition of Suzanne Jill Levine’s landmark text on translation, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Originally published by Graywolf Press in 1991, The Subversive Scribe is slated to be republished by Dalkey Archive Press (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) in October 2009 with a newly revised and extended introduction. Dalkey Press prides itself on being “subversive” by selecting texts that in some way challenge preconceived notions just as Jill Levine has consistently challenged our preconceived notions about literary translation. Visit ALTA website at http://www.utdallas.edu/alta/
Friday, July 31, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
interLitQ
blog | The International Literary Quarterly
Suzanne Jill Levine to appear in Roundtable discussion in New York on Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Posted January 13, 2009
Filed under: Authors, Fiction, The International Literary Quarterly, Translation |
Suzanne Jill Levine, http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/authors/9748, the distinguished academic, translator of Borges, Puig and Cortázar, and a Consulting Editor of Interlitq, will be participating in a Roundtable discussion (”The World of the Translator”) to be held in New York on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 2.30pm. The event will be held at the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination http://philoctetes.org/Home/at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Also participating will be other renowned literary figures: Peter Cole http://www.blueflowerarts.com/pcole.html; Peter Constantine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Constantine; Jonathan Galassi http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/11/books.html; Edith Grossman http://www.criticasmagazine.com/blog/810000481/post/640021064.html; and Qui Xialong http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/QiuXiaolong.html
blog | The International Literary Quarterly
Suzanne Jill Levine to appear in Roundtable discussion in New York on Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Posted January 13, 2009
Filed under: Authors, Fiction, The International Literary Quarterly, Translation |
Suzanne Jill Levine, http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/authors/9748, the distinguished academic, translator of Borges, Puig and Cortázar, and a Consulting Editor of Interlitq, will be participating in a Roundtable discussion (”The World of the Translator”) to be held in New York on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 2.30pm. The event will be held at the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination http://philoctetes.org/Home/at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Also participating will be other renowned literary figures: Peter Cole http://www.blueflowerarts.com/pcole.html; Peter Constantine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Constantine; Jonathan Galassi http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/11/books.html; Edith Grossman http://www.criticasmagazine.com/blog/810000481/post/640021064.html; and Qui Xialong http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/QiuXiaolong.html
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Remembrance of Translations Past: SOON to APPEAR in CALQUE
Remembrance of Translations Past: The Selected Stories of Adolfo Bioy Casares
By Suzanne Jill Levine
Green Integer is currently reissuing my edition of Bioy Casares’ stories, first published in English by New Directions in 1991.
It is much easier to talk about translating dense ‘untranslatable’ “baroque” texts, because the problems are visible, material, and one can speak of words as if they were clay. Adolfo Bioy Casares’s words seem transparent, not opaque. However, there is opacity in his “less is more” approach to language, and so one must catch the exact nuance or register of his words and phrasing. His typical style is understated and ironic; he had a perfect ear for colloquial speech, and his narrators and characters tend to invite the reader’s laughter unexpectedly, because no matter how hard they seek dignity, their actions and utterances are buffoonish. Such a style pertains to realism, one might think, but most narratives by Bioy, whether or not they begin on a realist note, slip imperceptibly into a dream.
After completing my first translation of a story by Bioy-- "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice," about a Peronist incident in 1953 in Buenos Aires--, I received a flattering letter, which at the time made not only my day, but my whole week. [This story would first appear in the Knopf Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature.] Bioy wrote from "Rincon Viejo, Pardo," the family ranch "Old Corner" in the town of Pardo where in the late 30s he had written his famous novella The Invention of Morel. Here is an excerpt from that letter:
Rincon Viejo, Pardo, March 8 1972
My Dear Jill:
Thanks for the letter and for the translation. About the latter, great suspense for the moment: to be elaborated on later.
I hadn't answered you until today, because for a time that has seemed immemorial I have spent my season at Mar de Plata lying face up, dedicated to examining, in all its details--which have struck me as sinister--the ceiling. It was nothing, lumbago; but, what a lumbago! That finally ended with a single injection, applied after fifty useless ones upon the advice of the father of my daughter's literature professor. There's nothing like literature.
The lumbago interrupted the progress of a short novel, Los desaparecidos de Villa Urquiza that I had begun with great hopes. But there is always something to be gained, as a Mexican general once said, and if I suffered over not writing (incredible as this seems), I spent who knows how many hours a day thinking about the little novel. As I watched it grow, not without fear of forgetting in the future, the novel and I became more intimate. Now I understand that before the lumbago, like an irresponsible chap, I was going to write about something of which I was completely ignorant.
Back, finally, to your translation. I wouldn't like to be unfair with anybody but I think, Jill, that it's the best that's been done with a text of mine. In general, the task of the translator consists in simplifying a text by weakening it, so that a mystery remains in evidence: Why did someone write (of course for this question there is never any answer) and why did someone else take the trouble to translate? Any author who doesn't want to abandon right there and then his profession should abstain from such depressing readings. With "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice" the danger, for me, is one of pride. I assure you that I have caught myself in the mirror, reading your pages with a beatific smile (from ear to ear), which could only correspond to the phrase: "How well I write!" "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice" does not read like a translation but as an original written with confidence, with intelligence and with grace.
As if I believed that those merits were also my own, your translation stimulated me to confront the continuous difficulties that fetter me in the composition and writing of The Disappeared...."
*********************
By Suzanne Jill Levine
Green Integer is currently reissuing my edition of Bioy Casares’ stories, first published in English by New Directions in 1991.
