Isak

Radioactive: A Graphic Take on "Love and Fallout"

Lauren Redniss' new graphic novel on Marie and Pierre Curie looks extraordinary. Jezebel offers a nice walk-through some of the beautiful art in this book; it, and the strange story of radioactivity, science, and a woman who was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes (in both physics and chemistry), has me hooked.

Right Translations

NPR gets a little crazy this week and spotlights literary translation in a "Talk of the Nation" segment featuring those superstars of the art, Edith Grossman and Lydia Davis. I'm particularly interested in their views about rendering into English a book that already has multiple available translations:

After finishing her first draft, Davis takes a look at the work of other translators, and develops a kind of partnership with them as well. "I would begin to feel that we were a group sitting in the room together wrestling with the same problems," she says.

Davis says reading many variations on a single phrase gives her an even better understanding of how complex the process of translation is.

"I sense how hard we've all worked," she says. "It's not easy. Even a not-so-good translation is not easy to produce. Somehow, I think we maybe should have been all together ... doing it together, and somehow achieved the final definitive translation."

On this point, Davis and Grossman part company. Grossman never looks at other translations. The translation is hers alone, she says, but it is impossible to separate her work from the author's.

"Clearly the translation is mine," Grossman says. "Clearly the book I translated was not mine. I really don't believe in sublimating much — and certainly not my sense of what works in English and what doesn't work in English. So I think there is the partnership — in the translation, there's a shared authorship."

Fact Checking John Steinbeck

From one of few of my can't-miss podcasts, "On the Media," comes this interesting little segment that re-visits John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley: In Search of America--the author's nonfiction account of a 10,000-mile road trip he took with his standard French poodle fifty years ago. OTM's Bob Garfield talks with journalist Bill Steigerwald, who retraced Steinbeck’s journey and discovered that as appealing as Steinbeck's book is, it is mostly fabricated.

 

REVIEW: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal

Some Kind of Beautiful Signal carries a vibrant, persistent pulse, a calling cry to readers to look up and out. Time and distance collapse in its pages; here, after all, is a re-visioned geometry. (That is, literally, "measuring the world.")

Here is the seventeenth volume of the TWO LINES annual series of multilingual anthologies of literature in translation, this time co-edited by Natasha Wimmer (famed for her Roberto Bolaño and Maria Vargas Llosa renditions) and Jeffery Yang, who is a poet, translator and an editor at the New Directions publishing house. It comes to us via the Center for the Art of Translation, featuring more than thirty writers from around the globe in both their original languages (even Zapotec!) and English translations. The collection includes more highlights than I can conveniently tick off ... but, oh hell, I'll try anyway:

• A folio of contemporary and medieval poetry from China's Uyghur ethnic minority that lives in a center of cultural hybridity at the western edge of the country and in the middle of Asia, in the midst of the old Silk Road and alternatively annexed by Russia and China.
• "A Thin Line Between Love and Hate”-- which is previously untranslated fiction by Jorge Luis Borges' best friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (whose own book, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, I have long hankered for).
• Three poems by Danish writer Inger Christensen, who passed away last year.
• An apt essay by Roberto Bolaño called "Translation Is a Testing Ground.” (via Wimmer, naturally)
• A chapter of Lydia Davis' translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
• Two poems by Xi Chuan, one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets.
• Two translators approach the poetry and prose of Gennady Aygum a Russian writer that was numerous times nominated for the Nobel Prize.
• Not a sideline issue: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is just so damn good-looking. A horizontal publication with a satisfying heft, clean design, and the aesthetic spark of multiple languages printed across the white pages... as Chad Post has put it, there is something that is just cool about it.

Rather than disappear into the texts they work with, here the translators' own voices emerge in introductions to the pieces they worked on. In mini-essays, the translators provide context, a consideration of challenges they faced in transforming the originals to English, and an articulation of their purpose. Collectively, these introductions are a fascinating overview of the differences among individual translators working in different languages and traditions.

