Stingy Kids

Kit Kats and Jellyfish

A couple of months ago, the on line and print journal Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture created a partnership with Jewcy, an entertainment and media company.  The print journal will continue to come out twice a year, but here on out on line content will be presented in more of a blog form.  This new format gives Zeek "a more flexible web presence."  I've published several translations of Israel literature in Zeek (see left sidebar for links) but my first translation to appear in Zeek @ Jewcy is the prose poem "Rita" by Roman Baembaev.  This new format now allows readers to leave comments, which I hope will generate discussion around these texts.  Also check out Lisa Katz's translation of "All" by Agi Mishol.

Artist Robert Ladislas Derr also participated in the "Theory and Practice" show that I saw recently at Gallery Aferro.  His piece "Intellectual Economy" is a video installation consisting of two computer monitors standing, back to back, on a table.  On one monitor, you see a man from the back, banging his head against the wall.  On the other monitor, you see his head coming through the wall.  In Derr's own words: "The front side view of the rupturing wall echoes the process of birth and challenges the notions of illusionistic space. Breaking through the wall from one side to the other illustrates that art is not easy."

Rilke's "Liebeslied," published in Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907).  Cliff Crego's English translation is lovely, as is Stephen Mitchell's.

I was reading about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and came across a bibliographic reference to Critical Kit-Kats, a 1896 collection of literary portraits by Edmund Gosse.  I've never heard the term "kit kat" used to refer to anything other than a chocolate wafer confection so I was intrigued.  The Kit-Cat Club was an 18th century club based in London that attracted those of political and literary persuasions (Jonathan Swift was a member).  The name also refers to a kind of pie, named after Christopher Catling, a pie maker.  In the preface to Critical Kit-Kats, Gosse offers another meaning:

In an age when studies multiply and our shelves groan with books it is not every interesting and original figure to whom the space of a full length or even a half length portrait can be spared For the low comfortable rooms where people dined in the last century there was invented the shorter and still less obtrusive picture called a Kit Kat and some of our most skilful painters have delighted in this modest form of portraiture which emphasises the head yet does not quite exclude the hand of the sitter I have ventured to borrow from the graphic art this title for my little volume since these are condensed portraits each less than half length and each accommodated to suit limited leisure and a crowded space.

You can download a scanned copy of the entire book through Google Reader.

Finally, I don't know how but I came across a fantastic and fun post on jellyfish by Molly Lambert, managing editor of This Recording.  I find jellyfish endlessly fascinating and recently learned about an "immortal" variety, Turritopsis nutricula (which Lambert mentions).  Appropriately titled "In Which They'll Outlive Us All," the post features a bunch of great illustrations and some mp3s.  I also recommend  this post on John Ashbery.

Anna T. Szabó

During the PEN World Voices panel "Rewriting Family," Hungarian author György Dragomán mentioned that his wife was a poet and frequently collaborated with translators. Dragomán blew me away with his generous and gracious comments on translation and translators, so I was interested to learn more about his wife and her translation background.  Her name, I learned, is Anna T. Szabó. and she has published several books of poetry.  Her website is in Hungarian but her author page on HunLit provides some biographical and biographical information in English and German translation (the English page is more comprehensive than the German).

In October 2004, Szabó and other Hungarian poets visited the UK and participated in Converging Lines, a program sponsored by the British Council Arts Group, which teams up writers and translators from the UK with poets from other countries.  It works both ways--first the UK writers toured Hungary and later the Hungarian poets came to the UK for reading tours and to participate in translation workshops.  Szabó was paired with Clare Pollard, a poet, educator and translator.  In creating her translations, Pollard, who doesn't know Hungarian, maintained an ongoing conversation with Szabó.  She had a literal translation to work with but the final translation also reflected how she interpreted and incorporated Szabó's comments on variant meanings, word play, sound and structure.  The program invited those who attended the public readings to participate in this translation enterprise.

Antony Dunn, who participated in this program, recounts:

We've created a leaflet for every audience member, which contains four literal translations of poems by the Hungarians€“ the very same literal translations that some of the Brits worked from at Lake Balaton. These literal (or plain text) translations contain a range of alternatives, notes and suggestions, to reflect the shades of meaning carried by the Hungarian words or phrases. Some are annotated with details of the rhyme scheme, or the rhythm, or with explanations of the Hungarian colloquialisms employed in the poems. The audience is invited to take these leaflets home and have a go at translation for themselves.

