Accents, language, nationality

Posted on by Liz

I enjoyed being in Montreal, surrounded by people speaking French. It was good to be in another country.

I could understand a few words and the gist of a sentence, but only after a 10-second time delay where I tried to spell words in my head. I can stumble through a French newspaper article, or follow a poem along with its translation into Spanish or English, but the same words spoken aloud – they often don’t compute!

My own voice sounded harsh and unlovely in my ears, flat and strident, after a day or so listening to French and Spanish. It was embarrassing evidence that I am an uncouth U.S. American. I might as well have been saying “Gee! Gosh! I guess so! W’all, I’ll be!” and slapping my knee while twiddling a strand of hay between my teeth, right off the set of “Hee Haw”. We have a lot of reasons right now to be embarrassed to be USians. Suddenly I could not escape being identified with a category I find distasteful… any personal or subcultural identities I have were subsumed into national identity, and into stereotype.

On the street and on the Metro I played guessing games – who was going to speak French? Was it possible to tell by how people dressed? I think there were correlations, but I didn’t have enough experience to guess right.

Strangers generally spoke to me in French, and I learned to say “bon jour” and “bon soir” but then there’d have to be a switch to English or shrugging. I wondered if people were reading me as French-speaking, or if it is standard in the Downtown and Village Gai areas to start off with French either because of the population there or for political reasons. Here, if someone speaks Spanish to me, it is either because they don’t speak English or because they have “read” my race incorrectly.

In the Metro I overheard a tour guide – in English – explaining to a group that the west side of one of the islands, the English-speaking side, just seceded from Montreal and is now its own city.



Impressions of poems; depth of meaning

Posted on by Liz

My favorite readings from ALTA were translations of poems by Julio Martínez Mesanza and Luis Cernuda. Readers were often grouped by language or by country; I made an effort to go to the Spanish-language readings, especially if they were heavy on poetry and light on fiction.

Don Bogen translated Martínez Mesanza’s decasyllabic lines into blank verse, into deftly rolling yet dense & compact lines that lent dignity to the work. Listening with concentration and focus is difficult. Even if I achieve it, the words slip away from me and I’m left with only impressions. I need to see the poems on the page. Unfortunately I lost my notebook where I jotted down some of Bogen’s lines, but the originals are here:

Martinez Mensanza

His poems spoke of war: trenches, artillery, castles. knights, tapestries, goniometers; the language of war, of power and chaos, seemed doubly rooted in history and fantasy, catapulting the poem’s metaphors into philosophical musings applicable to anyone’s struggle in life.

I thought of the function of war, of battle, in poetry. Consider the symbolic and narrative value of combat in comic books or superhero stories. The battle is charged with meaning; the “action sequence” in a spy movie, in a western, when Wolverine fights his womanly arch-enemy and her razor claws, when Chow Yun-Fat and the gangster spray an endless hail of bullets around the church and he crawls blindly past his blind lover… Consider Arjuna’s struggle, his moment of choice and judgement before the Battle of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata. Combat, ultimately, is about that razor edge of consciousness, about decision using all possible information and experience.

Es poder una torre sobre rocas had a powerful impact. Maybe because I had just been working on a long poem about towers, or The Tower, what we think “tower” means; fictional towers of all kinds, tarot cards, the tower of babel, the Two Towers; and the tower’s antidote, the rhizome. Something about the ephemeral quality of hearing, and my own bad memory, makes poetry hook unexpectedly into my own thought trains; on some level, I stop listening, I phase in and out of focus on the heard poem. This imperfection of understanding is productive. Later there is time enough to read the poem on the page and grasp it fully.

