Daily Archives: January 15, 2009

family

I’ve got your “social network” right here

This nonwithstanding, the only new site I have joined today is www.tribalpages.com – a family tree plotting site. I recently was present at the Bat Mitzvah of a second cousin here in Chicago, and was inspired to plot out the three-tiered Weinberg family tree. There were three brothers, Murray, Isadore (Izzy) and David, who came to the US from Poland before WWII. Two stayed in the Midwest and one, my grandfather, came to California.

Having now returned to the Midwest, I’m meeting, mostly for the first time, the many, many Weinbergs who descend from Izzy and Murray. And for my own edification more than their own, I’ve plotted how we are all related. I spent so much of the Bat Mitzvah going, “Well, there were three brothers…” like a fairy tale or something, to all the people who wanted to know who I was.

Tribalpages has lots of neat widgets, like the ability to sort the entire tree, with a click, by any one person in it – to see all their descendants and ancestors. Very user-friendly.

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metablog

I want a new WordPress theme

but I don’t know which one. This is a warning, I guess, that you should get un-used to the green. It’s driving me bonkers. I’ve been avoiding blogging because I don’t like to look at the site. So gray – like the sky most days – and the font is too teeny. I want to do something radical and replace the entire thing with a styeleless setup. White background, plain text.

That’d be good for a blog about style, right?

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science, writing

continually conditioning society

So, some scientists have found, based on a questionnaire about whether or not Darcy and Elizabeth and Heathcliff are nice or nasty, that novels are “not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation,” but actually “continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way,” especially Victorian novels, which “have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.”

This makes me sick. If I believed that, I would stop writing immediately.

It’s amazing how this particular Platonic error of interpretation about literature persists, century after century – how we keep trying to find justifications for literature which somehow make it contribute to the social good. Literature is good for religion, good for politics, good for philosophy, good for science – now it has to be good for evolution?

Literature is not “good” for anything except being itself. Poetry makes nothing happen. The Victorian novelists were writing against the social order as much as within it, and the fact that their characters reflect facets of that social order does not mean that the novels helped bolster it.

No one can predict who will be inspired to do what by a work of art. The same books and the same music have been inspiring to both pacifists and murderers. The other side of this argument about Victorian novels leading to a better society is that old familiar one about Marilyn Manson being responsible for Columbine. We have to take responsibility for our own actions and stop blaming (or crediting) the books, the music, the art.

This is the first time in my life that I have found myself arguing on the opposite side of the fence as an evolutionary scientist.

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directing, film

everything in the director’s handbook

Kevin Maher on Darren Aronofsky and Mickey Rourke’s director-actor relationship:

…to get him there, Aronofsky admits that he had to use everything in the director’s handbook. Rourke, for instance, refused to even attempt one elaborately choreographed fight sequence. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t you do the routine?’” says Aronofsky. “So I got into the ring and I did the f***ing routine, the whole thing. And that f***ing shut him up for the day.”

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style, translation

hypocrite traducteur

I have been writing a bit about my future translation projects for some applications these days. The idea, which isn’t really my idea, comes from the work of people like C. Moraga and O. Solis and other bilingual playwrights who I’ve been lucky enough to know & see work.

What I’m especially moved by in their work is this:

Lines where a character is speaking one language in the grammar of another, or lines that blend vocabulary from both languages.

The twist I have on it is that this kind of mix should be used for other translations, like rendering plays which were originally written entirely in French into English. There should be French vocabulary words mixed in, and French grammar mangled throughout.

Take, for example, this very famous final stanza from Baudelaire’s poem “Au Lecteur” (To the Reader)

C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

The link has several translations of the poem available, courtesy of fleursdumal.org. Here’s a very, very literal one, by William Aggeler in 1954:

He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

Say that these lines were lines in a play, designed for performance. The take I would put on them, then, would be this:

C’est l’Ennui! The eye watering d’un pleur involontaire,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes son houka.
You him know, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite reader, — mon semblable, — mon brother!

The ideas is to get as much of the French into it as possible, even to the extent of bad English grammar (You him know, The eye), all the words which are close enough cognates (Ennui, involontaire, houka, monstre délicat, even Hypocrite, which could be pronounced as in French) to leave in some particles and possessives in French (mon, d’un)…and so forth.

The word “lecteur,” which some people know and others won’t (think of “lectern”) could be translated in some instances and not in others.

The word “semblable,” which is variously translated as fellow, likeness, twin, double, etc., shouldn’t be translated at all.

Again, this would be for the purposes of a performance text. Read the entire thing with a French accent and French emphasis.

It would be like you were immersed in a bilingual household, hearing them speak, getting some of the words but not others.

You can only justify working like this if you believe, as I do, that playoetwrights like Molière and Racine and others cared just as much about the sound and rhythm of their words as the meaning – or, if you believe, as I also do, that we are justified in doing just about anything to a performance text, and that even the most grievous errors of misinterpretation will reveal more about it.

(Perhaps, and this is me being so Comp Lit, we could argue that the act of reading is in itself an act of misinterpretation.)

Say you were to do this method on a TARTUFFE script – perhaps you could begin with all English, incorporate more and more French as it went along, eventually get to the point of all French with English supertitles…of course you could preserve more rhyme & meter this way too, but the great thing would be to get the flavor of the original language.

That’s my idea. Qu’est-ce que tu penses?

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books, quotes

the height of skyscrapers

The smallest things made him happy – a blue sky, bicycle bells in the morning, the change of seasons, even the height of skyscrapers.

Pride filled her wrinkles.

– Diane Wei Liang, THE EYE OF JADE

My parents gave me an extra copy of this mystery, having somehow accidentally acquired two (this happens to our family a lot!) in Thanksgiving, and I only just read it now. I found it hard to get into a lot of the writer’s style, but those two lines stood out to me.

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