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.)

Things we like VI (I think? I've lost count)

1) Sarah Vowell: for many many reasons, like: having the same passionately ambiguous relationship to America that I do; for expressing said relationship much more eloquently than I could; for being a frustrated idealist; for being a nerd; for being the most reliably witty live person I can think of:

Heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth. Behold: my revelation: I stand at the door in the morning, and lo, there is a newspaper, in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the coffee, which was, and is, and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio, saying, “Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell.” And lo, after this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of shoes. And after these things I will hasten unto a taxicab and to a theater, where a ticket will be given unto me, and lo, it will be a matinee, and a film that doeth great wonders. And when it is finished, the heavens will open, and out will cometh a rain fragrant as myrrh, and yea, I have an umbrella.

— “The End is Near, Nearer, Nearest” from Take the Cannoli

2) Yo-Yo Ma, especially in the most recent issue of Gramophone magazine, in which he is interviewed by Lang Lang, and proves himself entirely wonderful:

YM: Menuhin used to say that certain composers are less exportable than others. This reminds me of Chinese food. Do you know the Chinese delicacy, the thousand-year egg?

LL: The pidan! I tried to get my American friends to eat it and they told me to get lost.

YM: No one likes it int he West because it’s stinky. Yet Peking Duck is very exportable because it looks beautiful with its crispy skin. Someone told me yesterday that in Vietnam they drink a liqueur whose bottle contains a snake. I think it would be a little hard for me to do that. Certain things travel well, other things travel less well. I wonder if music is a bit like that.

LL: You choose the final question, Yo-Yo. Would you like to talk about Bach or about how Chinese culture has influenced Western music?

YM: Why not both? One of the things that I’ve learnt about Bach and about music in general is that there is no such thing as purity. ... It’s good for music that composers and musicians are exposed to different things, that people try to understand what they don’t understand. People need to get to a point where they feel that the thing that they don’t understand is part of them.

3) Snarky biographies, namely Harold C. Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers (3rd ed.), in which the author demonstrates his apparent disdain (= jealousy!!) for certain composers near and dear to my heart:

If Bruckner’s music arouses fanatical devotion in many listeners, Mahler’s creates an actual frenzy. Again there are doubters, those who find Mahler’s music too neurotic and often too banal for enjoyment. The dedicated Mahlerian regards these unregenerates the way St. Paul regarded the heathen. It is hard to think of a composer who arouses an equal loyalty. The worship of Mahler amounts to a religion. Any music critic will attest to the fact that a response of anything except rapture to the Mahler symphonies will bring long letters of furious denunciation.

I, for one, was surprised to find out that Mahler heathens even exist. I mean ... really?

Short story collection

Lauren has just shown me this v. amusing site, the Random Title Generator. It’s rather formulaic — one title is always [Adjective] + [Noun], another is always The [Noun] of the [Noun], etc., and the pool of potential words to be plugged in is relatively small — but still, if you play with it long enough, it yields some pretty entertaining results.

Here are my favorite titles, randomly generated by the internet, and their accompanying recommended plot summaries, randomly generated by my imagination:

The Cracked Person: a thriller graphic novel, about a man who, in a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, accidentally combines his DNA with that of a pepper grinder*;

Vacant Voyages: genre: photography/psychoanalysis — pictures of people staring into space, with scholarly commentary;

The Unwilling Name: starring Hortense, or Tiglath-pileser the Third;

The Girl of the Person: a vacuous tale, to be sold exclusively by Urban Outfitters;

Lovely Snake: an epic poem, narrated by Cleopatra, describing her thoughts in the moments before she puts the asp to her breast;

The Magnificent Doors: a coffee-table book for people who love both architecture and Jim Morrison;

Crying in the Ice: über-depressing — will undoubtedly win the Booker Prize;

The Consort of the Petals: an eighteenth-century drama of scandal, passion, intrigue, decadence — basically, Dangerous Liaisons, except with flowers instead of people.


* this takes place in the future, obviously, when inanimate objects have been discovered to possess DNA...

Yes and No and the New Yorker

My brother recently informed me that everything I love is pretentious. This includes, I suppose, The New Yorker, which I do love — except for the annual fiction issue. In principle I like the idea of a fiction issue; I like discovering new writers, I like being reminded that living people also write (I have to be reminded of this because, as a truly pretentious person, I only read dead writers), and I like to fantasize about one day having a short story of my own in The New Yorker. I think if I were ever published in The New Yorker, my pretentious instincts would be satisfied and I could go on to, I don’t know, watch American Idol unabashedly, instead of abashedly, which is what I currently do.

The most recent fiction issue’s theme was “Writers Under 40.” A brilliant theme, a perfect theme for fantasizing (I am also under 40!), marvelous choice all around, and as a bonus, featuring Jonathan Safran Foer, who has also been accused of pretension, and whom I also love. So I attempted to suspend my usual skepticism about the fiction issue and discover some great young contemporary authors.

Here’s what I discovered. The majority of their stories could be subtitled in one of two ways:

1. “The Death of a Meaningless Person”
2. “The Sexcapades of a Meaningless Person”
   

I don’t mean to be flippant, but really, it’s a little bit exasperating. And somehow it reminds me of a discussion Lauren and I have been having recently, about our literary tastes. In addition to our joint preference for works by the deceased, she has also declared that she likes flashy writers (e.g. Nabokov and Gombrowicz). And after reading this particular New Yorker, I have discovered that I like flashy plots. Three of my favorite books are The Brothers Karamazov (featuring murder), The Magic Mountain (featuring tuberculosis), and Mrs Dalloway (featuring autodefenestration). Any of the three could be subtitled: “The Death & Sexcapades of Very Interesting People.”

These are also, admittedly, sad books, written by authors whose world was about to end, who were writing in a gathering storm. They are sad, but not bleak; and this distinction is crucial. As John Berger wrote, “The despair of an artist is often misunderstood. It is never total. It excepts his own work.” That is: you are sad, you write, but by writing you create a space to dissolve your sadness. In Deleuzian terms, you write to flee, but in fleeing you seek your weapon. I read dead writers because it is easier for me to sense their inner resistance, their affirmation, in that space between despair and art. I don’t object to despair; it is easy to feel agony, particularly when writing, so my only objection is to making this despair total, to the point where writing languishes in and glorifies boredom and disillusionment, simply because it can find no way out. (Writing itself is the way out, but only a potential one; it must be chosen and employed as such. )

The phrase ‘way out’ always makes me think of Kafka, and Kafka always makes me think of Beckett. I associate them with each other because they both strike me as people who were writing to save their lives, people who were sad and disillusioned, but against their will, who were surrounded by boredom and who fought back. The theatre director Peter Brook said of Beckett, “he forges his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn.” The ghost of affirmation haunts his writing, laughing; despair and boredom are never total. (Beckett and Kafka are also masters of the tragicomedy, one of my favorite genres and one which I would love for these writers under 40 to revive.)

So, this, I suppose, is what I was hoping to find in The New Yorker: this longing for ‘yes.’ Instead there was, for the most part, only ‘no,’ or rather, ‘I don’t care.’ So what?, I wanted to say, after Meaningless Person slept with Other Meaningless Person and then drowned. I don’t care either.

I don’t mean to condemn contemporary fiction. It’s not a homogeneous bloc and I know that some of it’s wonderful. But the world is always falling apart, and it is so easy to be bored and unremarkable. In writing it is possible to produce an alternative, to carve out a little space of freedom. I will own my vice of being a pretentious reader, if it gives me the right to demand agony in writing, if I can demand that something be at stake.