Rilke

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

                                                         - from the Duino Elegies (1923),
                                                           Rainer Maria Rilke,
                                                           translation by Stephen Mitchell
 


The opening of Rilke's classic sequence of elegies. Beautiful, isn't it? Beautiful and scary at the same time.

I recently acquired a book called Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H. Gass. It's classified as both biography and autobiography, an interesting combination. The subtitle alone makes me excited. And it's about translating poetry, one of my interests. A browse of the table of contents will give you some mysterious titles for chapters. They already sound like lines of a poem:
 

Lifeleading
Transreading
Ein Gott Vermags
Inhalation in a God
Schade
The Grace of Great Things
Erect No Memorial Stone
The Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke

The final chapter, Gass's full translation of Duino Elegies, is the cherry topping. Add to that the translations of some of Rilke's other poems scattered throughout the text, then I can't wait to down the pages of this book.

Gass's translation first came out in 1999; Mitchell's in 1982. In Gass's bibliography a list of 16 more translations of the same poem are given. This German poem surely resists the many rewordings of it, but it also survives miraculously in these interpretations.

A look at the end of Reading Rilke gives the same lines but with a different flavor:

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions
of Angels? And even if one of them suddenly
held me against his heart, I would fade in the grip
of that completer existence—a beauty we can barely
endure, because it is nothing but terror's herald;
and we worship it so because it serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is awesome.

I would certainly prefer an awesome Angel over a terrifying one. But not in this poem. "Terrifying" is simply a better choice and this poem ought to be that, terrifying. The poem inhabits various states of terror and tenderness and confusion. There is a searching edge to the voice. Mitchell's version reads well in terms of the forward movement of the lines and the rhythmic elegance of despair.

I am attempting a translation of "The First Elegy" into Filipino, my vernacular language. As my German is nil, I will use the English texts of both Mitchell and Gass. It will thus be a translation of translations. The inaccessibility of German to me is the main reason why I will be translating more the sense of the poem (from English), rather than the words.

I hope to be able to post my own version before the end of the month. August coincides with the Buwan ng Wika, or the National Language Month, in the Philippines. This exercise then will be my way of celebrating the Filipino language. I shall start like this:

Sino, sa aking pagtangis, ang makikinig mula sa orden
ng mga anghel? ...

Third epilogue for variations: "Literature + Illness = Illness" (Roberto Bolaño)

The August issue of Harper's contains an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's "Literature + Illness = Illness," an essay collected from The Insufferable Gaucho (El gaucho insufrible, 2003) which comes out this month from New Directions. The book contains 2 essays and 5 stories - two of which, the title story and "Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey," already appeared in The New Yorker. It's translated by Chris Andrews. You need to subscribe to view it online. The same essay, translated as "Literature + Sickness = Sickness" by an unnamed translator, was published in News from the Republic of Letters in 2005.

Sections of the essay have titles like “Illness and freedom”, “Illness and French poetry”, “Illness and travel”, and “Illness and Kafka.” The two versions are quite different in approach that one wonders if two patients were made out of one sick person. But no, it's obvious that both essayists are terminally ill. Here's a bit of comparison:


SICKNESS AND LITERATURE
(from News from the Republic of Letters)

No wonder the lecturer beats about the bush. Take the following case. The speaker is going to talk about sickness. There are all of ten people in the theater. Each of them waits there with a dignified expectation worthy of a better subject. The lecture is scheduled for seven or eight in the evening. Nobody’s eaten a thing. So when seven o’clock comes round (or eight, or nine) everyone is sitting there with their cell-phones turned off. It’s a pleasure to speak to people with such good manners. Nevertheless, the lecturer doesn’t show up, and finally one of the organizers of the event announces that he can’t come: at the very last moment he’s fallen grievously ill.


