Category: quotation/excerpt

on books and reading

(from Zama, the Governor questions a clerk in his office.)

What are you writing?…A book?  Make sons, Manuel, not books… then the clerk, in a respectful tone, deeply convinced of his own words, said “I want to realize myself in myself.  I don’t know what my children will be like.”  The governor hesitated…”Books? Ha, Ha!  Worse than children.” …(Manuel) managed to say, “Children realize themselves, but whether for good or ill we do not know.  Books are made only for truth and beauty.”  “That’s what you believe, what authors believe, but readers don’t see it like that,” came the ready retort.       Antonio di Benedetto

 

…like no other human creation, books have been the bane of dictatorships…the history of reading is lit by a seemingly endless line of censors’ bonfires.       Alberto Manguel

 

One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.                                            Joseph Conrad

 

 

Two poems by Li Bai

From historical sources, myths and stories, and the poetry of Li Bai and his contemporaries, Ha Jin conjures a vivid personality in a richly detailed world a millennium past.  The Banished Immortal, A Life of Li Bai draws us into the life of an extraordinary artist in the turbulent middle years of the Tang Dynasty.  Li Bai never achieved the official recognition that he sought but his poetry was widely admired and loved.  The nickname “the banished immortal” suggests it is so excellent that he must be a heavenly personage, banished to earth for some misdeed.

This short poem was chosen for the UN stamp set commemorating World Poetry Day.

Reflection In A Quiet Night

Moonlight spreads before my bed.

I wonder if it’s hoarfrost on the ground.

I raise my head to watch the moon

and lowering it, I think of home.

Another poem written for his uncle, a conscientious low-ranking official discouraged by court corruption.

Song For Accompanying Uncle Hua on Xie Tiao’s Tower

Yesterday, having left me, couldn’t be pressed to stay.  

Today, still disturbing me, makes me more upset.

The long wind is sending the autumn geese far away,

And viewing them from this high tower, we should drink more.

Your essays are fresh and strong like those of the Han dynasty

While my poetry resembles Xie Tiao’s in vigor and beauty.

We both have lofty spirit, thinking of soaring

To the sky to grab hold of the clear moon.

I draw my sword to cut water, which won’t stop flowing,

And I raise my cup to douse my sorrow, which grows stronger.

Ah, life is such a sad thing that tomorrow

I will undo my hair and sail away in a little boat.

                                                 

 

Is That A Fish In Your Ear?

David Bellos subtitled his book “Translation and the Meaning of Everything” and meant it.  It’s a brisk, occasionally head-spinning, always interesting survey of the nature of Language as the tool of human expression and communication and of the inherent challenges of understanding each other across the boundaries of particular languages.

I can’t say for certain that it was the first work in translation that I read, but I distinctly remember one Saturday morning pausing in my assigned chores to pull The Three Musketeers from the family bookcase – just to see what it was like –  and losing myself for hours in the thrilling world of Dumas.  I did have to finish the dusting, but the world had suddenly become larger, more glamorous and variable than I had known.

As I’ve continued to read the literature and watch movies/tv from as many countries as I can, the work of translation has become interesting in itself.  An early awakening to the difficulties of that work came with my discovery of Hong Kong movies, whose subtitles in the early years were rendered into astonishingly poor English.  My book group years ago read Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo and found ourselves more than usually divided in opinion.  In discussion we realized that members had read two different translations.  We definitely preferred one over the other but had to wonder if one was “truer” to the source or if you can even evaluate that.  I recently read a delightful book One Hundred Frogs by Hiroaki Sato in which he compiles more than a hundred translations of the poem Old Pond by the haiku poet Basho.  It reminded me that language always carries multiple meanings.  The translator tries to carry as much of that multiplicity into the new language as possible.

There are more than five thousand languages in use today, certainly more “major” ones than anyone can master.  Even linguists depend on translation.  So what is it? how is it done? what makes a “good” translation?  And more questions, what is language? how does one differ from another? what kinds of meanings are carried in structure? even, what is wordness?  Bellos explores these and many more with a wealth of historical anecdotes and contemporary statistics.

A particularly interesting chapter discusses the different structural qualities of languages and their implications for thinking and expression.  These create what the linguist Edward Sapir called mind grooves or habitual patterns of thought.  But this doesn’t mean that the meaning of one language cannot be expressed in another or that a language is “primitive” if structured differently from ones own.

Different languages, because they are structured in different ways, make their speakers pay attention to different aspects of the world.

The mind grooves laid down by the forms of a language are not prison walls but the hills and valleys of a mental landscape where some paths are easier to follow than others. 

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can.  The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

 

Zama

The opening of Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto  translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

       I left the city and made my way downriver alone, to meet the ship I awaited without knowing when it would come.                                                                                                             

     I reached the old wharf, that inexplicable structure.  The city and its harbor have always been where they are, a quarter-league farther upriver.                                                                  

     I observed, among its pilings, the writhing patch of water that ebbs between them.

              A dead monkey, still whole, still undecomposed, drifted back and forth with a certain precision upon those ripples and eddies without exit.  All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse.  The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going.  And there we were.                                                                                                                                        

There we were: Ready to go and not going.

In a nightmare/vision Zama sees horses in the street trample a small girl.

I withdrew.  My boots dragged in the dirt; I could not lift my feet.  Had my arms been longer, my fingernails, too, would have been encrusted with red earth…I know nothing more.  Night, my benefactress, came to my tired body.

Later, Zama goes with a military detachment into the jungle.

The sun was a dog with a hot, dry tongue that licked and licked me until it woke me up.

 

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring:  it all begins again with him.”

This is a wonderful sentence and wonderfully reassuring to an attentive, eager, self-educated reader of novels, i.e. myself, seeking to enrich her appreciation of fiction.  Wood proves himself an excellent guide, knowledgeable and witty, widely read and articulate in analysis.  He asks a critic’s questions – is realism real, how does point of view work, why do we love to read? – and offers answers from his work as a writer and a lifetime of reading.

Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial.  It is lifelike because detail really does hit us…in a tattoo of randomness….The artifice lies in the selection of detail.  In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras.  We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us.  Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects.  Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call “lifeness”: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.

What James calls “the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.” … And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit’s house to its foundations.

 

on the nature of Writing…

an excerpt from Memoir of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

I have to admit: my life changed because I’d made myself an author.  Or to be precise, it wasn’t exactly me who did that, I was made an author by the sentences I’d written, and that wasn’t even the end of the story: each result gave birth to the next, and I found myself being transported to a place I hadn’t known existed.  Writing was a more dangerous acrobatic stunt than dancing atop a rolling ball.  To be sure, I’d worked myself to the bone learning to dance on that ball and actually broke some bones rehearsing, but in the end I attained my goal.  In the end I knew with certainty that I could balance on a rolling object – but when it comes to writing, I can make no such claims.  Where was the ball of authorship rolling?  It couldn’t just roll in a straight line, or I’d fall of the stage.  My ball was supposed to spin on its axis and at the same time circle the midpoint of the stage, like the Earth revolving around the sun.

Writing demanded as much strength as hunting.  When I caught the scent of prey, the first thing I felt was despair: would I succeed in catching my prey, or would I fail yet again?  This uncertainty is the hunter’s daily lot.