In fact, I don’t like a poem that is simple enough to grasp fully on one hearing. How dull, how disappointing, how very like a sound bite! For example, the poem by the Bulgarian poet, who was certainly a nice guy and a sensitive poet, and perhaps a translator himself. But the very poem that listeners in two audiences sighed over, in appreciation and perhaps in relief that it could be understood, I found to be one of the worst I heard all weekend. It was quite short, and had something like this: “God is a child/making sand castles/ and doesn’t understand/that he can control the waves…” I am a fan of the short poem as a form, but if it’s short, it had better have some good thick ideas jam-packed into it, especially if it’s one image and one metaphor. Songs don’t have to be that simple. A poem you can understand completely in one hearing is poor food for poet’s souls.

I forgot to talk about Cernuda, but I’ll do that in the next post.



Fired up about translation; Comparative Literature and translation

Posted on by Liz

After the ALTA conference I’m all fired up about translation. In the next few days I’ll be writing up my notes from the panels, hallway conversations, lunch dates, and bilingual readings.

I bounced around the conference spreading lots of ideas. One thing I love about ALTA is that it’s not just for professional academics. Because it’s so hard to make a living being a literary translator in the U.S., everyone has a day job. There’s courtroom interpreters, surgeons, and high school foriegn-language teachers, heck, elementary school teachers. People’s jobs tend to be in teaching, publishing, editing, or – like me – housewifing. Those mavericks do great work, and they get a lot of respect from the academics, who also tend to be the red-headed stepchildren of their departments; foreign language, Comp Lit, English, Composition, Creative Writing – none of them are quite the right fit and your translation might not be quite respectable, might not count so much towards your tenure. Of course there are execptions, and some people are lucky enough to be in one of the rare universities with a Translation Studies program.

Comparative Literature is the logical home for translators in academia. It’s already cross-disciplinary. It’s theory-heavy right now, and could use a little course correction, a little practical connection with the world. Translation, at least of living languages and authors, maintains a direct connection with literary communities. Take a look at the book Comparative Literature in an Age of Multiculturalism. It’s a collection of short essays on Comp Lit, including a report on the state of the discipline from the 60s, 70s, and one from the 90s. (The 80s one is missing, because the Culture Wars were so intense.) If you look at the drafts of new American Comparative Literature Association essays available here: ACLA drafts that translation is being “noticed” more by Comp Lit. Maybe a shift in the discipline is happening, or should be happening. What does this mean for Comp Lit departments?

Comparative literature students and profs would benefit from learning more translation theory, and from doing translations. Translation theory and literary translators would benefit from thinking of their work as essentially comparative. What does that mean? As far as I understand it, it means keeping many factors in mind at the same time while doing your translation: your own subjectivity, the gaps in your knowledge, the depth or shallowness of your knowledge of other cultures and contexts. Seemingly unrelated areas of knowing can factor into a translation; though you’re translating an Argentinian short story from 1920, your knowledge of Icelandic history or the Tale of Genji, as a comparatist, is going to deepen the work. Putting translation into Comp Lit as a discipline would revitalize Comp Lit, and would acknowledge the way that translation is a creative, critical, literary, and political act.



Fear of disillusion; a point to poetry

Posted on by Liz

I felt a moment’s temptation to try and go see Mary Oliver. But what if she’s a twit? It was rather upsetting when I went to hear Margaret Atwood, though we’re all ambivalent about her these days for being a snotwad about science fiction some of the time, I still have my admirations… and she was cool, but came off as oddly stuckup for someone who is so boasty about growing up in the backwoods.

Anyway I have this nightmare-universe vision suddenly of Oliver being so eastcoast and upperclass that I will want to scream no matter how much i like her poetry. It’s so unfair to say this; I know nothing about her!

Considering imitations. People who try to write like Oliver, they bother me more than people who try to write like Ginsberg. Why is that? Certain literary styles that are good in the original but when the emulators spring up, it makes it all seem cheap.