ILLNESS AND PUBLIC SPEAKING
(from The Insufferable Gaucho, translated by Chris Andrews)

No one should be surprised if the speaker loses his thread. Let us imagine the following scenario. The speaker is going to speak about illness. Ten people spread themselves around the auditorium. The buzz of anticipation in the air is worthy of a better reward. The talk is scheduled to begin at seven in the evening or eight at night. No one in the audience has had dinner. By seven (or eight, or nine), they are all present and seated, with their cell phones switched off. It’s a pleasure to speak to such a well-mannered group of people. But the speaker fails to appear, and finally one of the organizers of the event announces that he will not be coming because, at the last minute, he has fallen gravely ill.




[Note: This post edited Nov. 27, 2010. The passage translated by Chris Andrews above was taken from the book, not from the Harper's excerpt.]

Reading diary: April 2010

More quick reviews. But before that, I should mention that this blog is now proud to be in the directory of Filipino Book Bloggers. I invite you to visit the site and link to many enthusiastic book reviews by bloggistas from the Philippines.

APRIL 2010

19. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard

"It is the the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself," says Barthes. For that we may need images and photographs to certify the text. Barthes's reflections on photography offer some subversive theories on the persistence of images in the imagination. In the end, however, the writer's memoirs provide a surprisingly affecting portrait of a man coming to terms with his personal loss.

20. Piercing by Murakami Ryū, translated by Ralph McCarthy

A book for the faint of heart, that the heart may skip a beat, or several beats, and then resume its life of pumping. A send-up to the psycho killer setup in movies and books, Piercing is transgressive fiction at its creepiest. And yet it's very funny. That funny-scary combination must be one of the hardest to pull off but Ryū is criminally accurate in puncturing the reader's ready expectations. He is a serial novelist who aims for the kill. I'd like to be victimized by his other books.

21. Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer

Paris is a moveable feast. It is a place for finding love and of losing it. In this novel we find two couples struggling with circumstances of their own making. It's like The Sun Also Rises for the 1990s in which the once-hippie lover will ask at the end of the affair, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

The book escapes the bathos of nostalgia and ennui by embracing them. The drifting ways in which love ebbs and flows are well told by George Dyer, who lately have been known to produce some hybrid novels of journalism. This novel is of the traditional sort. But it's crisp in its portrayal of longings and loves as it is.

22. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews

Aira is an incandescent talent. This novella is beautiful, poetic. The episode just ended too soon. The book's theme is the creation of a masterpiece, and it's very near producing one itself. It unfolds like a canvas of lighted landscapes here traversed by artists in the making.

What I love about An Episode and the other Aira I've read (Ghosts) is that you keep reading the books even after you finished reading them. They linger in your mind like a flash of lightning or something. The story ends with always the maximum impact. In between the flashes of brilliance are musings of the poetical nature.

Ghosts is a bit longer in length. And I think it is just as well made if not better. Aira is a puzzle-maker. I asked myself after reading each of the books: What the hell was that all about? Yet it all made sense in the end. As if the abrupt way the story ended is the only possible way to end a story already unhinged from its frame.

23. Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Jaime Deza, the protagonist of this novel, has this power of reading people. His mentor, an old man, is the same. They can know people's history and psychology and what they're capable of just by observing them and hearing them talk. Nothing happens much in this the first volume of the story. What is certain is that by the end of the third volume, someone will be betrayed and will pay the price for "careless talk." This is ultimately a spy story, but it's James Bond in the role of a psychologist.

Marías is Marías. His characters talk and talk and think and think. They can be repetitive and exasperating. Very few paragraph breaks and sentences that go on and on and on and on. Some beautiful insights into telling stories and the capacity to betray others with a single word.

I’m bracing for less talk/more action in Act II (Dance and Dream). But I wouldn't be surprised if the spies still battle with their minds here. Dance and Dream is proving to be another mental bloodbath.

"Air War and Literature" (W. G. Sebald), 2

In "Air War and Literature," Sebald was trying to account for the unexplained disengagement from reality of the works of German literary writers right after the second world war. Self-righteousness, pedantry, insensitivity - these can be leveled against this attempt to recover some forgotten memory, soul, or conscience that was left in the ashes of ruined shelters and buildings. Why bring out to the surface what has been safely kept from sight? Given Sebald's high standing in contemporary literature - achieved through the publication of a series of radical novels which broke new genre grounds while essaying the stories of melancholic survivors of history and atrocity - his arguments cannot be easily dismissed. His persistence on the matter brought discomfort and provoked a critical examination of literature that has so far come out in Germany in the past half-century.

