Don Q, via Cervantes

RANK BADGE, MING DYNASTY, EARLY 15TH CENTURY CHINA EMBROIDERY

In which the blogger posts his final thoughts on the novel, with a nod to its real author.


The pleasures, the comedies, the verisimilitude of Don Quixote are bottomless, unrelenting, imaginative, that the reader, both the open and close ones, will be relishing its tricks and treats. A reader open to the unforgiving comedy will forgive the author for concocting all kinds of humor, from the slapstick to pitch black. The close reader, if by close we mean the closeness to the spirit of adventure, the willingness to be subjected to quixotic winks and, can I say, sanchic-panzic wit, in other words to be "in on the joke", will be rewarded with plenty of amusement. To be laughed about or lapped up. Or, being laughable, simply lopped off.

   '... If you do not believe me, Sancho, I beg you to do something that will correct your mistake and make you see that I am telling you the truth: mount your ass and stalk them [flocks of sheep], and you will soon see how, once they have gone a little way, they turn back into what they were at first and, ceasing to be sheep, become real men again, just as I described them to you. But do not go yet, because I have need of your assistance: come here and see how many of my teeth are missing, for it seems to me that there is not one left in my mouth.'
   Sancho came so close that his eyes were nearly inside his master's mouth ... [Part I, Chapter XVIII, Rutherford translation]

We are inside the mind of the author of the Quixote, who at this point is reading the translator's writing from the manuscript by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. What happens next inside the mouth of our knight errant, where Sancho's eyes peered as close as any close reader of a text, is so gross it could turn one's stomach upside down and spew all the hibernating contents. For that was precisely what happened.

The history sometimes displays humor through puns so sprightly they could make one jump up and down:

   'I didn't cut any capers in the blanket.' Sancho retorted. 'I cut them in the air, and more of them than I'd have chosen to.'
   'I suppose,' added Don Quixote, 'that every history that has ever been written has its ups and downs ...' [Part II, Chapter III]

Somehow the comedy also paints a most disturbing picture of the times. Spain in the time of Cervantes being a time of inquisitive struggles.

   ... Sancho stood up and took himself a good way off, and as he went to lean against another tree he felt something touching his head; he raised his hands and they came into contact with two feet in their shoes and stockings. He shuddered with fear and went to another tree, and the same thing happened there. He screamed to Don Quixote for help. Don Quixote came and when he asked Sancho what had happened and what he was frightened of, Sancho replied that all those trees were full of human feet and legs. Don Quixote felt them, and immediately realized what the cause might be, and said:
   'There's no need to be afraid, these legs and feet that you can feel and cannot see must belong to outlaws and bandits who have been hanged from these trees; in these parts the authorities hang them twenty or thirty at a time when they catch them, from which I deduce that we must be near Barcelona.'
   And he was quite right, too. As they were leaving, they raised their eyes and saw the fruit that was hanging from those trees: bandits' corpses. [Part II, Chapter LX]

There's no need to be afraid. Yeah, right. Can anything be more surreal than some booted pairs of feet dangling lifeless from trees. Indeed, it could be an influence of a scene happening in the night. A powerful, disconcerting image in any context that it will give one pause (there's a striking passage, for example, in Laforet's Nada referring to a hanged man on a tree, quoted in Caravana de recuerdos.) What a strange and black sense of humor the historian must have had to include this unsolicited lesson on the death penalty. Poor Sancho. The comedy is not funny at all when you just plain jump in fright and it's your heart that goes up and down.
 
The translated "true history" was so grounded in the historical and the real that it contained some details that speak of events, conflicts and religious policies in the 16th/17th century. There was also, for example, the prejudice against races, particularly the Morisco people (converts from Muslim) who were forcibly driven out of Spain because of their race.

There was no respite to humor in the novel. Comedy was so well integrated into the history's base and superstructure that it functioned as a conduit for its telling. Humor and history closely accompanied each other.

In addition to poking fun of knightly misadventures and verisimilar historical events, the true history floated certain questions of authorship, translation, plagiarism, and the self-determination of characters. Humor also brought these questions to their feet.

Don Quixote, it turned out, had such a poor regard of translation that he inadvertently belittled his own true history, which was in the first place a purported text translated from the Arabic. In fact, the Quixote is not so much an early instance of metafiction as the progenitor of what could be termed as a meta-translation. That is, a written text that (i) is being put forward as a translation and (ii) is well-aware of the fact.