In some ways, it'€™s been rather easier for us, with access to the poets themselves. To be able to ask, What did you mean, exactly? and get an answer.

You can download from Dunn's website a pdf file that contains some of the translations put together by the group, including one of Pollard's translations of Szabó's poem "Around the Tree" (from a longer poem "Winter Diary").  It's a fantastic poem--here's the first stanza:

In the ice-storm these cats now mate,
light frozen on their soft, black skins.
They stage their hot, furred winter show,
wild things.

Reading this translation out loud, I'm struck by the cadence and the rhyme between "skins" and "things," as well as the internal rhyme between "soft" and "hot."  Also, most of the words are monosyllabic which can't be incidental.  A great deal of attention has been given to the sound of this translation, which makes me wonder how its sounds in Hungarian.  Hungarian sounds nothing like English so the translation isn't necessarily striving for aural equivalence, but perhaps there is something interesting about the original poem's prosody that the English poem is trying to evoke. 

In an on line interview, Szabó, who translates from English to Hungarian, acknowledged that she prefers not to self-translate.  "I have tried, but what comes out is not what I had intended."  This is an incredible admission and, in a way, contradicts Dunn's comment that having the original authors on hand gave the UK translators an advantage.  There is a prevailing assumption (that even translators tend to perpetuate) that original authors always know what their work means.  And, frankly, speaking as a translator, I'd rather have a range of meanings and possibilities to work with. 

For Szabó, translation is not only a creative exchange (that is more productive when the translator is someone else) but also a way to assess the merits of a work, to go beyond first impressions:

I used to think that mutuality in translation was some sort of a gesture of respect. In fact it is nothing of the kind. It is extremely useful. While you work on the translation you are also in contact with the author. During these conversations you find your place into their world and their vision, and it becomes much easier to get an understanding of their poetry. When you place yourself in the other's poetic world you really get in tune with them. This can be mutual, which is really a very exciting process. It was during translation that I grew to like Pollard's poems a lot. There were poets I started to translate convinced that they were great, and found out during the translation process that they were not. You come to stumble upon subtle shifts more easily, and find that things which look graceful from the outside may not be all that well put together, after all.

This has happened to me on several occasions. I'll start translating a poem I really like in Hebrew or Spanish and, in the process, certain flaws or missteps are revealed.  In this way, translation serves as a mode of critical reading.  I'm looking forward to reading more work by Szabó and Dragomán.  It's been very exciting to encounter their ideas on writing and translation and to find in them something "mutual."

Links:

Two Poems by Anna Szabó, Translated by David Hill

"Poetry in the NIght" (prose) and "This Day" (poem), Translated by George Szirtes

Poems from "The Labour Ward," Translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri

PEN Worlds Voices 2008

I just got around to organizing my notes on the PEN Worlds Voices Literary festival, which took place last week in NYC.  It's an amazing gathering of writers, publishers, translators and readers.  The only drawback: there was just too much to do and so many good things overlapped!  Here are my notes from the panels and readings that I attended--my notes on the panel "Short Stories" will appear in a separate post:

Wednesday, April 30

Rewriting Family
Housing Works Bookstore Café
Participants: P.F. Thomése, György Dragomán, Yael Hedaya (Moderator: Stacey D'Erasmo)

Dragomán is a Hungarian novelist and translator who was born in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş, Romania in 1973.  As a literary translator, he's aware of the limits of translation but doesn't let them become an excuse for not translating.  So let's say you can only get 90%, he said, that's something!  He also conceded that the kinds of limits or problems that one translator faces may be entirely different for another.  If you can't find the solution, someone else will.  This is a very generous and optimistic approach to translation and I thank Dragomán for it.  An audience member asked about the different between translating poetry and prose and remarked that poetry, in particular, tends to be untranslatable.  Dragomán smiled and told us that his wife is a poet and frequently works with translators.  "First, the rhyme goes,  second, some of the meter....but it's ok!  Something stays and that's what's important."  I really wish more readers and critics would focus on how much remains in translation rather than fixating on "losses," which I put in quotes becomes often those who assert that something has been lost in translation 1) haven't read the original or 2) haven't/won't read the translation.

He has a fantastic author website (authors, take note!), where he's posted excerpts from and links to a number of interviews.  I recommend highly his interview with James Smith in which he discusses at length his relationship with his translators and how he approaches the task of translation.