I read Some Kind of Beautiful Signal slowly, taking it in sips over the course of a season, feeling no need to rush. There were a few points where my limited Spanish led me to wonder why a translator chose a particular English rendition of a line or word, making me wish I could talk back to the work and ask it questions. (How did "La traducción es un yunque" become "Translation is a testing ground," Natasha Wimmer? Why is "la mesa de trabajo" simply "the desk," Suzanne Jill Levine?)

Most of the time, though, I enjoyed just moving along on this ride. I read this collection, incidentally, while also moving through the mammoth Best European Fiction 2011 anthology; it is a curious thing to reflect on the differences between anthologies that share a similar purpose in making more excellent international literature available in English. While I love them both, BEF is immersive, contemporary, more unified in cultural landscape, form and the idiosyncratic  preferences of Aleksandar Hemon, its editor. Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is the anthology that is more eclectic, more global, more far-reaching in time and tradition, and more attentive to the process and purpose of translation.

It seems fitting to end with the final paragraph of the (curiously titled) Bolaño essay included in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Bolaño is hyper-alert to the limitations of translation, but has a sort of gentle smile about how great literature pulses through. (In this CAT interview, incidentally, Wimmer offers her own response to the essay.)

How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.

Diana Laufenberg: Learning, Teaching, and Big Mistakes (VIDEO)

 

 

Literary & Media Indulgences - 12/21/2010

--Thank you to "Midday with Dan Rodricks" from WYPR 88.1, Baltimore's NPR station, for quoting Isak on its hour-long conversation yesterday about Charles Dickens! The show centered on Dickens' fiction about Christmas outside of "The Christmas Carol." When Oprah's Book Club came up, my "response to a curmudgeon" got a cameo.

--Donald Barthelme's reading list. This is awesome...

--Jaimy Gordon, your reigning winner of the National Book Award for her novel Lord of Misrule, is the latest to share an excellent literary conversation with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm. Other Bookworm interviews worth your time? Well, all of them, but I'll highlight here the recent talks with Nicole Krauss and Leslie Marmon Silko.

--Margaret Atwood, Sam Lipsyte, and other writers take a stab at improving President Obama's narrative.

--Two Venezuelan media laws look shady.

--On radical philanthropy and a new meaning for the phrase "class action."

--29 literary films for the holidays.

--"Weird and wonderful books"--NPR picks out hidden gems from 2010.

--Here's a look at what the press had to say about Social Security in the last year. (Hint: it's scary).

--Queer college presidents go public in a new online video.

--Publishing Perspectives wraps up its year with Proust and prepares to launch "Project D" (that is, Dostoevsky) in 2011. You (yes, you!) can join in the reading adventure through Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Demons. Seeing as that among these are my all-time favorite novels, I won't be able to resist this myself. Look here for more.

--A match made in heaven: Guernica partners with Dzanc Books on the first annual DISQUIET: International Literary Program Award. The winner will be published in Guernica and receive airfare, accommodations, and tuition for the program in Lisbon this summer. DISQUIET, incidentally, is designed to encourage international writing from within North American borders through its writing workshops. All submissions, which are due on January 31, will be judged by writer Chris Abani (whose awesomeness you can witness here and here).

--Bloomsbury picks two good books for the aspiring journalist.

--On Chicago, eviction, and one of the most famous public housing experiments in the world.

--On Democracy Now!, a disturbing and revelatory debate between Naomi Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman on the sexual assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I am busting with pride to call Jaclyn my pal.

--Writer Rebecca Traister on political inspiration and its emotional heat.

--The Nigerian newspaper Next takes a look at Yoruba literature, especially the novels of D.O. Fagunwa.

--What poets can teach us about the war in Afghanistan, via The New Republic.

--Speaking of poetry, here is a glimpse of the underground scene in Syria.

--Laila Lalami writes about her year of (public) silence. She broke the fast with an article for The Nation on Moroccan writer and critic Abdelfattah Kilito (who has a book now being released from New Directions).