And I imitate her too including the yuppie moments of aetheticization and thoreau-like musing combined and the neat little wrap-up at the end. Sometimes I write that kind of poem and then I’m disgusted with myself. And then i know someone will publish it somewhere because it is easy to grok. It’s simple and digestible. And then I feel dirty, a lowdown rotten dirty liar, because my moment of aestheticizing nature is essentially false given the way I live, in an urban/suburban environment, so that it’s like this blinder-vision where I’m staring as if hypnotized at a tree or an acorn or a star, when all around me are streets and houses, bags of cheetos, paperclips, trashcans, dinner tables, people going to work. If I were actually living out in the woods like Thoreau it would seem more intellectually honest to write about the tree like it were the most important thing in my world. (Though I read all about how Thoreau’s mom or aunt or someone would come and clean his house and bring him his dinner so he could loll about the trails gazing at groundhogs — so he’s rather bogus himself.)

This is not at all a new thought for me; I became obsessed with it when I was about 16 and I set out to try to aestheticize everything and ended up with a lot of that sort of poetry that exalts paperclips and trashcans to positions of tawdry glory. At that age I was filled with a lot of wild determinations like, “I’m going to combine Art and Science in a way heretofore never seen in the history of the entire world!”

And later I tried to feel a spiritual & poetic bond while musing on the nature of the artificial, the spirit of manufactured objects and mass production. I can get in that mode where an empty milk carton is a tragic miracle! The effort required to make it, its moldedness, its nearly severed connection with the things used to make it and with people. But central nature-y things come up, or one is just too conditioned to go around “feeling poetic” when the moon is up, or when gazing at the ocean with no pressure to go anywhere, and the moon and stars become poetic archetypes, part of a pantheon of symbology, and the trashcans, paperclips, urbanness, etc. are harder to internalize. And then one doubts completely whether the aestheticization of everything is a good idea at all! If we accept that poetic musing as part of the process of art or the point of art, then we’re lost to poltitical awareness.

So, back to the small precious illusions about other poets: Part of the reason I can believe in Marge Piercy’s poems is that I believe in the picture of her I have constructed, that she spends a lot of time in her garden, that she has a huge real-life commitment to composting her lettuce beds. I imagine her recycling everything, and wearing only all-cotton tunic-dresses made by non-sweatshop labor, and you know, the salty Cape Cod wind blowing in her hair. And it kinda ruins it when I imagine her going to K-mart and buying some socks, tampax, and a bag of cheetos and going home to eat the cheetos, grumpily pop some Midol, and watch Tivo-ed episode of “Cops” until she falls asleep in front of the TV, even though surely that or its Marge Piercy equivalent must happen. How unfair that my romantic myth of the poet should interfere with the poetry itself! And that the poetry should construct this unrealistic wind-blown portrait of the poet! Is that really necessary? I don’t think it’s right!

At poetry readings, part of what we like about them as poets — I’m thinking of Waverley Writers here, or some other small “page poet” readings around the Bay Area — is that we see evidence of other people who seem like regular cheeto-consuming people, confessing to those moments of tender aestheticization, of romanticizing some aspect of the world. And that makes them vulnerable, I think, and we mutually recognize the vulnerability of “being like that” and walking around in a sort of fog where we attach our attention to some object– or situation –and stuff all this meaning into it. We’re a little embarrassed. And yet we love it – and admire it when other people do it, no matter how it may seem to the rest of the world like pointless navel-gazing wankery.



Poetry readings and what they mean

Posted on by Liz

When you read a book of poems, you know that someone else has likely read that book, so on one level you become a member of a community of people who have read it and developed a response to it. But you don’t have much awareness of that community. Your membership is not active or visible.

For an example of readerly membership, consider old-fashioned library cards. When I was in grade school, I’d check a book out by signing my name on a lined index card that was in the front of the book. The librarian would take the card and date stamp it. I could see on the card in the book a list of everyone else who had read the book before me. I could make myself known to them, and I’d be known as a reader of that book by anyone who read it after me or who had the impulse to look at the card. In this way I became aware of other kids who shared my reading tastes, my interests; as meta-information one level removed I became aware that two or three other kids in the school read as much and as widely as I did.

