Marks, Signatures, Authors, Books

Michael Roloff sent an email today with a link to this blog posting about the marks inside an English translation of an early novel by Peter Handke, Short Letter, Long Farewell. "I bought this book for 50p," the blog author writes, and goes on to follow the information written inside the book. He speculates on the name Charles Unwin and travels through London to photograph the building at the address given.

I admired the idea, the quiet nature of the thought, the bookishness of the whole thing.

And I turned to a book of my own, bought for $7.50 in Powell's Bookstore in Portland over a decade ago. It's the first edition of a book Michael eventually translated whose English title became the title of this blog.

Inside the stylish mattblack cover is a single letter followed by a period: P.

I have always supposed this is Peter's elegant and minimal signature.

I had met and translated and travelled with Peter before acquiring this book. I never asked him for his signature in any of the books of his I own. I have them because of what they say, because of the sentences and characters and ideas they make manifest, and not because he inscribed them. Having said that, this little book still feels special to me, takes me back to a moment, perhaps, when someone handed a young author a copy of the book and he made his mark.

SUCCUSSFUL UNIVERSITIE SPELING

A university education ought to do many things, one of which is to foster a heightened awareness for language.

There are two universities in Utah Valley, and both of them seem to have some problem with words.

Take, for instance, the sign on the south entrance of the newly remodelled Losee Center for Student Succuss (photo taken on Monday, the 5th of April).

Hope the remodeling went better than the re-branding.

And if one might snicker and think that this is just what happens at a new university still thinking its way to success, consider the following.

At BYU, just a few miles to the east of the unsuccussessful sign, the very department whose task is to pay attention to the English language, the English Department, lists multiple faculty members on their home page with this proof that the Latin original of the English has passed into forgetfulness:

"Link to Vitae"

If you mix up nominative singular with genitive or plural you're apt to be made fun of, especially if you're professing English or Student Success.

Socialised Medicine: 1967-2010

As a first-year student at Brigham Young University, 18 years old, fresh from the culture of Farmington, New Mexico and scarcely separated from the conservative political influence of my parents, I turned in a research paper for English 115.

My intriguing title was "The Quality of Medical Services under Socialized Medicine."

I proposed to prove that "compulsory medical care results in a lower standard of individual treatment than is found under the free enterprise system."

I was so convincing in my arguments that my professor awarded me a grade of C+ and wrote that my paper was "adequate."

My major point was obvious to me: "When people must pay their own medical expenses they are not sick as often as if they are not paying their own bill."

Powerful logic, echoed by my Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz tonight: "we're going to sue! The Federal Government can't take away our rights this way!"

Tomorrow I'll put a check in the mail to the Democratic Congressional Association, the DCCC, to thank them (not including the one Utah Democrat, Jim Matheson) for passing a health-care bill that will, for all its warts, make it possible for the 3 of my adult working children who can't afford health insurance under the present system to sign up for insurance.

And then hope for future changes to the system that will bring down costs even more while insuring more and more of us.

Gary Bryner

Gary Bryner died yesterday. Cancer.

How to deal with the loss? Memory may be the best recourse.

In 1995 we took students to Peru, to work for two weeks on Taquile Island, at 13,000 feet, in the middle of Lake Titicaca.

Here a few notes:

8 May

A sun-drenched breakfast in the courtyard of a little restaurant. The woman wouldn't take my 5,000,000 Sole (5 new Soles) bill because it didn't have flowers in the right spot. Five years ago, Gary says, the rate of inflation was 7500% per year. In Germany, that kind of inflation helped fuel the Nazi rise to power.

I'm impressed (as I have been before) by Gary's command of the facts, facts gathered with intense energy and focus. He just finished a law degree while engaged in full-time research and award-winning teaching. And he recently turned down a prestigious position at the University of Colorado out of a sense of commitment to the graduate program in public policy he has recently begun at BYU.

We gather at the school. A Taquileno blows a referee's whistle to summon people from across the island to work on the two new rooms.

Early afternoon, exhausted by three trips up the hill carrying floorboards -- heavy Amazonian hardwood. Two cokes (who carried them up the hill?), a liter and a half of orange drink, a powerbar (hauled up the killer steps in my dufflebag), and five bread rolls later I feel like I could maybe do one more trip. Halfway down the trail I pull off and sit on a huge stone.

Sheep bleat.

Humming. Bees.

Birdwings.

A woman in a red dress carries a bulky load on her back as she walks along a row of eucalyptus trees far below.

