"Ang Dinosawro" (Augusto Monterroso)

Ang Dinosawro
ni Augusto Monterroso



Pagkagising nya, naroon pa rin ang dinosawro.







Salin mula sa Ingles ni Edith Grossman






Related posts:

"The Dinosaur" (Augusto Monterroso)

An elegant proof

My Kind of Girl (Buddhadeva Bose)

BUDDHADEVA BOSE

Four men, complete strangers to each other, were stranded on a night train. They met a young couple ("clearly newlyweds") who appeared very much in love. This sight of the couple triggered memories for each of them. They began reflecting about love. They decided to pass the time sharing stories with each other. Each of the four stories that followed was rendered in very simple yet beautiful prose. They were all simple tales but together they form a subtle whole.

Romantic love is the subject of  My Kind of Girl (1951, English 2010) by Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974), a prolific Bengali writer. Though primarily known as a poet, Bose wrote in various genres, including novel, short fiction, drama, and essay. He was often considered in the same breath as the Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.

The novel is a slim one, 138 pages, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, who is said to be presently at work on Bose's magnum opus Tithidore (1949), a family saga. Bose himself was an accomplished translator of European poets like Rainer Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire.

Anyway, romantic love. If being in love is a natural subject for poets, then Bose was one of its purest practitioners. He explored the theme in a very likeable way, even if the stories did not have fairy tale-like endings. There are no special pyrotechnics in his writing, but sometimes the sentences will stop one in his tracks –

In the ashen first light of dawn we saw his lips move. We were so still as we watched, and it was so silent all around, that we seemed to see his words, not hear them.

There's something oddly fantastic about that seeming ability to see words in complete silence. There it was. Utterly compelling.

The descriptions of characters can be cartoonish but the unusual circumstances they found themselves in allowed them to easily surpass their cartoonish-ness. There's a sense of humor, hesitant, poker-faced. Here is a striking passage, a handsome parody of Austen's "truth universally acknowledged":

   ... Theirs was an affluent household, and a bride would only make their cup of joy brim over. And the boy wasn't one of those typical, bespectacled midgets – just see how handsome he was.
   Yes, he was indeed handsome – there was no denying this. I know – knew – Makhanlal very well; at twenty-one he was a burly, powerful giant who looked thirty-two. Large and ungainly, he had prominent teeth, a manly, hair-covered chest, enormous shoes that caused great consternation when they were sighted lying around. Seeing as he could easily pass for a father of three, it didn't seem suitable for him not to be married.

The stories may be sharing the same topic and setting, yet their diverse viewpoints formed individual portraits of the social and cultural contexts of India in the early period of 20th century. The stories formed a whole because they seemed to spring from the same source of feeling. Being in love was mixed in different states of being: disillusion, loss of idealism, pride, kindness, compassion. The simple telling was an assurance that the novel was devoid of mawkish chick-litry.

The stories build on each other. They enlarge. Like love, they can be beautiful and in that sense, inspiring and life-affirming. Also, they can be cruel and heartbreaking and yet still enlarge the heart, by a few millimeters at least.

"The more I heard about love, the more I wanted it," a dejected character cried out at one point in the story he was telling. For love can be addictive. The four voices in My Kind of Girl, spun in a kind of addictive prose, somehow tells of it.

The novel reminded me of another book set in the region. Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra is also structured as a book of independent love stories, seemingly linked by the writer's fine sensibility and poetry. It also reminded me of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. For the characters are in search of a suitable boy or girl to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage and matchmaking were the book's provinces.

The two wonderful books by the two Vikrams can be traced to the same (romantic) tradition as Bose's. It was a tradition that was not blind to historical and cultural shifts in Indian society – to a time when attitudes by, and toward, women were starting to change. These attitudes are increasing liberality and independence. The passing references to them in Bose's stories are constructing a map and milieu of this new understanding.