A poetry reading or spoken word event creates a visible literary community. The sharing of information is visible. You know who’s heard what you’ve heard. Even if you don’t say anything, by attending the event you become engaged in public discourse, or potentially engaged.

In blogging communities, the visibility of readership creates strong reading communities. For example, I feel a kinship of shared knowledge with someone who has been a regular commenter on a blog that we both read. I can see not only that they read it, and not only the tenor of their responses, but a glimpse of their level of engagement with the text. I may not know their own blog or their work, but I have a textual relationship with that fellow commenter.

Wanting a lot of people to come to your reading goes way beyond wanting to feel a diva-like popularity. When people come to a reading, their presence magnifies the importance of the event in each others’ eyes, because they personally become visible to a larger literary community. They have an opportunity to make connections with other listeners and to have conversations about the work. Events with only 6 people attending can be powerful too, if those 6 people respond strongly and put their information visibily into the mix. If they all go off and write reviews of the event, or poems in response to what they heard, or have a blog discussion the next day, then an event of literary importance has probably occurred.

In literature as it is treated in the literary-academic world, there are authors, readers/listeners, and critics. The categories overlap. It’s particularly powerful when we see their strong overlap, for example when poets write poetry about other poets’ poems, or when a novel has complex intertextual relationships. When this happens, we as readers realize we have a relationship to the text that is potentially creative and critical. In addition, the subjectivity of the critic is strongly exposed. We also as readers can now see something of the internal library, or the blogroll, the information feed, of the author. As a reader and critic, I want to know the information feed of whoever I’m reading.

I take notes at readings and think about what I’m hearing, about patterns and fashions in poetry. It’s difficult to write frankly about what’s good and bad in other people’s writing without being offensive or hurting people. I’m hoping I can strike a balance: focus on the positive without pulling my punches. I’d like to practice exercising judgement and drawing other people into critical thinking about poetry and translation.

Here’s a list of some of the readings and open mics that I have been going to over the last 5 years in the Bay Area:

Waverly Writers, in Palo Alto
Art 21, also in Palo Alto
Writers With Drinks, San Francisco
Kvetsh, San Francisco
Edinburgh Castle, San Francisco
The Saturday Poets, in Burlingame
San José Art League, in the Minor Street house around 2000-2002
Willow Glen Books, San José
Poetry Center San José
Redwood City Not Dead Yet Poets’ Society
Various reading at City Lights, Modern Times, Valencia St. Books, Chimera, Kepler’s, & other bookstores.

I hope I can expand this list and take a peek into other readings, other scenes that have their own particular thing going. I recently wrote an article for a book on the Waverley Poets on this specific subject: the academic/literary page poets and the spoken word poets don’t have a context for judging each others’ works, because they don’t know each others’ information feeds.

I’d like to get some of the people in different scenes around the Bay Area reading or listening to each other, and looking for each others’ ways of being intertextual and literary.



Textual and imaginary worlds

Posted on by Liz

I think of books and literature as texts, as information. Texts interconnect with other texts and exist as parts of dynamic systems of reading, interpretation, rewriting, and references. People have relationships with each other, and with objects, and I would argue that their relationships with literary texts fall somewhere in between, because texts carry more complexity than, say, a car or a hammer.

The judgement of literary quality has something to learn from the web’s management and judgement of textual information. Context is important. Who is reading is important. Relevence to a specific need, query, person, or community is important.



Bookmania reviews, Dec. 1996

Posted on by Liz
Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fu

A slacker from long ago….

Chinese poetry

Damn it, what was that book called… ugh! A cool book of literary criticism type rambling about Chinese poetry. Cool stuff about a poem’s “chi”.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carre

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carre (rr)

A Small Town in Germany, John Le Carre

The Book of Mars, NASA, circa 1960

Not a book to read all the way through, but the section on the possibility of life on Mars, and contamination of the Earth by virulent Martian plagues, was rich. It’s nice to know our government has some imagination…

Bookmania reviews, Nov. 1996

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The Deep and Beasts, John Crowley.