I Call It Art

Coco Fusco

Fusco is a Cuban American performance artist whose work explores and challenges ideas on gender, race, and borders.  One of her performances was included in this year's Whitney Biennial.  You can read more about her work on her website, but I'd like to highlight two projects in particular that deal with death and gender:

Better Yet When Dead

I thought of Ana Mendieta; I thought of Frida Kahlo and the way in which she sort of dies on canvas--there was this form of performance... I started to think about these processes of idealization that are very much a part of Latin Catholic Culture, where women get shafted in reality and then deified at the moment of their death. I thought that one of the things that is kind of bizarre about this, in this particular moment in history, is that death becomes a kind of opportunity to really commodify to an incredible degree the images of these women. So I think about Evita Peron and the business that's been generated by her corpse traveling around the world for 40 years; the difference between Ana Mendieta in life and in death; what happened to Frida Kahlo who got one solo show in her entire life in Mexico and now is the best-selling artist from her country. (via MOMA)

The Incredible Disappearing Woman

So in the piece different possible scenarios emerge in the storytelling. The date rape drug, catalepsy was another version I did some research about, -- you know, people being buried alive because they looked dead and then they wake up. So one thing was to do the almost hardcore journalism, you know, asking, who could this have happened to , but another thing to think about was what would it be like to be alive when everyone thinks you are dead, to be just an object, not to be seen, not to be recognised, not to be present for people. In that sense, thinking about it in a more metaphorical way, gave me a way to tell the story. (via 3am)

Fusco's performances intentionally create a sense of complicity in the viewer.  So reading about these performances seems beside the point but, at the very least, the interviews and talks that I've linked to contextualize Fusco's works in interesting and provocative ways. 

Fusco's "Buried Pig with Moros" will be showing from April 3 to May 2 at The Project. 

Alex Colville

If you've seen Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat, you may recall a scene (scroll down for images) in which the character Neil McCauley, played by Robert de Niro, is standing at a window with his gun resting on a table behind him.  The entire scene is bathed in deep blue light.  I remember this moment from the movie and learned recently that this shot was inspired (most likely) by Alex Colville's 1967 painting "Pacific" (click here for a higher res image).

Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920 and studied fine arts in college.  During World War II, he served as a war painter for the Canadian army and was sent to Europe.  In 1945, he was among three Canadian artists who entered the newly liberated Bergen Belsen camp.  "Bodies in a Grave" was one of the works that came out of that experience.  The website for the Canadian War Museum contains a few more images from this period of Colville's work.  When I think of a "war painter," particularly a painter-soldier, I think of someone who is like a journalist but working in images (admittedly, though, I don't know a great deal about the subject).  Colville himself describes the work of this period as "reportorial."  But a painting like "Bodies in a Grave" doesn't really report, in a journalistic sense of the word, the scale of death and disease that Allied soldiers encountered in Bergen Belsen.  It feels very personal and very partial, like a remnant. 

For more on Colville, I recommend his page on Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's website.

Frank

In his article "Honk if you see high art," Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post argues that a mural for a auto service shop is "Picassoid":

Finding an accidental work of modern art in our own urban scene may be no stranger than spotting some Constable-like beauty in the untouched English countryside. The fact that the trees don't know they're artful doesn't make them seem any less artistically arranged. (my link)

"Trees Don't Know They're Artful" should have been the title of this post.

The actual title for this post comes from The Kills version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Chanson de Slogan."

Readings: Jeffrey Yang and David Grossman

Saturday 3/22, Hermitage, Beacon, NY

This past week, East Slope, a collection by 11th century poet Su Shi, arrived as part of my UDP subscription.  East Slope consists of eight poems written during an eight month period in the early years of Su Shi's political exile.  Jeffrey Yang's translations are really wonderful and are accompanied by the Chinese texts.  I don't read Chinese, but I was intrigued by the internal line breaks that Yang employed.  The generous spacing between words and phrases suggests brush strokes and gives the words in translation an object quality.  Take for instance this line from poem #5:

Not one month since planting      clods
covered         with green             green

The repetition and spacing of green interests me here because it emphasizes both the substantive and adjectival function of the word: green as a descriptive term, "the green clods," but also green as a metonymy for the anticipated harvest.  In Poem #6, green reappears, also at the end of a line, this time like a hanging a leaf or fruit:

melts                       Imagine     among
bamboo thickets                         green
yellow                dangling by the eaves

In an afterword to his translation of nine poems from the Qian Jia Shi (Poems of a Thousand Masters), Yang briefly discusses his translation approach, particularly with regard to form:

The English translations emulate the overall rectangular fields (or seals) of the Chinese poems and retain the same number of lines. (Due to the difference in internet browsers, the lines in the translations may be a little off and not form perfect rectangles.) White space, as in many poems, serve as punctuation, breath, pause, degrees of rest, "In silence . . . the pulse of God's blood in our veins" (Bunting). The overarching hope was to convey some of the music and precision of the Chinese in English.