Here is our knight on the subject of translation (a passage used as epigraph in translator John Rutherford's introduction to the book):

And yet it seems to me that translating from one language into another, except from those queens of languages, Greek and Latin, is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, when, although one can make out the figures, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and one cannot appreciate the smooth finish of the right side; and translating from easy languages is no indication of talent or literary ability, any more than transcribing or copying a document on to another piece of paper is. [Part II, Chapter LXII]

Arabic being one of these "easy languages" instantly made the present written history of our knight already suspect, presumably because it has hidden the smooth finish of the fabric. (Of course, the English translation stitched from the Spanish doubly concealed the lining. So we didn't really stand a chance.) For although Don Quixote extols the virtues of his historian for his supposed accuracy in laying down his adventures, his idea of the inadequacy of translation to deliver the nuances of the whole pattern of the tapestry, humbled the entire enterprise of the paid translator. This seeming inconsistency was yet another manifestation of the pragmatic attitude of the storyteller toward his own tale that harks back to the very first sentences of the novel, where the narrator confessed that the idea for the book (likened to a "son") was conceived while he was in prison.

Idle reader: I don't have to swear any oaths to persuade you that I should like this book, since it is the son of my brain, to be the most beautiful, elegant and intelligent book imaginable. But I couldn't go against the order of nature, according to which like gives birth to like. And to what can my barren and ill-cultivated mind give birth except the history of a dry, shrivelled child, whimsical and full of extravagant fancies that nobody has ever imagined – a child born, after all, in prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation? [Prologue]

Ah, truth in storytelling is never as slippery as when one tries to efface the traces of active authorship by electing to be humble before one's own creation. How could something living and vital be willed to be born if the mind that constructed it was, from the start, dry and barren, hence infertile?

One last note. Going back to the idea of translation as the reverse side of the tapestry, this novel metaphor yet proved original thinking on the part of the speaker.

Or not.

It may be possible that this fabric thing was fabricated from another source, in the same way that several lyrics and verses in the novel were filched from other writers and appropriated by Don Quixote as his own. A similar idea on translation was alluded to in The Book of Tea (1906) by Kakuzo Okakura:

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound?

The idea of translation as the reverse of tapestry [PDF] was attributed to an author of the Ming dynasty, whose reign at least overlapped with the lifetime of Cervantes. Who was this Ming author and what exactly did he say, in what book or scroll? Whether the brocade/tapestry idea was independently formulated by Cervantes or whether he absorbed it from the Ming directly or indirectly, is still an open question. In the meantime, those threads were indeed obscuring the design, preventing us from admiring the full frontal beauty of the original.

But why does a viewer choose to look from behind? One can always turn the carpet around and look for the embroidery. An imaginative translation of a meta-translation, from any language, king or queen or subject, has the capacity to reveal the intricate colors by approximating the loops the threads make in the original, using different kinds of fibers. If it is any good, it could even weave another textile of its own, one whose subtlety and smoothness can approach the original patterning. The workmanship preserved regardless of how the translator has woven the materials or operated the loom.


P.S.
Do not believe the blogger when he said this will be his final post on the subject. He has mooched another adaptation that promises to explore some catholic ideas about the nature of truth, or that will probably tackle faithfulness to the source text, if not the author's faith to his brainchild. "Don Q, via Greene" goes like this:

[T]he author continues to explore moral and theological dilemmas through psychologically astute character studies and exciting drama on an international stage. The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village ...

Doesn't that sound the least bit heretical?



(Image source: Rank badge [China] (1988.154.1) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

South of the Border, West of the Sun (Murakami Haruki)

The story, a love story, is simple. A boy fell in love with a girl. Many years later, when the man was already married, they met again.