The Deep haunted me by sounding awfully like it was taken from some real historical incident. Great for the moment when they come to the edge of the world… mind twisting… and Beasts is really beautiful literature. The leos are good but Reynard the genetically engineered fox-man kicks ass… I am even more reconciled to the fantasy genre than I was last month reading M. John Harrison. _Engine Summer_ is the last novella in the book, and I’m saving it for dessert some other day.

The Sea Wolf, Jack London.

More manly men doing manly things. Violent sailors beating each other to pulp and whetting their knives, in between bouts of philosophy and seal-clubbing.The philosophical conflicts are between the optimistic, upperclass, Humprhrey “Sissy” Van Weyden and the natural anarchist, Wolf Larsen. But this scary testosterone roller coaster was unfortunately cut short and a lame-ass love story creeps in. Maud Brewster was particularly interesting to me because she is robust enough to survive long journeys in open boats, but she gets exhausted whenever she exerts herself and lies down on the floor for a few minutes… sounds less like corset-induced faintness and more like… fibromyalgia! The best moment in the book for laughing hysterically is when Van Weyden, as cabin boy, comes across Wolf Larsen naked, and breathlessly describes his manly perfection. What else can you expect from someone named “Hump”?!

Knights Castle, Edward Eager

Excellent E.Nesbit-ish book of kids being magically whisked away to the land of Ivanhoe, castles, sieges, and giants. I liked how Eliza was described as being like an insane battle goddess, and she was completely unruffled by having hacked several knights to pieces, while her brother was grossed out by it.

Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture, Somers Clark & R. Engelbach.

A really, really boring book. Analysis of the patterns made by copper chisels on blocks of stone, 3000 years ago. It had beautiful illustrations of obelisks, pyramids, quarries, and Egyptian boats. As I chipped away at a frozen block of hash browns that evening, I was imagining that I was in a limestone quarry with a bunch of sweaty men in white sarongs. What can I say– boring books add to my rich fantasy life.

Hellcats of the Sea.

WWII propaganda about submarines and sonar detection of mine fields in the Sea of Japan. Written by some Navy guy who backed sonar when it was a new and unproven technology.

Brave Men, Ernie Pyle.

More WWII propaganda. Pyle was apparently a well known war correspondant. Endless, emotional stories of hanging out in the trenches with Joe Blow of Cleveland, Ohio, who owns a filling station back home and has only seen his infant daughter once while he is on leave. The invasion of Sicily was the most interesting bit. It seemed very impressively organized…I liked the description of quickly repairing blown-up bridges.

The Mark of Conte, Sonia Levitin. (rr)

A classic! Conte Mark exploits a computer error, bureaucratic sluggishness, and teacher stupidity to get double the credit for his high school classes. The book that inspired me to graduate early from high school.

The Secret Language, Ursula Nordstrom. (rr)

Two boarding school girls become best friends. Their oddly different temperaments go well together… Martha is bold and tomboyish, Victoria is shy and imaginative. Leebossa! Or, lee-lee-leebossa!

The Complete Jack the Ripper.

Complete with gruesome photos. Why, why, why do I read books like this. Why did I ever read that Hannibal Lecter book? I knew it would give me the creeping heebie-jeebies late at night. Well, same with this. Don’t read it! Yuck!!!

Bookmania reviews, Oct 1996

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The Mummy!, Jane Webb Loudon

“In the year 2126, England enjoyed peace and tranquility under the absolute dominion of a female sovereign.” Not such a surprising first sentence for a science fiction novel, until you realize that Webb wrote _The Mummy!_ in 1827. Her vision of technological progress knocks me out: everything is steam powered, women wear big hats with fantastic, lit-up neon tubes instead of ostrich feathers, weather control increases crop productivity, passengers on trans-continental aerial balloon flights sleep on comfy air mattresses. But for some wacky reason, women still can’t vote!