Speaking: Leila Aboulela

"I want to write about the faith, but it's so difficult to talk about it like this when everyone else is talking about the political aspects. I'm concerned that Islam has not just been politicised but that it's becoming an identity. This is like turning religion into a football match, it's a distraction from the real thing."

-- The brilliant Leila Aboulela, as quoted in a profile in The Independent. Aboulela is a Sudanese writer who spent a good part of her life in Scotland and now writes from Qatar. A Caine Prize winner, she's the author of The Translator and Minaret (both Orange Prize and IMPAC Dublin nominees), as well as the new novel Lyrics Alley.

Image Credit: Mark Pringle

Response to a Curmudgeon: 10 Points on Oprah and Charles Dickens

 

Goodness, this is quite a curmudgeonly view of the Oprah's Book Club new selection of two Charles Dickens novels: Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. In The New Republic, Hillary Kelly slams Oprah for picking these novels in an argument that seems to boil down to this:

1. Oprah has never read Charles Dickens before.

2. Oprah is already romanticizing and simplifying Charles Dickens' fiction by associating it with the holidays and "comfort."

3. Oprah is not enough of a literary scholar, and does not have enough literary taste, to be trusted to guide the many thousands of readers who will take the cue and pick up these novels.

Here is Hillary Kelly at her most damning:

(Oprah's Book Club is) not about literature or writing; it’s about looking into a mirror and deciding what type of person you are, and how you can be better. While a generally wrongheaded view of novels, this notion is all the more frustrating when the club delves into the true classics, with their vast knottiness, glorious language, breathtaking characters, and multi-faceted, mind-twisting prose. None of that matters in Oprah’s view of books, since reading is yet another exercise in self-gratification. “If you have read him, what do you think Dickens might have to share and teach those of us who live in this digital age?” the Book Club’s producer, Jill, asks on Oprah’s website. This is the Eat, Pray, Love school of reading.

In response to this extremely bitter take on Oprah exciting thousands to read Charles Dickens, I have this to say to Hillary Kelly:

1. You seem to take an extraordinarily judgmental view of the reasons why a reader might pick up a Dickens novel. Whether it is a whim, or because a celebrity talked about it, or because there is a cultural opportunity to read it in a (live or digital) community, or because you feel like you might have missed out on something by not exploring a classic, or because you treasure it and want to re-read it a hundred times, I say: who cares? It is the reading that counts, not the 'why', yes?

2. I agree with you that Oprah's Book Club picks are uneven--some are extraordinary classics (Anna Karenina), some are contemporary classics (The Bluest Eye, Say You're One of Them), and some contemporary picks feel very flat to me (The Pilot's Wife). But isn't it rather impressive that Oprah has been able to balance her bookish influence in a way that cuts through genre hierarchy and presumed popular/literary dichotomies in a way that welcomes an unusual diversity of participants? There are a variety of "ins" here, igniting untold numbers to pick up books they normally wouldn't, permitting stereotypes of "classics" or "literary fiction" or "popular fiction" to dissolve. Nobody and nothing has come close to doing this with as much ease as Oprah's Book Club.

3. Doesn't this textured catalogue of book club picks underscore the variety of purposes and experiences we look for in reading--from escapism to fun to social awareness to introspective contemplation to recognizing reflections of ourselves in diverse and different worlds? Where Oprah's taste diverges from mine or yours, Hillary Kelly, or when her take on the books do not agree with ours, there is no threat here; Oprah is simply putting her readerly experience out there, amplifying and contributing to the conversation. While her influence is off the scale, this is not much different than what a passionate book blogger or literary journalist does.