The book brings in a flux of strong feelings, some empathy, personal and social revolutions. Possibly more. Acquaintanceship with an excellent writer.


I read an advanced reading copy of this book which I received through BookMooch.



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Beowulf (translation by Seamus Heaney)

Spoiler. Alert.

So. In the midst of this fiendish fun-book,
monsters flit to and fro, the hungry blokes.
Heaney's translation exhales and breathes.
It brooks no comparison mayhaps.
Old English’s boon is drinking in its words,
delivering blow by blow as swords clash
bilingually. The movie grays beyond
compare to the verses that believe
in the breast where the chain-mail protects
our hero’s blood, and flesh. The chain-mail cloth
is everything to the brave wolf’s safety net.
To the adventuring prince Beowulf, it brings
the bad bad wolf into the epic
big big.

Ho! The villain comes to town
to slay a lot of warriors, to orphan boys
and girls. Beowulf to the rescue, fasten
your seats. The ride’s rough but blood
is plentiful. Holy smack! The brutal
arm-of-monster is ripped-torn from
the sharp shoulder blade. It demands big-eyed
wonderment: the hero’s bare-hand handiwork,
He was unarmed, yes, yet he prevailed, leaving
a one-armed monster with a big wound
to lick. Thus ended the evil ambushing,
the terror-monger's terrible monstering.
The ligaments were showing, the wire of nerves.
Blood drip-dripped, the bad monster’s life’s snatched
as the arm was un-armed. While our insouciant hero
Beowulf was unharmed! Hurrah!

The death-den is inviting men to the death.
God-Messiah we pray for the strength of one man:
the macho muscles of the brawn Beowulf.
He was the stoic power of the people. He must
have crunched up to the bone, built strength
to the marrow, exercised fastidiously, lifted
weights, then aghast, his enemies
must cower and declare their sincere cowardice
else their heads fall to the side, leaving
headless necks atop headless bodies.
Heeded, less and more, the call of poetry -
Heaney was bold to use words that build
realism of battle scenes and gruesome gore.

Act Two was the jolly vengeance of angry ma.
Grendel was grand yet his mother was grander.
Monsters extraordinaire, the twosome trolls
haunted the lands of Denmark, mark it.
The battleground was ever wet, the sea.
Beowulf brought his diving gear and
dived to the bottom of the muck where
the ugly wicked momma sat femme fatally.
Nothing was as risky as that, cannibally,
a truesome truth that grew out of some
pure greed and gluttony, an evil hue.
The underwater skirmish would make
the non-swimmer squirm in his skin.
Beowulf emerged from the water victorious,
the aqua-monster was victimized,
drowned by her own amphibious lungs.

Years passed.

Ha! Enter the dragon breathing fire
in each cranny and nook. The cave of treasure
was thieved and dragon went berserk.
The gold must be returned by hook
or by crooked ways. The reader on edge, at the precipice’s
edge, suspense suspended, hanging by threads.
Spiderman’s finally defeated, crawling on all fours
after inflicting the draconian wound to his enemy.
Testosterone’s elevated to the throne,
Pure energy, pure pyre and fireworks.
The visual effects eye-popped and thrown
the reader out of balance watching
with bated breath, as the hero bathed in sweat.
The ring-leader was un-ringed, the hero
was un-kinged, escaped his final escapade,
delivered his final feeble speech. The people
were aggrieved by this smashing turn of events.
Exeunt knifed dragon and slain dragon-slayer.

Before the blogger forgets, via dismembered
memory, the rating is waiting: five out of five
stars. And may it shine as it brings
a shiner, a result of a hardline punch.
The hard lines of poetry were not by an epigone.
The poet had versed-translated them epically
with the spirit, mayhaps, of nobility,
of Anglo-Saxon succession of virtues
and vices that continue to this day.
Contemporary reader wasn't held at bay.
The interest waxed and did not wane.
It was bloody and disarming.




(Image: Gerard Butler as Beowulf)

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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