Space of Her Own, edited by Shawna McCarthy (Asimov series, 1983)

Excellent collection of science fiction short stories by women. All excellent. The one that struck me most was “Belling Martha” by Leigh Kennedy. Gritty post-disaster, widespread cannibalism, outside of the walled city of Austin, Texas. Martha is sort of a feral teenager (if she is even supposed to be that old- it wasn’t clear). Breaks all the usual conventions of this genre- epecially as the teenage boy babbles on to Martha about his visionary belief in technology, and she is just looking at his arm muscles and thinking how MEATY they are. Yum!

Farrier’s Lane, Anne Perry.

Another mystery novel. Unremarkable, except that it holds up the usual good quality of Perry’s stories and characters.

The Best of C.L. (Catharine) Moore

Lurid, Lovecraft-ish science fiction with a sexy horror twist. Trashy and fun…. Midwest Henry was just another tough geek, haunting the dingy streets of the net. Little did she know, before she cracked the spine of this book, of the unspeakable pleasures and torments that lurked within, the nameless being that would thirst to drag her soul into the black depths of a vortex of madness from a dimension too terrible for any human to bear!

Other Nature, Stephanie A. Smith

More post disaster science fiction. Builds slowly & becomes almost unbearably intense. It’s bleak, and there are interesting gender-related tensions, but not dystopian… What I mean is, the pressures of decaying civilization don’t divide people along gender lines as in books like _The Gate to Women’s Country_, or _Walk to the End of the World_. Instead it is closer to Von Scyoc.. the fear of mutant children underlies everything. I have a longer review of this book which I’m posting on the Fem. SF pages soon. A book worth buying in hardback; gorgeous writing, hard to sum up in a paragraph.

In Viriconium, M. John Harrison

Vivid mythic characters and even more vivid sense of place, of the streets and cafes and apartments of the city of Viriconium. Incredibly compact and beautiful writing. I am saying beautiful, but really the scenes that stick with me are the most grotesque. This goes on the Golden Bookshelf of fantasy literature…

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

Another fun mystery novel. Heavier on the obviously autobiographical feminist introspection than any of her other books I’ve read so far. She, Lord Peter, and the rest of the characters, are more fleshed out, more real. Coincidentally, I recently read Sayers’ translation of The Song of Roland.

Have His Carcass, Five Red Herrings, Strange Poison, all by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter Wimsey is completely uninteresting, until the later books when Harriet Vane appears. They’re good mysteries, but the timetables and alibis, especially in Five Red Herrings, made my eyes water with their hideous complexity.

Desert Peach series Donna Barr

The fictional and goofy adventures of Pfirsch, Rommel’s queer younger brother. Interesting to find a comic book that makes you sympathize with Nazi soldiers. We so very automatically think Nazi=bad guy, but when you think about it, your average soldier in the desert was miserable and clueless like any other soldier… I don’t know how accurate Barr’s research is but she seems to know what she’s talking about. The ways that the British and German soldiers interact in these stories remind me of Bruce Catton’s descriptions of Union and Confederate soldiers, calling unofficial truces and fishing from opposite sides of the same stream.

Immigrant Song, Colleen Doran

Another graphic novel. Has promise of interesting things to come, but so far, it seems like a standard “telepathic kids who escape from evil scientists” story. In short, good but not Fabulous.

The Sandman series Neil Gaiman

Fabulous graphic novels/comic books. I should put some links here….

Charlegmagne and His World, Friedrich Heer

Unremarkable history book, with lots of pictures of nifty Carolingian artifacts.

Souls, Joanna Russ rr

A somewhat disturbing science fiction novella: the story of Radegunde, prioress of a medieval nunnery, and a Viking invasion.

Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

Techniques of Criminal Investigation

A dry and boring textbook. Good sections on interrogations, playing good cop / bad cop, how to investigate burglaries, explosions, and homocide. Why am I reading this? Because I got it for free, because I’m twisted, because it might be useful for writing mystery stories or playing detective characters in role-playing games, I guess.