4. Many, many thousands of people are going to pick up Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. You imply that these people are stupid--since they are "only" picking it up because Oprah said so (an assumption) and because you believe that Oprah is unqualified to guide them through the complexities of books that, you say, are too different from each other to be paired together in the first place. This is downright snobbish. These thousands of readers are entitled and able to have their own authentic experiences with the books, no matter what their cue was to pick them up (see #1 above). Maybe those experiences will involve loving the novels or hating them, or somewhere in between. Maybe attentiveness to Oprah's perspective adds to the joy they take in the novels, or the inspiration to actually finish them, or maybe the readers don't particularly seek out her perspective at all after taking the novels home. And perhaps you are right that a disproportionate number of these readers will seek reflections of themselves in these nineteenth century novels.

5. This is not a bad thing.

6. It is worth saying again. Whatever happens, again, many thousands are reading these significant novels--and this is not a reason to be bitter. In fact, it is something to celebrate!

7. Because, you say, Oprah is not so much a literary guide through Charles Dickens but a guide to using these novels as a tool for self-gratification, "Oprah’s readers have been left in the dark," though this perspective forgets that Oprah is hardly the only individual over at Harpo Productions that is contributing to the direction of this multi-media celebration of Dickens' novels.

8. You go on:

(Readers) must now scramble about to decipher Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms—and the sad truth is that, with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon. Instead, they can only mimic their high-school selves with calls of, “It’s too hard!”

Give these readers some credit! If they need or want guidance and don't get it from Oprah, they can find it easily elsewhere through a wealth of online and in-print resources about two of the most popular classic novels in the English language. It is worth noting that Dickens was a famously popular//populist writer who serialized his plot-heavy novels for a mass readership. But really, who are you, Hillary Kelly, to assume that these readers are dim bulbs who have no experience with classic novels in the first place? That is neither fair nor credible (particularly given the sheer magnitude of Oprah's audience).

9. And do you seriously believe that "with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon?" Seriously? That the only people who love nineteenth-century classic novels are those who have taken college courses in them? As someone who has gained a great deal from the "guides" I've had studying literature in college and graduate school, I say this: Oh, please.

10. What I love about reading and literary culture is the multiplicity of experiences it holds. While you say that the news of Oprah picking the Dickens novels amounts to--I quote--"Oprah 1, Literature 0," I want to nudge you into a bigger perspective. Literature holds magnitudes, my friend. Not every reading experience has to be identical to yours, Hillary Kelly, in order to be worthwhile.

VIDEO BOOK REVIEW: Best European Fiction 2011

 

The new issue of The Collagist debuts today, and with it comes my video review of Best European Fiction 2011 from Dalkey Archive Press, edited by Aleksandar Hemon and with a preface by Colum McCann. As usual, there is a lot of great material in this magazine--poems, stories, novel excerpts, eclectic book reviews--so please, go make yourself a cup of tea, settle in this morning, click over, and begin reading.

Isak Interview #9: Carol Ann Fitzgerald

This interview series features original conversations with folks around the world who are in the thick of literary culture -- the passionate writers, editors, critics, readers, translators, publishers, bloggers, designers, booksellers, poets, performers, journalists, and instructors who are bringing vibrancy and joy to the world of words. More than a rehash of things you have heard familiar names natter on about before, this series will turn its attention beyond the bounds of the usual suspects and the usual issues. This series is committed to a dynamic exploration of ideas, craft, language, literature, and culture with the people who are committing their lives to it. See more interviews here.

You may have noticed over at my (updated! expanded!) "Choose Books: A Gift Guide For People Who Care About Stories," I count The Oxford American as one of the Top Ten Magazine Gift Subscriptions. But here's the thing: it's not just a great magazine to give as a gift to others; it's one that you too deserve.

I stumbled on my first issue of The Oxford American on a Borders newstand and discovered a wealth of imaginative, intelligent, and exciting writing (including the work of Anne Trubek) inside a beautifully designed publication. Published quarterly out of Arkansas since 1992, it has won two National Magazine Awards and featured original writing by Roy Blount, Jr., ZZ Packer,  Ernest J. Gaines, and many other brilliant storytellers (as well as previously unpublished work by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers... and so on). The Oxford American  is a decidedly multimedia publication, with a lively website, a strong artistic sensibility, two DVD releases, and a CD that comes with its very popular annual Southern Music issue.