I usually hate Haruki Murakami's fiction. The flatness of his characters, the cheesy self-help quotes, the repetitions of these cheesy self-help quotes, the poor execution of surrealism. These are some of my gripes about his works, particularly in most short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, all the stories in after the quake, and in Kafka on the Shore. The latter novel is simply an ambitious mess of puzzle fragments whose seams show at the edges. So I'm a bit surprised with the depth of characterization in South of the Border, West of the Sun. Murakami's mannerisms were still present but they were tempered by the voice of its narrator. The things that don't work well with the other books found their way here in concentrated form but somehow this book resisted the tendency to be mediocre. Perhaps it was because of the straight diction of the book, which can be detected in translator Philip Gabriel's careful words. For some reason, I liked this book as much as I liked Norwegian Wood. The simple writing style evoked authentic feelings of pain and loss. The characters were ordinary (ordinary guy, ordinary person) as the characters themselves are wont to describe themselves, here as well as in Norwegian Wood. Their very ordinariness questioning the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in, the unusual relationships forged and broken. The narrator's emotional journey progressed through a fair amount of self-examination, an all too honest self-examination that was despairing and yet never totally depressing, never completely succumbing to the blows of life and hate, to the vision of the abyss. The main characters foundered and were lost. But a touch of hope lingered at the end, a generous glimpse of the miracle of existence. The ordinary characters were trying to be brave for the coming of "a brand-new day", here in this novel and in others.

This love story had certain moments of darkness, certain ominous moments. Yet in certain places, it had lightness and buoyancy, the fleeting clarity of an insight. Perhaps an inner truth, perhaps what goes on in the heart.

It's a good story. As clear and transparent as good wine.




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Seven stories by João Guimarães Rosa

The seven stories came from the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006), edited by K David Jackson. João Guimarães Rosa (1908-64) published two short story collections in his lifetime - Sagarana (1946, English version in 1966 by Harriet de Onís) and Primeiras estórias (1962, The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, 1968 English version by Barbara Shelby). Another two were published posthumously, both still untranslated - Tutaméia: terceiras estórias (1967) and Estas estórias (1969). The two English versions, from Knopf, were now safely out of print.

It took more than 35 years after the death of Guimarães Rosa, at the turn of the millennium, before two new anthologies of his stories in English will see print again. In 2001, The Jaguar, a collection of 8 stories, came out in a translation by David Treece, a professor of Portuguese in King's College London. The Jaguar was reprinted in 2008 to commemorate the centenary of Guimarães Rosa's birth. The stories in that collection came from Primeiras estórias (6 stories) and Estas estórias (2 stories, including the titular story).

The other substantial story anthology that brought back the Brazilian novelist in print was the Oxford Anthology, which contains 72 stories by 37 Brazilian writers. The most represented writers were Machado de Assis (10 stories, 63 pages), Clarice Lispector (9 stories, 36 pages) and Guimarães Rosa (7 stories, 56 pages).

As with The Jaguar, the bulk of Rosean stories in the Oxford edition came from Primeiras estórias (5 stories, four were from Shelby's translations in The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories) and Estas estórias (2 stories). Four of the seven stories overlapped with Treece's selection. In fact, "The Jaguar" is reprinted in the same translation by Treece.

At present, The Jaguar and Oxford Anthology constitute the only available selections of a fair number of stories by Guimarães Rosa in print. Here's a brief description of each of the stories in the Oxford anthology.


1. "The Girl from Beyond" (translated by Barbara Shelby)

Nhinhinha is a young girl in possession of a unique power. There's something in the composition and subject of the story that is akin to Juan Rulfo's stories, particularly in terms of the thematic exploration of folk religion, delusion, and hypocrisy.

2. "Much Ado" (translated by Barbara Shelby)

Immedicable, empalmed, fantastico-inauspicious, psychiataster, circumstanding - these are only some of the unusual words in this story which make one curious how the translator came up with them. It is an amusing tale of a man of high position who climbed a place of high position (a palm tree) in the nude and declared to everyone watching that "Living is impossible!" What happens next is surreal.

3. "Soroco, His Mother, His Daughter" (translated by Barbara Shelby)

Soroco accompanies the two women of his life to the railroad, for them to board the train on the way to the madhouse, apparently to stay there as mental patients. This story is quite brief and did not waste any word. It lodges in the mind, like the last song syndrome.

4. "The Third Bank of the River" (translated by William Grossman)

A man suddenly just up and went to live in a boat by the river, leaving his family behind, leaving them for good. What was wrong with him? Did he go crazy? The story is the most anthologized by Guimarães Rosa, as well as the most translated (three times). It is a succinct encapsulation of his principles, that of the dynamic interface between civilization and savagery, sanity and madness.
 
The story also appeared in translation in Modern Brazilian Short Stories (1967, ed. William Grossman, the version in this edition). It was anthologized at least six more times, including in The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature (second volume, 1977, eds. Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Thomas Colchie) and in The Jaguar.

