Stingy Kids

Tracking Translation

One might therefore ask what purpose is served by translating books from Estonian if they go unnoticed and are rapidly lost within the prolific and ceaseless flood of publications; (it is sobering to reflect on the fact that the French words meaning [publié], and [oublié], differ by only one letter!) In one of his poems, Karl Ristikivi writes: "A lizard's track over a stone also leaves a trace, even if we do not see it," (Ka sisaliku tee kivil jätab jälje/ kuigi me seda ei näe). I sometimes feel that we, translators of Estonian literature into French, resemble Ristikivi's lizard: each published translation, even if forgotten, is one piece of the mosaic which forms the image of Estonia in the French-speaking world, a trace which endures even if we do not see it, and which may be discovered, or rediscovered one day by another of those adventurers who walk, as do we, in Europe's literary margins, in search of hidden treasures.

(A lizard's track over a stone. Translations and Translators of Estonian literature into French by Antoine Chalvin)

Senior Thesis

Scott Elmegreen, a soon-to-be graduate of Princeton University, wrote two senior theses this year (I barely cranked out one!).  "Wrote" isn't exactly the right word.  One could also say that he "composed" his senior thesis.  But that's not quite right either.  Emlegreen, a music major with a certificate in creative writing, wrote and composed his senior theses, both of which explore the relation between music and the written word.  For his music thesis, Elmegreen wrote a story titled "Flowers Pick Themselves," which tells the tale of Spencer and Adie, two teenagers in love in a world that treats love like a disease.  It's sixteen pages long and includes a music file at the end of each page.  The audio track begins playing the moment the page loads and, with few exceptions, timed well with the pace of my reading (or, arguably, the music set my pace).  As I read and listened to this story, I was thinking about tone, which in literature usually refers to the "mood" that a text conveys.  But it makes sense to return aurality and music to literature.  I imagine that before writing, the modulations of a storyteller's voice, his or her pitch, volume, cadence and pace, set the "tones" of a work.  At a poetry reading, I'm always struck by the voice of a poet and how his or her reading of a work adds something that wasn't visible to me on the written page.  A shift in mood, sometimes.  But live readings also risk presenting a work in a way that destroys it for me.  I remember in high school reading Dorothy Parker's poem "Penelope" and falling in love with its melancholy, lonely mood/tone.  So I was horrified when my English teacher read the poem out loud as a sarcastic, humorous piece.  It was like the poem had split in two.  To this day, I hear echoes of her voice when I read the poem. 

For his second project, Elmegreen wrote a novel titled Reveille, which also features Spencer and Adie.  In this work, the thoughts of some of the protagonists sometimes appear as musical notes.  In the novel, music is visible, textual.  For someone like me, who has a very poor musical background, the musical notes wouldn't "say" anything to me, at least not initially.  That is, I wouldn't be able to read them and I certainly wouldn't be able to translate them into sounds.  This makes me think of a wonderful scene in Milos Forman's Amadeus in which Salieri glances at the unfinished score for the Requiem Mass and hears the music in his head.  When I see a note, I just see it, a dot anchored to space by a vertical line.  But at any rate, the presence or intrusion of a musical score in a novel would create a pause, a moment in which I have a choice as a reader to skip ahead or to try to dig in and try to imagine what is being conveyed by those lines and dots.  In "Flowers Pick Themselves" there is a clearer distinction between music and written language, quite simply because you can hear the music as you are reading.  But here the challenge for me was to listen to the music not as an accompaniment but as this other layer of language that was also very much a part of the text.  At the top of each page there is an image of a rose that fades as you read.  This flower seems to suggest that the visibility of text, on which our reading relies, is  itself tenuous, vulnerable, temporary  Imagine if your favorite story suddenly vanished one day.  Would you be able to recite it by heart?  Or does its existence rely entirely on being a word on a page?

I'm excited to see what Elmegreen does in the future with these and other works.  Another Princeton student, Josh Williams, also wrote a senior thesis that has been getting some buzz. Both Elmegreen and Williams were advised by Joyce Carol Oates, who worked with Jonathan Safran Foer on his creative writing thesis, which became the novel Everything is Illuminated.