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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: borges (page 5 of 5)

Precision and Translation

The Complete Review links to an OpenDemocracy article bemoaning the lack of attention towards translated work. Although it’s true that there are classics out there deserving of translation (I’d really like to read Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologie some day), I have to wonder if the small percentage of translated books relative to others in the U.S. is really due to a specifically American dislike of translated work, rather than the sheer amount of American books that are produced. There is a European holism that produces a lot of German-French exchanges, as well as even more double translations from some obscure language (in addition to Albanian and Hungarian, Polish seems to count here for Gombrowicz as well as Lem) to French to English. But even that wouldn’t fully account for what the article describes.

Dilday is dismissive towards the academy, but it is the university that institutionalizes a real bias against translated literature. In the most prestigious universities, you study “English,” or else “comparative literature” in the original languages. There are very few opportunities to read translated literature; they are usually in cultural history classes, or else pet projects of professors that wouldn’t attract enough students otherwise. I don’t know if this attitude is present in most other countries, though I know it is England.

There are problems. There was a British imprint called “Quartet Encounters” that went out of business around the time when I was visiting the Strand in Manhattan often. Faced with a battery of obscure European novels, often in the less popular languages, I picked one or two up each time I was there. The list now doesn’t seem as imposing as it did then, but the eclecticism is admirable: for a subset, consider Martin Hansen, Ismail Kadare, Par Lagerkvist, Boris Vian, D.R. Popescu, Stig Dagerman, and Stanislaw Witkiewicz (I still wish I’d bought Insatiability, unreadable as it is). With matte covers, tasteful abstract cover art, there was a certain weight to the presentation, but the translations were, on the whole, pretty bad, pet projects of Englishmen or maybe student work.

(A good tip-off is whenever translators punt the problem of the familiar vs. polite second-person by using “thee” and “you”, respectively. The most egregious example I can think of is George Szirtes’ translation of Deszo Kosztolanyi’s Anna Edes, where a lothario seduces a woman by saying:

“I love you. Only you. I love thee.” Having addressed her formally so far, he whispered the last pronoun…'”Thee, thee. Say it. Thee. You say it too. Say it to me. Thee…thee…”

To be fair, Szirtes seemed to do an amazing job on The Melancholy of Resistance.)

But to echo Borges, what is lost is often miniscule compared to what is preserved. What you lose, however, is the authority to know exactly what was said, and what’s left is the uncertainty that one turn of phrase may or may not have a hidden resonance, that a language-specific idiom could not possibly communicate the same thing as whatever is in the original. The Quartet Encounters translations made this obvious, which in one sense was helpful. I had to treat them on the level of the abstract ideas, characters, and plots communicated imprecisely, not the specifics of the language. With few exceptions, I was not able to do this at university, and I appreciated the bald awkwardness of many of the translations, which pushed me away from the particulars of the words.

Oulipo Tangent: Milorad Pavic

The difference between the works most closely identified with Oulipo writers (Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies, Queneau’s Exercises in Style) and those works which, while in the same exploratory spirit, don’t quite coexist in the same genre is them, like Sladek’s below, John Barth and Robert Coover’s metafictional spirals, or Tristram Shandy, is often the existence of a procedural gimmick. If the clef to a roman is an easily referenced generative device or structural ploy, the work can seem that much more mathematical and clever.

The danger is that the gimmick becomes the book. Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted with Tea is based around a crossword puzzle, but the device does not seem to justify an entire book, which is otherwise erudite and well-written. But more interesting is Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, a self-proclaimed “lexicon novel” based around Eco-like historical research and mythology. But what is the one thing it is known for, the thing that became its main marketing point? It’s the thing so significant it made it into the rec.arts.books FAQ:

12) What is the difference between the male and female editions of DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS by Milorad Pavic?

The differing paragraph is given in both forms. (And is it just me, or is the male version eerily reminiscent of Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”?)

The Flames, Olaf Stapledon

The Flames (1947) was Stapledon’s last major work of fiction before he died in 1950. After having narrowed his scope from the huge cosmic histories of Last and First Men (history of humanity) and Star Maker (history of the universe, Dante-esque cameo by God at the end) to the earthbound Odd John (super-man) and Sirius (super-dog), The Flames reads like an attempt to stuff them all into a 50-page novella. It’s supremely confused, but the evident moroseness of an author who, in the face of a second world war, has decided that his imagination will not help, gives The Flames an immediacy that you never see in other top-flight fantasists like Borges.

It is written in Stapledon’s trademark stiff prose, which places it stylistically closer to H.G. Wells than to any contemporaneous science fiction originating from the United States’ pulps, and if Stapledon had read any of them, it doesn’t show. Even though Stapledon had rejected Wells for being too cynical, The Flames has a sludgy melancholy that allows joy only in the most ironic way.

The story consists of three segments, each of which undercuts the last. In the first, the sensitive narrator talks to a “flame” in a burning stone who tells of life on the sun and subsequent exile when the planets were formed, with a polite dispassion not so far from that of Hal Clement. Despite some ill-fitting foreshadowing, the revelations in the second part that the flames are hellbent on manipulating humanity to help them thrive and pursue their spiritual aims, through mind control if necessary. To this end the flame reveals that he and his comrades caused the narrator’s wife to commit suicide, so the narrator could devote himself fully to his studies and establish contact with the flames. This is all vaguely silly and melodramatic, and trivializes the first section. I don’t know if Stapledon read Charles Fort, but he treads on similar territory here, and with no better luck than Fort or Eric Frank Russell in The Sinister Barrier.

But in the third segment, Stapledon plays down the mind-control aspect and the particulars of the flames’ existence to focus on their religious history, which is a rewrite of the tail end of Star Maker: advanced beings, including the flames, join into a single cosmic mind that then searches the total vision of reality. This time, though, the revelation of the total indifference of the Maker (who, while not quite absent, is not as personified as it is in Star Maker) is catastrophic and the cosmic mind collapses. Star Maker ended with a little homily on the significance of humanity’s efforts; “The Flames” ends with the flames deciding that a Loving God is such a great idea that He must exist, and stupidly start the whole process up again, killing the narrator in the process for questioning them.

All this comes as a shock after the first two parts, which had alluded to the flames’ abstract spirituality but had only used it as a differentiating point between their minds and human emotional experience. Stapledon suddenly seems possessed by a need to rewrite his previous optimism from fifteen years before. The only hint of this comes late in the first segment, where, after receiving a noetic emotional experience from the flames (a great idea that Stapledon abandons), the narrator thinks he’s seen God, and the flame responds, in what sounds like a rebuke from Stapledon to his younger self:

Just because you have had an exciting and clarifying experience you persuade yourself that you must have had a revelation of the heart of the universe.

It’s tempting to see the later inversion as indicative of narrative unity, but it just doesn’t make sense. The entire cosmic mind comes out of nowhere, and Stapledon is so driven to drive it to cosmic despair that he converts the flames into religious devotees. As with most everything Stapledon wrote, there’s enough high-minded ideas flying off to distract from the incoherence, but the main message is one of repudiation of his earlier self, a rejection of human aspiration, and an embrace of Wellsian darkness. But Stapledon doesn’t have Wells’ detachment, and “The Flames” is ultimately more miserable than anything Wells wrote. Stapledon’s self-flagellation over believing in his own imagination’s “exciting and clarifying experiences” is evidently an overreaction, but it marks him as a brave, if defeated, man, and an antecedent of an entirely different tradition of science fiction.

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