the cure for the common cold
…turns out to be Lennie Tristano + a photograph of Adorno in a bathing suit.
Image via The Poetry Foundation.
Lost in the Stacks
thoughts on Latin American literature and film (mostly)
May 6, 2012
April 27, 2012
the dramatic experience
Sergio Chejfec’s had a busy year. In the States, he’s been traveling from coast to coast for My Two Worlds (trans. M. Carson), which was nominated for a Best Translated Book Award back in February, and teaching with NYU’s Creative Writing in Spanish MFA program. And then there’s the latest novel, La experiencia dramática, which just came out in Buenos Aires to a flurry of attention in the press.
As was the case with My Two Worlds, the premise of La experiencia dramática can be summarized in a few sentences, though there’s obviously much more to it than that. Felix and Rose are old friends with a standing coffee date; the novel ostensibly takes place during the hour or two their meetings tend to last, though it could just as easily span several such encounters–its temporal structure, as Chejfec pointed out in a recent interview with Ñ, is somewhat elastic. On his way to their regular café, Felix reflects on the ancillary (bird’s-eye) perspective he’s developed from seeing his route plotted out on Google Maps, and wonders whether the objects he encounters along his way are, ultimately, “concrete examples of that which the maps simply take for granted.”
This tension between the real and its representation, this distillation of lived experience, is at the center of the novel. Its title, in fact, comes from an exercise assigned by Rose’s acting coach, who wants his students to prepare a scene based on the most dramatic experience they’ve had; the question of how to define this moment–and how to represent it, translating the immediate and often unassimilable into a symbolic register–bears significant weight in the narrative (and, of course, reflects back on its own composition).
Rose and Felix wander the streets of her neighborhood, which becomes something of a stage itself as they converse in a mix of (internal) monologue and (reported) dialogue. The two are deeply aware of performing their conversation as they watch and are watched by others, and consciously enact the physical and verbal gestures of an engaged interlocutor. One of the most remarkable things about this encounter between friends is the way in which Chejfec balances the synchrony produced by their familiarity with an interiority that borders on alienation; most of their exchanges, which range from reminiscences of Rose’s wedding and the death of her brother-in-law to the possibility of switching to a 30-hour day (and how many extra meals that would entail), reach the reader only after being filtered through the inner world of one or the other. The exchange itself happens offstage.
If the act of walking the city pressed the narrator’s gaze outward in My Two Worlds, focusing it on passers-by, petty crime, the intersection of art and politics, and so on, the same act drives the focus of La experiencia dramática inward, toward the personal histories of its central characters and the nuances of the relationships between them. In this sense, Chejfec’s latest is at once his most accessible and his most impenetrable: the emotional resonance of the scenes it presents can be seductive, and there are fewer signposts here to direct the reader toward the deeper reaches of the work. But tucked into the shadows just beyond the spotlight is a powerful meditation on the notion of writing as performance, human connections and their limitations, and the self-reflexive examination of what it means to hold life up to the lens of art.
If you’re in the San Francisco area, Chejfec will be participating in the Center for the Art of Translation’s “Lit and Lunch” series on May 8, 2012. In the meantime, I’ll be putting up a few choice quotations from that Ñ interview over the next few days, so check back in.
Photo credit: Paco González, from the blog of Antonio Jiménez Morato.
March 29, 2012
readings: Oliverio Girondo (two)
SEVILLIAN SKETCH
The sun leaves violet rings under the eaves of the houses, withers the skin of shirts left hanged in the middle of the street.
Windows with the lips and breath of a woman!
Dogs with ballerina hips pass by. Chulos in pants glistening with shoeshine. Nags that will lose their entrails in the bull ring on Sunday.
The patios sprout orange blossoms and fiancées!
A cloak caught on a wire grate flutters with the tense movements of a bat. A Zurbarán priest sells chasubles stolen from the sacristy to an antiquarian. Immoderate eyes that heal sores with a gaze.
The women have pores that open like little suckers and a temperature seven degrees above average.
Seville, March 1920
. . .
From Twenty Poems to be Read on a Streetcar (1922)
The piece can be read in Spanish here.
