Latin American Literature

[nnyhav]

more on or by edith:
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/adeste-fideles/
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/1649/the_fault_is_mine/

[madupont]

nnyhav,

"The second piece of invaluable assistance came from an old friend, the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, who sent me a photocopy of a dictionary he had found in Holland when he was a diplomat there: a seventeenth-century Spanish-English dictionary first published by a certain gentleman named Percivale,...The dictionary was immensely helpful at those dreadful times when a word was not to be found in María Moliner, or in the dictionary of the Real Academia, or in Simon and Schuster, Larousse, Collins, or ...I was fascinated to realize how constant and steady Spanish has remained over the centuries (as compared with English, for example), which meant that I could often use contemporary wordbooks to help shed light on a seventeenth-century text."

                    (That began to dawn on me in high-school; but the teacher was less enthusiastic.)

"On occasion, at a certain point in the translation of a book...when I can begin to imagine that the author and I have started to speak together.... In those instances it seems as if I can hear the author’s voice in my mind speaking in Spanish at the same time that I manage to find a way ... The experience is exhilarating, symbiotic, certainly metaphorical, and absolutely crucial if I am to do what I am supposed to do—somehow get into the author’s head and behind the author’s eyes... the writer’s linguistic perceptions of the world.
And here I must repeat Ralph Manheim’s observation comparing the translator to an actor who speaks as the author would if the author could speak English. A difficult role...."

(It was not entirely coincidence to find my first textbook entitled, El Camino Real; a title of a play that Tennessee Williams had brought to Broadway.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_Real_(play    By which time, I had been to New Orleans and discovered the route of the Streetcar Named Desire, so that I was ready to begin my acting career in the local community theater, the year that  Camino Real appeared on Broadway. In the following years, I could work with a second(or third) director in summer stock by starting out as prompter with the script of Streetcar in my hands.

What my Spanish teacher had not been enthused about was this: Jeronimo Bermudez, Alvaro Cubillo de Aragon, Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega "the dweller in the meadow", Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza, Pedro Calderone de la Barca, Juan del Encina, Juan Bautista Diamante.)

"For instance, the ballads or romances cited so frequently in Don Quixote by the characters and by Cervantes himself in the guise of the narrator were common knowledge at the time, familiar to everyone in Spain, including the illiterate. For a modern reader, however, especially one who reads the book in translation or is not conversant with the rich Spanish ballad tradition, the romances are unfamiliar, perhaps exotic, even though they are utterly unproblematic in the intention and structure of the novel. The same is true of allusions to figures and events from the history of Spain—not obscure in and of themselves, but probably not known to most modern readers of Don Quixote, regardless of the language in which they read it. For instance, in the course of the novel, Cervantes mentions well-known underworld haunts, famous battle sites and fortresses in North Africa and Europe, popular authors and major military figures of the sixteenth century. These were the kinds of references that I did my best to explain in the notes."

(And here is the piece de resistance, from a reader who posts: Ardon Gador | April 1, 2010 10:34 AM | Reply" As I am neither translator or man of letters, nor am I fluent in Spanish, I hesitantly suggest another tool that might shed light on Cervantes language, and this is the Judeo-Espanol, or Ladino,still spoken by descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and - as I am told - has retained many elements of the fifteenth century Castillian. I was told by a young lady that whenever she, as a high school student in Argentina, encountered an obscure word, her grandmother, fluent in Ladino, would explain it off hand."

I was fortunate enough to meet and make the acquaintance of a friend of a friend,with those origins, who helped me out at a low point when I was stuck in the country without a typewriter, receiving the low wages of an agricultural laborer(in other words, we picked more food than we could buy with our pay for doing so, in the early 1980s, hardly an equivalent exchange but that was in, what I called, East Lake Woebegone. Surreptitiously, she came up with a typewriter, just like that ! )

[madupont]

 " (Grossman, though, puts a rather uniquely contractual spin on the matter: “a mindless, literalist translation would constitute a serious breach of contract. There isn’t a self-respecting publisher in the world who would not reject a manuscript framed in this way. It is not acceptable, readable, or faithful, as the letters of agreement demand, though it certainly may have its own perverse originality”)"

For a considerable period of time, I've witnessed a poster unfamiliar with Romance languages or any others contributing translations of literature following the poster's discovery of where you will be babbled a translation of sorts.

