Translation is: difficult; music.

Taped on the wall just above my desk in my apartment in Paris are a picture of Darwin and a picture of Leonard Bernstein. Darwin is there because G.G., a professor of mine once printed it out for me, saying, “I’m not sure why I’m printing this for you, but I think you should have it.” He has enjoyed pride of place ever since. And Leonard Bernstein is there because I’m obsessed with him.

However, I have come to realize that these two serve a metaphorical purpose as well, and I’m keeping them there to remind me about the ethics of translation. It seems to me now that Darwin was a kind of translator, observing nature meticulously, obsessively, in order to re-write it, its genealogy and present state, in another language: a human one. Another of my professors has asked whether translation can be defined as “writing under constraint”; I think that’s really not a bad definition — and Darwin was certainly constrained.

So he reminds me, basically, to just keep at it: keep observing, keep reading, agonize if you must, and then produce something, even if everyone thinks you’re crazy (and they probably will).

The photo of Bernstein I have is my favorite picture of him: conducting, head thrown back, arms upraised, eyes closed, as if at any moment he will transubstantiate and simply turn into music. He once said that his engagement with music was “a total embrace,” that knowledge of a work makes you belong to it, and not it to you.

He was also absolutely fanatical about loyalty to the composer, and remains remarkable among conductors for sounding noticeably different with each composer he conducts. Conducting, he said, is exactly like breathing: the preparation is inhalation, the music is exhalation.

So Lenny, eyes closed, is winking at me and reminding me to be loyal to the composer (or in my case, the writer), and not to engage except by total embrace; the work must live inside you; you must be inhaling and exhaling it.

(For in fact, literary translation is very much like musical interpretation: Bach as played by Perahia is not the same as Bach by Gould, but Bach is always there, and music is always the goal, the necessity.)

Death, oh baby ...

... you know that dying is fine, but maybe,

I wouldn’t like death if death were good,

Not even if death were good.

Things that are making me think about death:

1) One of my favorite professors, Feliz Eda Burhan, died last week; she was an amazing woman — a brilliant scholar and teacher. She was demanding and always v. critical of my writing (and I loved her for it). “This is good,” she would write on my essays, “but I know you can do better.”

A classmate of mine wrote to me to inform me of her death; she said that Professor Burhan had “passed away.” That’s what everybody said about her, actually: she passed away. I’ve always found this an incredibly strange phrase; I preferred the way another of my friends put it: that Professor Burhan had come to inhabit one of her own phrases, the “absence of presence and the presence of absence.” She is not here, but she has not passed away. In her absence is presence.

2) Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Mahler was obsessed with death his entire career, but he was particularly afraid of the curse of the ninth — to which, in fact, he ultimately succumbed. As he was writing the Ninth, his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter suddenly died of scarlet fever; he himself was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition; WWI was rapidly approaching. So the symphony became his farewell to life — his own, and that of his entire world’s. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — I was thinking of this line as I listened, especially during the third movement when the cracks in the structure are revealed and everything indeed begins to crumble. The second and third movements are intense and twisted, carnivalesque, ridiculous and sinister at the same time; the first and fourth are movements of the body: the symphony begins with an irregular pulse, a hesitant arrhythmia, and the final movement ends in much the same way; it is the heart-beat slowing down.

Herbert von Karajan said that this symphony is “music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”

I highly recommend both the program notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda from the performance I attended (the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the incomparable Marin Alsop), and the essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Thomas. It’s rather apocalyptic, but so is the symphony.

3) These recently-declassified photos from Hiroshima, 1945:

This one reminds me of the human body, a spine or a rib cage.

Things we like V: undeniable trends [aka the year in review]

1. An analysis of my reading habits in 2010:

Books that I read, cover to cover: approximately 30.

Books that I spent a good deal of time reading, but either started and didn’t finish, or read only lengthy excerpts of: approximately 25.

2. Norwegian men of the year (to qualify one must be named Edvard): Munch and Grieg.

3. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (one of my new favorite people) and his film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and, praise the Queen!, was showing in London, where I finally saw it and became entirely enamored. There is a v. nice summary of Uncle Boonmee here, though I also highly recommend putting the original Thai title into Google translate:

4. The difference between the real and the surreal, more specifically: my increasing inability to distinguish them. There is reality TV, for one thing, which shouldn’t be real but is, and then obviously wax people who are not made of wax, and women laughing alone with salad.

5. Hedonism, which often takes the form of a search for the perfect chocolate muffin (found, at long last, on Charing Cross Road). As we were snacking on the street, my friend whom I was with declared, “This is the best muffin in the entire world. I like that I can be v. hedonistic around you.”

6. Commemorating instances of cosmic unfairness and/or explaining medieval literature by writing limericks.

7. Ai Weiwei, his ethics, and his beautiful beautiful sunflower seeds.

8. Quantum entanglement, which sounds, like most things, better in German: Quantenverschränkung.

Things we like

The predilection Lauren and I have for lists is probably obvious by now. Nearly all our lists are infinite, and foremost among them are the lists of things we like. And since I have tentatively decided to post more here, having purged my life of Facebook, but not of the impulse to share random information, voilà une sélection de la liste des choses aimées:

• the Wooster Collective, especially when they post things that highlight the similarities between people and sheep
• Louis Malle, Charlie Chapman, Ingmar Bergman, and the Criterion Collection’s page of quotes
• Jean-Luc Godard's (and Fritz Lang’s) Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), which is even better than I’d remembered
• Zadie Smith, at least when she writes things that highlight the differences between people and software
• David Sedaris and Dutch Christmas traditions
• Three-line novels. More of these to come.