Girondo’s drawings & biography (and more translations)
can be found on his robust official website.
March 8, 2012
readings: Saer on Robert Walser
Earlier this week, The Quarterly Conversation published a piece I wrote about Juan José Saer (whose Scars, published in Steve Dolph’s translation by Open Letter Books, was nominated for a Best Translated Book Award this year), in which I mention a few barbs the author directed at the likes of Nabokov and Mario Vargas Llosa. It should be said, though, that Saer was equally keen in his appreciation of those he admired, like the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956). Walser, who has been a consistent presence in the literary limelight since the 1970s — most recently, thanks to Susan Bernofsky’s perfectly measured translation of his Berlin Stories — explored the expansiveness of the small in an oeuvre remarkable for, in the words of J.M. Coetzee, its “lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox.” Saer, for his part, hones in on Walser’s microscripts (a vast assortment of texts written in a miniscule hand during the author’s internment in the Waldau sanatorium), moving from the minutia of their physical aspect to their broader meaning as a miniature of the creative process.
Walser was in the habit of writing on pages taken from calendars (which he tended to cut in half), on the back of receipts, of fliers, of used envelopes. Often, new texts were written on the reverse side of a postcard, or even of the memorandum by which some journal or another informed him of the rejection of an earlier text he had sent in for publication. The one constant in his use of this medium (singular in that, in many cases, the length of the text corresponded to the size of the page almost to the millimeter) has led those who study Walser’s oeuvre to hypothesize that it was the type of paper and its dimensions that gave rise to the writing. [Werner] Morlang says: “We can point to an affinity between the materials and the practice of writing that inspired Walser and must have represented one of the greatest charms of his method. The frequent use of paper put within his reach by chance coincides with Walser’s poetic and ethical precept that any event, no matter how mundane or banal it might seem, is worthy of being the subject of poetry.”
Saer goes on to describe Walser’s reception among his “furtive, yet distinguished admirers” (to Benjamin, his prose was a “perversion of the language” that was “entirely accidental, but fascinating and appealing nonetheless,” while Musil saw it as “a human game, agile and harmonious, overflowing with imagination and freedom”). It’s the closing lines of the piece, though, that I wanted to reach with this; lines that, like all good criticism, have a bit of poetry to them.
The truth is, finding inspiration in the paper, in the place, in the table at which one writes is fairly common and generally accepted by the public. But what might generate resistance in this utilitarian and consequentialist world of ours is the assertion that a piece of paper destined for the trash bin has a more powerful energy to it than moral, philosophical, and social aesthetic imperatives, an energy absent in those imperatives and endowed with the unusual ability to generate a work of literature. The assertion that even the works most representative of the values of which a given culture is proud would not exist without the irrational dependence on a private stimulus that is totally irrelevant in the eyes of that culture, and which, because of this very irrelevance, presents itself as its negation. The assertion that this obvious particularity of Walser’s, which, given the nearly thirty years he spent locked away in a mental institution, many might be tempted to write off as dementia, is actually the model of all literary creation.
* * *
The full text of the essay can be found on the website of El País (in Spanish). The Microscripts (New Directions, 2010) and Berlin Stories (NYRB Classics, 2012), both in Susan Bernofsky’s translation, are available for sale by all the usual suspects.
February 24, 2012
a day in the life of an accidental writer
Words Without Borders (an invaluable resource for those interested in literature in translation) just put up a review I wrote of César Aira’s Varamo, “an effervescent morsel best devoured in one sitting, confected of a series of loosely related and generally madcap episodes, and laced with moments of surprising conceptual density.” (Do I quote myself? Very well, then I quote myself.) Here’s a snippet:
The poem at the heart of the novel is produced—spontaneously, accidentally—when our protagonist sits down to write something else: a treatise on his hobby and private passion, provisionally titled How To Embalm Small Mutant Animals. Advised not to be too fastidious about its composition, given that “immediacy is the key to a good style,” Varamo sets about assembling the work, fitting pieces together “in a purely cumulative fashion, without punctuation or divisions,” from the contents of his pocket at the end of the day. These include: notes on his trial-and-error taxidermy, a tally of winning and losing numbers played by his gambling-addicted mother, the key used to decipher communications between the members of a golf club smuggling ring, and the receipt for his mattress, which someone has turned into a menacing “poison-pen letter.”