5. "Treetops" (translated by Barbara Shelby)

A boy was separated from his ill mother. His uncle fetched him from home and they travelled by plane to a far away place. The boy tried to cope with his loneliness and homesickness by playing with his monkey doll. Suddenly there appeared a toucan bird flying above the forest trees. Through the toucan the boy projected his temporary happiness as he searched for peace of mind, an inner peace that can only be provided for by transient animals (the stuffed toy and the bird). Guimarães Rosa's writing about a child's consciousness and longing was very sensitive and delicate, evoking the journey of a troubled spirit.

6. "Those Lopes" (translated by Richard Zenith)

"Those Lopes" is an exploration of female psychology, a short story containing the kernel of what could be a novel about a woman who suffered domination by men (by the Lopes). The words used by Richard Zenith, the translator, are very precise and controlled. They reproduce the rhythmic anguish of a woman biding her time, waiting for the opportunity to break from her shackles. One can risk assuming that the words are faithful to the original language owing to the singular and confident voice in the story. Its "fresh" rendition makes it an easy favorite in the selection.

This translation is here published for the first time in book form. It appeared earlier in 1997 in the journal Grand Street. It is to be hoped that Zenith, if not Treece, will have the chance to put out the whole Estas estórias collection.

7. "The Jaguar" (translated by David Treece)

The same story that is the centerpiece in the anthology by David Treece, "The Jaguar" is a work of high craftsmanship, possibly representative of the Rosean stream of consciousness in the watershed novel Grande Sertão: Veredas. It's an intricate tale that traced its own ruthless monologic direction and produced its own taxonomy of several wildcat species for the purpose. The story was also published in Giovanni Pontiero's version, as "My Uncle, the Jaguar," in Masterworks of Latin American Short Fiction: Eight Novellas (1997, ed. Cass Canfield Jr).


Consummate plotting and poetic language are the best qualities of a Guimarães Rosa story. His sentence constructions are founded in a polyphonic range of styles and registers. His sense of language, of what words can convey in various combinations (phonetic, linguistic), demonstrates a writer's complete freedom to experiment, invent, and craft a story. He was most certainly a savant, given his spoken command of at least seven languages (fluent in most of them) and an aptitude of reading and understanding in several more. His "neglected" status was probably due in part to his reputation as a "difficult" writer (now contradicted by the most recent translations by Treece and Zenith), and in part to the unfounded fear of major English publishers to take risk with an experimental writer, an "avant-garde," despite his already prominent status in his homeland Brazil.

Until such time that Guimarães Rosa's major works were given their due and proper recognition by the readership in English, by being translated or re-translated, or at least reprinted - by being made widely available - a large proportion of readers remains in the dark about his standing in world literature. Fortunately, his literary presence, still undimmed 65 years after the publication of his first book, was detectable in the two latest available anthologies. Those who were able to read and appreciate his works in the now-rare English editions (or in any language for that matter) are lucky for getting an exclusive glimpse of what one story called the "other-place". Those who will be acquainted with his outputs through the selections by Treece and David Jackson, in The Jaguar and in this Oxford edition, will have the same rare privilege.

Marxism and Literary Criticism (Terry Eagleton)

Here is a concise introduction to the subject of reading socio-political "relevance" in books. Terry Eagleton surveyed the rise of Marxist literary critics and their ideas and philosophies. It began with a definition of basic concepts of Marxist lit theory (base and superstructure) and then proceeded toward a critique of early interpretations of the theory. The approach is academic and somehow lacking some specific examples. The presentation of arguments was interesting even though it mentioned a lot of critics and books I'm not familiar with. The book will be most appreciated by those who have a background on the subject and its writers, from its originators Marx and Engels, to its modern interpreters Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Eagleton specifically approved of the types of response and criticism produced by the latter two: Brecht for his plays which were meant to be performed with complete improvisation, and Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – at least Eagleton convinced me to look out for these books. There are some good passages worth quoting but alas the book was mooched and I mailed it before I got the chance to type some passages I underlined. In any case, what I remember of the basic precepts and conclusions of the book range from the obvious (a text should not be overtly political) to the ingenious (texts are valued as much for their content as for the behind-the-scenes modes of production that went toward their publication; and also, history is an active arbiter of the relevance of literary texts, a book can be hailed as a success or failure depending on its place – or on the timing of its publication – in history).