It is much easier to talk about translating dense ‘untranslatable’ “baroque” texts, because the problems are visible, material, and one can speak of words as if they were clay. Adolfo Bioy Casares’s words seem transparent, not opaque. However, there is opacity in his “less is more” approach to language, and so one must catch the exact nuance or register of his words and phrasing. His typical style is understated and ironic; he had a perfect ear for colloquial speech, and his narrators and characters tend to invite the reader’s laughter unexpectedly, because no matter how hard they seek dignity, their actions and utterances are buffoonish. Such a style pertains to realism, one might think, but most narratives by Bioy, whether or not they begin on a realist note, slip imperceptibly into a dream.
After completing my first translation of a story by Bioy-- "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice," about a Peronist incident in 1953 in Buenos Aires--, I received a flattering letter, which at the time made not only my day, but my whole week. [This story would first appear in the Knopf Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature.] Bioy wrote from "Rincon Viejo, Pardo," the family ranch "Old Corner" in the town of Pardo where in the late 30s he had written his famous novella The Invention of Morel. Here is an excerpt from that letter:
Rincon Viejo, Pardo, March 8 1972
My Dear Jill:
Thanks for the letter and for the translation. About the latter, great suspense for the moment: to be elaborated on later.
I hadn't answered you until today, because for a time that has seemed immemorial I have spent my season at Mar de Plata lying face up, dedicated to examining, in all its details--which have struck me as sinister--the ceiling. It was nothing, lumbago; but, what a lumbago! That finally ended with a single injection, applied after fifty useless ones upon the advice of the father of my daughter's literature professor. There's nothing like literature.
The lumbago interrupted the progress of a short novel, Los desaparecidos de Villa Urquiza that I had begun with great hopes. But there is always something to be gained, as a Mexican general once said, and if I suffered over not writing (incredible as this seems), I spent who knows how many hours a day thinking about the little novel. As I watched it grow, not without fear of forgetting in the future, the novel and I became more intimate. Now I understand that before the lumbago, like an irresponsible chap, I was going to write about something of which I was completely ignorant.
Back, finally, to your translation. I wouldn't like to be unfair with anybody but I think, Jill, that it's the best that's been done with a text of mine. In general, the task of the translator consists in simplifying a text by weakening it, so that a mystery remains in evidence: Why did someone write (of course for this question there is never any answer) and why did someone else take the trouble to translate? Any author who doesn't want to abandon right there and then his profession should abstain from such depressing readings. With "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice" the danger, for me, is one of pride. I assure you that I have caught myself in the mirror, reading your pages with a beatific smile (from ear to ear), which could only correspond to the phrase: "How well I write!" "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice" does not read like a translation but as an original written with confidence, with intelligence and with grace.
As if I believed that those merits were also my own, your translation stimulated me to confront the continuous difficulties that fetter me in the composition and writing of The Disappeared...."
*********************
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Galaxies: transcreation of Haroldo de Campos by SJLevine
In 1978 I recorded for Haroldo this excerpt from his Galaxias into English at Yale University. A leader at that time of Brazil's concrete poetry scene, Haroldo, who translated Finnegan's Wake into Portuguese, an impossible task of course, was producing a new poetic form with his book Galaxias, taking language to its limits. As a translator of avant-garde Latin American writers in Spanish, I was invited by Haroldo to collaborate on Galaxias.
laxias: andhereibegin 
and here I begin I spin here the beguine I respin and begin
to release and realize life begins not arrives at the end of a trip
which is why I begin to respin to write-in thousand pages write thousandone pages
to end write begin write beginend with writing and so I begin to respin
to retrace to rewrite write on writing the future of writings's the tracing
the slaving a thousandone nights in a thousandone pages
or a page in one night the same nights the same pages
same resemblance resemblance reassemblance where the end is begin
where to write about writing's not writing about not writing
and so I begin to unspin the unknown unbegun and trace me a book
where all's chance and perchance all a book maybe maybe not a travel
navelof-the-world book a travel navelof-the-book world where tripping's the book
and its being's the trip and so I begin since the trip is beguine and I turn
and return since the turning's respinning beginning realizing
a book is its sense every page is its sense every line of a page every word
of a line is the sense of the line of the page of the books which essays
any book an essay of essays of the book which is why the begin ends
begins and end spins and re-ends and refines and retunes the fine funnel of
the begunend spun into de runend in the end of the beginend refines
the refined of the final where it finishes beginnish reruns and returns
and the finger retraces a thousandone stories an incey wince-story and so count
of no account I don't recount the nonstory uncounts me discounts me the reverse
of the story is snot can be rot maybe story depends on the moment
the glory depends on the now and the never on although and no-go
and nowhere and noplace and nihil and nixit and zero and zilch-it
and never can nothing be all can be all can be total sum
total surprising summation of sumptuous assumption
and here I respin I begin to project my echo the wreck oh recurrent
echo of the echoing blow the hollows of moreaus the marrow that's beyonder
the over the thisaway thataway everywhere neverwhere overhere overthere
forward more backward less there in reverse vice verse prosa converse
I begin I respin verse begin vice respin so that summated story won't consume consummate
saltimbocca bestride me barebackboneberide me
begin the beguine of the trip where the travel's the marvel the scrabble's the
marble the vigil's the travel the trifle the sparkle the embers of fable discount
into nothing account for the story since spinning beginning i'm speaking
Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (from a basic version by Jon Tolman)
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