Sebald identified some consequences of his perceived literary self-censorship and selective amnesia. One is the lack of masterpieces. There is a clamor for the “great German epic of the wartime and postwar periods.” The economic miracle in Germany is another possible consequence. As if the citizens became conscientious traders and miracle workers to cover for their ruined livelihoods.

Whereas recounting “truthfully” is an activity that requires soul-searching, it is still not antithetical to hanging one’s own head in guilt. A neat explanation is impossible. Should the victims insulate their selves or express open grief? Sebald was right to refer to psychoanalytic explanations of the mental stress experienced by victims, but it is such a confounding phenomenon that his quotations are hardly definitive. One of the implicit causes of the breakdown of collective memory is the legacy of an unorthodox worldview. The assumption is that forgetfulness is a fruit of fascism: a lewd legacy of totalitarian regime.

A potential weakness of Sebald’s line of thinking is a pedantic critique of trauma and guilt as originators of desensitized mental state. One of the causes he gave is the shared guilt by the Germans to the holocaust. They cannot complain of massacre because their kind has done similar terrible crimes. This is the default “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” principle which in this case cannot be easily abstracted for its complex psychological nature. The causes and the effects of violence, cruelty, and evil may be so interchangeable that one does not know where one begins and the other ends. This is the bane of modern humanity.

* * *

Sebald decried the lack of German masterpieces yet failed to mention the novels of Günter Grass, notably The Tin Drum (as Hydriotaphia commented on the previous post). This novel is widely read and considered a masterpiece. It also contains scenes of the aftermath of bombings, as the critic Ruth Franklin pointed out. This elimination of Grass by Sebald speaks volumes. It can only mean that he does not subscribe to Grass's aesthetic representation of suffering.

Grass himself was critical of Sebald. He said in an interview with The New York Times that he welcomed books about the Allied bombing such as the one written by Jörg Friedrich (Der Brand, or The Fire):

But he agreed less with W. G. Sebald's essay, "Air War and Literature," published [in Germany] in 1999 and in English [in 2003], in a collection called, "On the Natural History of Destruction." Mr. Sebald, who died in 2001, argues that postwar German writers ignored German suffering during the war. "The novels of Henrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen deal with these things," Mr. Grass said. "If I had met Sebald, I would have asked him, 'Why don't you write a book about it?' "

The novelist did write something. In "Air War" itself, he provided a summation of what happened during that time. His problematique begins with a sweeping diagnosis: The Germans have abdicated their role to provide a credible witness to history’s errors. To correct this, the novelist has to produce his own version of the events with graphic details culled from the diaries of survivors. The novelist maintains that a synoptic and artificial view of the bombings are needed because eyewitness accounts are either unreliable or clichéd. In producing his own synopsis of the bombing, the novelist is reliving an un-witnessed carpet-bombing, enacting his own repressed history, reading the silent documents from the archives, and ultimately satisfying his own hunger for truth. He is lighting a new fuse, creating another possibility, and surviving his own firestorm. His means are his ends.

GIVEAWAY: Totto-chan

It's the middle of the month, time for another giveaway. Here is what's at stake.

Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window

by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

Translated by Dorothy Britton

Illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki.

Please note that this giveaway is open only to readers in the Philippines.

The book is not new but the pages are in very good condition. It has a fold on dust jacket and front cover. It's a mass market paperback, with dust jacket.

Learn more about this book from the publisher's page.

The rules are too simple. Just drop me an email. Subject: "Hello, Totto-chan". Include your full name and your full mailing address (within the Philippines only). One address per reader, one reader per address. A winner will be chosen from the entries using a random number generator.

The deadline is midnight of August 31st, local time. I'll update this post and announce the winner here.

Good Luck!

UPDATE (Sept. 2): Congratulations to Faye of Dasmariñas City.