Terry Eagleton is a critic best known for Literary Theory, another guidebook whose chapter one was a good background on the value judgements attributed to literary works, but whose succeeding chapters were written in one of those academic, scholarly, elegant, learned style. Hence, boring. I never did finish it.

His latest publication, Why Marx Was Right, is a return to the theory of Marxism. If the excerpt is any indicator, the book has a more philosophical (over academic) bent.

Because the working-class movement had been so battered and bloodied, and the political Left so robustly rolled back, the future seemed to have vanished without trace. For some on the left, the fall of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s served to deepen the disenchantment. It did not help that the most successful radical current of the modern age—revolutionary nationalism—was by this time pretty well exhausted. What bred the culture of postmodernism, with its dismissal of so-called grand narratives and triumphal announcement of the End of History, was above all the conviction that the future would now be simply more of the present.

. . .

Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire. It is more like being a medic. Medics are perverse, self-thwarting creatures who do themselves out of a job by curing patients who then no longer need them. The task of political radicals, similarly, is to get to the point where they would no longer be necessary because their goals would have been accomplished. They would then be free to bow out, burn their Guevara posters, take up that long-neglected cello again, and talk about something more intriguing than the Asiatic mode of production. Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests his whole identity in it has missed the point. That there is a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism.

There is only one problem with this otherwise alluring vision. Marxism is a critique of capitalism—the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of its kind ever to be launched. It follows, then, that as long as capitalism is still in business, Marxism must be as well. Only by superannuating its opponent can it superannuate itself. And on the last sighting, capitalism appeared as feisty as ever.

The new book – in sketching a new reading of the present based on an old model – appears to be not only a continuation but an extension, an amplification, of his Marxism and Literary Criticism. His introduced theme painted some very broad brushstrokes about why the contemporary global landscape is not very accommodating to Marxism. In the subsequent chapters of the book, his supposedly impassioned defense of Marxism from its detractors promises to be a hardening of his thesis about the continuing robustness of Marxism to describe the techno-capitalist society.

Borges and the Eternal Orang-utans (Luis Fernando Verissimo)

The book in question is a very funny, very entertaining and refreshing whodunit, with more than passing references to Borges (a major character here), Poe, and Lovecraft. Vogelstein is a 50-year old translator and English teacher who adored Borges with the same fanatical zeal as the narrator of the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." His first "encounter" with the master was not agreeable: Vogelstein translated one of Borges's stories for a Portuguese magazine but he changed some aspects of the story to fit his own preference for how the story should proceed. Of course, Borges, upon learning of the travesty, was furious. They eventually exchanged letters, which was the start of Vogelstein's literary hero worship.

Their second encounter was face to face, in a conference about Edgar Allan Poe held in Buenos Aires. But even before the conference was to start, a murder of one of the speakers took place. The murder victim was found, in true Borgesian fashion, in front of a mirror – his body's position was such that it formed a letter from the alphabet, a clue that could point to the solution of the crime. Borges and Vogelstein were enlisted to help uncover the identity of the killer. The ensuing investigation was a riot of literary speculations, invoking the mystery stories of Poe, the Kabbalah, Necronomicon book of the dead, et cetera. This novel was criminally funny. I'm sure there were some in-jokes (Borgian, Poetic, Lovecrafty) that went past me but it was altogether a solid detective work, if a bit too neat the way it all tied up, in a postmodern postmortem, in the end. Verissimo was nonetheless guilty of leading the reader into a maze of intertextual pleasures. There's a chance that a fan of Borges or Poe or Lovecraft will revel in the games and gimmickry of the Brazilian writer Luis Fernando Verissimo.

The short novel was translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who was probably in top form the way she came up with words to describe the murder weapon:

You mentioned that Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires where you were brought up, had been a violent place full of bohemians and bandits. There they had two names for the knife, "the blade" and "the slicer". The two names described the same object, but "the blade" was the thing itself, and "the slicer" its function. "The blade" could fit in the hand even of a sickly child shut up in his father's library, "the blade" could be any of the superannuated daggers and swords belonging to his warrior grandfather or great-grandfather and displayed on the walls of his house, but "the slicer", the knife in the hand slicing back and forth, in and out, existed only in his imagination, in a fascinating world of rapid settlings of accounts and duels over honour, an insult or a woman, in dark streets where you never went, where no writer went, except in the literature he wrote.

Whether it's "the knife" (instrument) or "the blade" (form) or "the slicer" (function), the essence of light and dark comedy here cuts through like any sharp object.