Much of the credit for all this goes to Carol Ann Fitzgerald, the magazine's managing editor and art editor. 

Carol Ann has been with The Oxford American since 2003. Beyond her behind-the-scenes envisioning and hard work, she's also contributed content, including a passionate profile of jazz pianist, vocalist, and composer Amina Claudine Myers and the "Southern Girl" blog on the magazine's website. With a taste for substantive photography and art, she is a powerful force for bringing dimension, depth, and a design sensibility to the magazine's  sharp content.

In our conversation for Isak, Carol Ann and I discuss what the heck "Southern writing" means anyway, her own not-so-Southern background, how the magazine's multimedia platforms work together, and what, in her time with The Oxford American, she's learned about writing and reading. 

Here's Carol Ann:

To a Young Poet: A Letter From Dean Young

Seth Pollins, a poet and the nephew of Dean Young, has generously shared a remarkable letter that his uncle wrote to him awhile back. It's already been getting a good deal of attention, but, in the spirit of sharing this beautiful piece of writing as widely as possible, I can't resist bringing it to this space as well.

2/17/98

Dear Seth,

I was very happy to get your letter, and my mom sent me your story which I want to get to but things have been so busy lately, what with school here and all those demands, and I've been flying around doing readings, and always feeling that I'm not devoting enough time to anything, even my cat, I figured I'd better write you soon, even if it was before reading your story, because I guess you're off across the seas soon. I don't know if I can really help you through your uncertainties, but I think I understand what you're feeling, and wondering, and maybe doubting. As far as missing out on life because of devoting your time to writing, I don't think you need to worry about that: life will happen to you no matter what you do. There will be joys and celebrations. There will be nights crossing bridges you don't know the name of when some unspeakable beauty envelopes you. There will be nights looking from windows upon the staggered lights of some town when some unspeakable sadness envelopes you. There will be people you love who you can no longer find your way to. There will be new discoveries, new clouds that resemble strange and terrible things, tangerines and hangovers, and long, long telephone calls made of almost entirely silence. There will be enormous pains and small pains that are almost pleasurable. There will be haiku that suddenly make sense, and the feeling that something has been taken from you, and songs, always songs. So don't worry about missing life, it's like missing the sky, you can't, you'll always be under it and in it and sometimes high in it, but often just on the ground, moving from thing to do to, needing, crying, making people laugh, although it's hard to tell what they're laughing about because it seems you were just talking about how terrible life is. But one thing that won't just happen to you, like life, is teaching yourself to write well. So whatever time you spend doing that, can stand to spend, and need to spend, all that time that seems wasted and those rare moments that seem volcanic and so sure, is the time that must be spent, otherwise you'll never become the writer you want to become. And there's a funny thing about that, too. One is that you'll never become the writer you want to become. You'll never be satisfied, never really know if you are any good. You'll never be certain. I mean to you it probably seems I have some sort of certainty, I've published some books which sometimes show up in used bookstores right down there with Yeats and John Yau (who?) and just in the last couple of years or so people have started to hear of my work, of me, and now I'm teaching at this la de da writing program and poets who I think of as giants are treating me as a friend, which is, I admit, great, but there is flattery and there is the truth and one can never tell where one stops and one begins. My own sense of my my own writing is what have I done lately? It's the writing-nowness of it that matters, and in that we're all equals in the fog, each of us with a single flashlight with the batteries only lasting so long and we're not sure if we should signalling to some landing airplane or is that the galloping of horses we hear coming our way, or should we be just trying to find house again, that place where we were born, where some huge, beneficent force would lift us from our groggy tatters and fit us into a voluminous bed....

Read the rest of the letter here. And please consider stepping up to support Dean Young in his urgent search for a new heart--there is a lot you can do to help.