I have to get back to work on something I’m putting together on Juan José Saer for The Quarterly Conversation, but check back in for a few notes on Aira’s The Seamstress and the Wind, also published by New Directions, and maybe, finally, on Carlos Fuentes’ Aura.
Read more:
http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/cesar-airas-varamo#ixzz1nJUDrypm
January 30, 2012
oh, Jonathan.
So, Jonathan Franzen held a press conference today. Though he might have been well served to hold off just a bit longer – at least until he shored up a few flaws in his logic. Speaking at the Hay, a British festival of the arts, he expressed some unsurprisingly conservative views about the long-term cultural dangers of e-books. Now, the author’s curmudgeonly tendencies are widely known and often quite well conceived (I’m thinking of his paean to the “distant pageantry of public life” in How to Be Alone, which I loved). But I think he misses the mark here, and by a wide margin.
The first of his dubious claims is that printed books somehow subvert the logic of consumerism through their “permanence,” both physical and aesthetic. In his words,
The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.
January 6, 2012
speed reading with Natasha Wimmer
Conversational Reading recently published an interview with Natasha Wimmer on her latest translation of Bolaño, The Third Reich (FSG 2011). Recommended. Not only does it offer insight into the inner workings of the novel (which, I’ll admit, I haven’t yet read), it also reminds us how articulate Wimmer is on the subject of translation. As anyone who’s translated knows, the experience of reading is markedly different from that of reading for pleasure – not that it’s any less pleasurable for it. It’s slower, but also more active (and, admittedly, more obsessive). Wimmer:
George Steiner says somewhere that translating is like loosening the weave of a fabric until you can see the light through it. He considers this to be a negative effect, but it’s something I must admit I enjoy. As a civilian reader, I tend to read too quickly, skimming over small tangled bits without even noticing, but as a translator I have to shine a light on every phrase and decipher what I think the author means, even if there’s no way to know for sure, and even if it happens to be a phrase that was obscure to the author himself. [...] The result is a text that is perhaps too brightly lit, but the experience of total illumination can be an exhilarating one for the translator.
December 30, 2011
readings: Aira on translation
“Faced with the alternative between becoming translators or alcoholic bums, some at least favored the first option.”
. . .
From Varamo by César Aira
trans. Chris Andrews
December 28, 2011
Abstraction, for Jesús Rafael Soto.
December 27, 2011
fallen, in the forest
Las acacias dir. Pablo Giorgelli (2011, 82′)
If ever a notion of writing formulated while drunk and likely brandishing a firearm sparked a radical change in the way stories are told, it would have to be Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory.’ In an interview with George Plimpton for The Paris Review, Hemingway describes his approach as a series of well-chosen omissions:
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
I haven’t seen or read anything in the past few years that puts this idea to better practice than Pablo Giorgelli’s exquisite first film, Las acacias (2011). The darling of festivals from Cannes (where it won the Caméra d’Or) to London’s BFI (Best First Film), via the eight or so others that named it their Best Picture, Las acacias has been garnering its well-deserved share of critical attention. Its plot is fairly straightforward: Rubén, who drives a truck for a man named Fernando, has been told to take a load of acacia wood and a woman named Jacinta across the Paraguayan border and into Buenos Aires. He does this, and the movie ends.
Of course, what is omitted from this summary is the stuff of the film itself. Like the fact that Jacinta shows up with her five-month-old daughter, and that Rubén nearly leaves them on the side of the road once they cross into Argentina. And then, of course, there is everything that goes unsaid yet is still vitally present; despite the sparsity of the dialogue, we come to know a remarkable amount about the film’s two central figures. Without any of this being explicitly conveyed, we know that Jacinta occasionally exercises poor judgement when it comes to men, and that Rubén has long since given up on mending his broken relationship with his son. We also know that he is starting to peg his last hope for happiness on a stranger and her baby.