The white spaces in East Slope certainly encouraged pause and rest, but, as I said, it also enhanced for me the physicality of the language.  I was thinking of this later at the reading, which was organized to engage the five senses.  It began with a a taste of medicinal tea (to ward off colds), a moment of silence, and then artist Hu Ren Yi dipped his brush in dark ink and started painting across a sheet of paper while Yang read East Slope.  Hu painted continuously without pause, and it was interesting for me to reflect on this when Yang paused between words, phrases and poems.  He seemed to be giving Hu time and attention, but one could also understand Hu's brush strokes as a literal illustration of what fills the white space of Su Shi's poems.  And what this is can be language or distortions of language, a movement or breath, a suggestion of landscape or a circle enclosing space. 

Artists Jon Beacham and Christian Toscano opened Hermitage in December 2007 as an art space and bookstore focused on collaboration and community (Yang lives in Beacon).  The bookstore stocks small press books and chapbooks of U.S. poetry from the 1950s and 1970s, an "important literary period in which poets and writers across the country published themselves and each other, and held a rich ongoing dialog through correspondence and activity amongst each other." 

Sunday, 3/23, 92nd St. Y, New York, NY

I attended an interview with Israeli novelist David Grossman, part of the 92nd St. Y's "Israel at 60" festivities.  The interviewer was Adam Rovner, who is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Hofstra University.  Adam did a fantastic job asking a range of challenging questions on Grossman's work, focusing specifically on the literary and leaving the political to the Q&A. 

Adam is also the Translation Editor for Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (and in this capacity has given me many opportunities to delve into some great translation projects).  He's also married to translator Jessica Cohen, who has translated Grossman's most recent novels into English.  So a question about translation was in order.  Adam observed that, to a significant extent, translation has shaped Grossman's influences and noted, in particular, the role that Bruno Schulz plays in Grossman's 1986 novel See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh: ahava).  Grossman had remarked earlier in the conversation that after the publication of his first novel, The Smile of the Lamb (Chiyukh ha-gedi, 1983), a number of readers and critics instantly tried to link his work to other writers.  "I was a new literary baby and everyone wanted to claim a part of me...he has the eyes of... the ears of..."  One reader remarked that Grossman's work shared a strong affinity to the writing of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), a Polish author Grossman had never read.  He borrowed a Hebrew translation of Schulz's work and instantly was captivated.  As he read more about Schulz, he was troubled in particular about the circumstances surrounding his murder and resolved to write a book that what redeem Schulz in some way.   This book became See Under: Love, which contains long sections about Schulz and his death that are written in a style and language reminiscent of Schulz's stories. 

Since Grossman read Schulz in Hebrew translation, it's a little odd for Grossman to talk about writing in "Schulz's language" (which was Polish, for the record), but this is exactly how he describes these sections of the novel.  I think Adam wanted him to address this slippage between translation and writing but Grossman turned to the subject of translation and mentioned that though Jessica does a "brilliant" job translating his novels (she does!), he remains skeptical of the very possibility of translation.  For Grossman, every word he writes is precise and resonant.  His Hebrew is layered with traces of the language of the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Haskalah (Enlightenment) and contemporary literature.  Language, Grossman said, is like "a revolving door."  The reader is inside this door experiencing the possibilities of language.  But at some point, for translation to happen, one has to pick a point of exit.  Where one chooses to step out of the door is necessary for translation to take place but it also reduces the possible meaning, references, and nuances of a word.  As I listened to Grossman, I was struck once again by how often a deep skepticism about translation coincides with the deep influence of translation.  Grossman may not be convinced that translation can convey adequately everything that he is trying to say in one word or phrase, but something came across in his reading of Schulz in Hebrew translation even if it was partial and incomplete.  And it was this language of the translation that shaped those beautiful, resonant passages on Schulz in See Under: Love.  Sure there are losses in translation, but when I think of See Under: Love and how translation inspired and, arguably, made possible the writing of this urgent, radiant novel, I'm convinced that the absence of translation risks the greater losses.