I used to find on the other hand if you had read quite a lot of translation from a particular language, in  particular a language with which one has some cultural familiarity, over the years you find it not altogether difficult to comprehend what the translator has been about deciphering. Having started with Sigmund Freud in my mid-twenties, Marcuse was somewhat less difficult in my thirties.  I think this happens when you have heard a lot of German speakers in their attempts to better express themselves in English.

But when this became heavy-lifting and you needed a respite, Nabokov was such a relief in where his mind took you by the facility of his connections.

"Grossman’s chatty, combative proselytizing may, we can hope, have more success, since overcoming discomforts with translation will make for a public with a greater ability to think intelligently about questions of authorship in all areas of literature."        In other words copyright.

Thus, it is not so odd to notice that a reader who has difficulty about obtaining a translation and digesting the content but has to resort to an immediate literalist approximation to prove that the reader understands the stuff, then will also not comprehend that actual authorship involves a publication copyright . They will purloin your work in an instant for their own purposes, unaware of the eventual consequences.

This was kicked around fairly recently at Salon by people, three-quarters of whom, did not see what was dishonest about running with your work.   One school of thought is that a change of consciousness has taken place because of the new swifter modes of communication which has changed the amount of reading which they can take in. The other school says it is a generation gap that does not see anything wrong with co-opting stuff.

It turns out the first group is a bad example to their less intelligent associates who literally do not know about laws against libel, in association with the appropriation of sources of material not theirs to use.

[nnyhav]

I'd previously posted on Fiction a way below average Bolaño short:
http://forums.escapefromelba.com/index.php/topic,34.msg189576.html#msg189576
latest NYer, otherwise above average, has a merely mediocre one:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/04/19/100419fi_fiction_bolano
looks as if Last Evenings on Earth was the cream of the crop as far as shorts go ...

[madupont]

I started reading the current Bolano at TNY last night but not really in a hurry to continue finishing it.  It seems somehow out of place for their usual picks.

[martinbeck3]

Saramago has died.I cannot but remember all of you,my friends and the great times we had reading this Master of Literature.

I hope you are all well. At present I am opening a third floor in my outlet so I am really busy.

[nnyhav]

Hail & farewell, then, to our honorary Latin American, by way of his stone raft ...

[S2B]

I came here to 'see' you all when I heard the news that Saramago has died  :'( and to think back to the fabulous reading/discussion we had with his "Baltasar and Blimunda" ... I feel there has been an irreparable rip in the paper of the literary world today ... and I remember that our own MRingle had an interview with him last (?) year...

"We lack reflection, thinking, we need the labor of thinking," Saramago said, "and it seems to me that, out of ideas, we are not going anywhere."

May he enjoy reflecting with the others who have gone on before.  Blessings to his widow and family.

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a type of library." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

[pugetopolis]

Pilar del Rio

“If I’d died before I met you, Pilar,
I’d have died feeling much older.”
—José Saramago

pilar del rio—serves coffee
in demitasses—she’s elegant
from seville—saramago’s second wife
nearly 30 years—younger than him
she meets him—in the mid-’80s
lecturing—in lisbon…
“blimunda”—del rio’s e-mail avatar
from baltasar—blimunda
a novel…

[martinbeck3]

If you  can read in Portuguese, Spanish will do as well ,this is
Saramago' s blog.I think he will still be writing in it.
Stranger things have happened in his lit.

http://www.josesaramago.org/

[martinbeck3]

This is what Saramago wrote when Uruguayan poet Mario de Benedetti died last year:
"el planeta se hizo pequeño para albergar la emoción de las personas".
(my free and awful trans:"the planet is now smaller to house the emotions of people"). Now it is true about him.

Nnyhv: why "stone"?

 


 

[nnyhav]

MB3, The Stone Raft (A Jangada de Pedra)  is one of his novels I haven't gotten to yet, but the premise (Iberia breaking off into the Atlantic) seemed consistent with life (in the Canaries) and death (hailing Charon). Though perhaps not a headstone:

The [Jose Saramago Foundation] said the novelist's body will be cremated at Lisbon's Alto de Sao Joao cemetery at noon on Sunday, after which his ashes will be divided.

Half will be taken to his native village of Azinhaga and the rest will be placed at the foot of an olive tree in the garden of his Lanzarote home, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.

and they flew him in to lie in state in Lisbon ...

[pugetopolis]

The Cellist
—for José Saramago

There are few things—I don’t know about you
You want me to tell you?—the woman asked
Oh please—not that absurdity again
The cellist said—bordering on despair
It was just a rehearsal—I’m no maestro
I’m not Rostropovich—I’m just a cellist
I’m not—Johann Sebastian Bach either
It’s late at night—I’m just a lonely man
Surrounded by—books, scores, compositions
They went into the bedroom—got undressed
What was written—finally happened again
And again and again—until he fell asleep
The violet-colored letter—smoldered
Then it went up in flames—leaving two lovers
She who never slept—slept deep beside him
And the following day—nobody died

[pugetopolis]

June 21, 2010, 11:45 am

In Portugal, Saramago’s Funeral Draws 20,000 Mourners, But Not the President

By DAVE ITZKOFF

President Anibal Cavaco Silva of Portugal defended his decision not to attend the funeral of the author José Saramago, saying he had never known Mr. Saramago during his lifetime, BBC News reported.

Mr. Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, had left his native Portugal in 1992 after the Roman Catholic Church pressured the Portuguese government into disqualifying his novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” from contention for the European Literary Prize. Mr. Saramago went into self-imposed exile in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, where he died on Friday of multiple organ failure after a long illness.

Ah yes, politics and poetry. It takes two to tango, I suppose.

[nnyhav]

Something elseforum I'll bring in here: I recently finished José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night, a monstrous unrelenting shifty labyrinthine pile. For me, as significant a find as Roa Bastos' I the Supreme, no, more. How'd I miss out on this? I came a little late to the Boom, but these guys seemed even then to be eclipsed by the headliners, tucked away in back pages (even now kirjasto.sci.fi doesn't seem to have a page on Donoso).

The narrator is the son of a poor railway worker, just as Pablo Neruda was ... it's tempting to see the novel as commenting of relative places of prose and poetry in Chilean lit, but it probly shows just how little I know ...

see also A Small Biography of The Obscene Bird of Night (Donoso in RCF, Fall '99), which concludes:

Very seldom does a country or a community, less a continent, find its own contemporary voice. And when it does it is a wonderful choir that does not last for a very long time. One such occasion was Mexican mural painting in the 1920s and 1930s: murals were the country's voice for a while, and then it was all over. Or Spanish lyrical poetry in the 1920s, when Lorca and Alberti and Cernuda and Hernandez were all writing, and Pablo Neruda was the Spanish American poet in residence: lyrical poetry cast a shade onto almost all of the rest of artistic undertaking of that period.
So it is with the Latin American novel of the 1960s and 1970s. Our poetry, by comparison, is puny, and a whole continent, in its many forms and nationalities, seemed to have expressed itself, at the same time, in the same form, and made it, par excellence, the metaphor for that continent. I have said time and again that I do not subscribe to a social interpretation of literature, much less of what I have written. But, with time, I have grown not to dislike its possibility. Now, it seems to me, with age, I have acquired a degree of humility which makes me accept the possibility that, on one level, my voice is more meaningful than alone when heard in a choir.