The lake smooth in large patches. Elsewhere slightly ruffled.

A bird call.

One of the Taquile community's blue-and-white boats arrives quietly from somewhere.

A slight breeze.

Steady sun.

Thumps -- people coming down the stairs. No, it's a small bunch of sheep, herded along the trail by a young man, a load of cornstalks on his back and a radio in one hand tuned to a news program.

More bird sound.

The boat leaves, its wake an arrow toward Puno.

A little girl herds a few sheep across a terrace below.

Bright clothing drying on a rooftop.

7 p.m. In Faustino's restaurant. Close, stuffy, claustrophobic with the sound and smell of a kerosene lantern and thirty closely packed bodies. Gary comes in late. He's bundled up in several layers of clothing, including a tan parka. Its hood is pulled up over a stocking cap.

Who has diarrhea? Cindy asks for a show of hands.

All day we worked like piss ants hauling wood up from the pier. Five trips up and down was all I could muster. Fifteen boards. A tiny pile after an enormous effort. At five the head man blew his whistle and we stood there while a couple of men gave speeches in Cacao thanking us for our work and praising the community effort (at least that's what I think they were saying). Then the children came out of the school and stood in lines, the boys in black and white, the girls in colorful dresses and their head scarves. The teacher, with whistle and cap and an American flag on the front and a satin soccer-uniform shirt, stood and gave a speech. then Percy, the school president, gave a speech, then someone else, and finally the children were set free. In the meantime the schoolyard had fallen into shade and I was left shivering in the thin air in my sweatsoaked clothing. Gary too, it appears.

Peter Handke's "Don Juan, His Own Version"

The February publication of Krishna Winston's translation of Peter Handke's 2004 novel "Don Juan," like every publication of one of Handke's books, is an important literary event. And such events are marked by important reviews, including the one titled "Man of Constant Sorrow," written by Joel Agee for the New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 12, 2010).

Agee focuses interestingly on Don Juan's obsession with time, with being a master of his own time, and he finally accuses the novel (and perhaps, indirectly, the author) of a lack of virility.

Fair enough, especially insofar as he makes his claims a matter of personal taste: "It is not realism I miss but a more fully realized fiction."

But when Agee (himself a translator) takes on the translator of Handke's novel, he does so without specific reference, which makes his claim hard to judge:

Krishna Winston’s translation faithfully conveys what is said, but she tends to simplify and generalize how it is said. This is not a trivial subtraction. Like God and the Devil, Don Juan is in the details.

I too am a translator of one of Peter Handke's works, and I would have been troubled had reviewers of my translation accused me of simplifying and generalizing Handke's language. His work is language, it is about language, every word and phrase and rhythm part of what he has described as "a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar -- of aesthetic veracity" (from the preface of the American edition of "A Journey to the Rivers").

Is Agee correct, I wonder? Since he gives no details, and the devil of his claim is certainly in the details, I decide to take a look myself.

In Winston's translation, as in the original, the novel commences with several short sentences:

"Don Juan had always been looking for some one to listen to him. Then one fine day he found me. He told me his story, but in the third person rather than in the first. At least that is how I recall it now."

(The original: "Don Juan war schon immer auf der Suche nach einem Zuhörer gewesen. In mir hat er den eines schönen Tages gefunden. Seine Geschichte erzählte er mir nicht in der Ich-Form, sondern in der dritten Person. So kommt sie mir jetzt jedenfalls in den Sinn.")

There are ways Winston might have created a less seamless account. The second sentence, for instance, might have been rendered with a more complicated syntax to match the slightly awkward German: "That listener, one fine day, he found in me." And the final sentence might have read something like "At least that's how the story comes back to me now."

Might have read. I read Winston's sentences and figure, finally, that they're at least as good as my attempts. And there is a nice awkwardness introduced by the placement of "but in the third person rather than in the first."

The story continues:

"At the time in question, I was cooking only for myself, for the time being, in my country inn near the ruins of Port-Royal-des-Champs, which in the seventeenth century was France’s most famous cloister, as well as its most infamous."

In German the long sentence ends with the information that the narrator is cooking only for himself, a stronger ending for the withheld detail. What if the English sentence too had set up this tension: "At the time, I was cooking in my country inn near the ruins of Port-Royal-des-Champs, in the seventeenth century the most famous and also infamous French cloister, temporarily for myself alone."

Is that better than her sentence? Or worse? Better and worse? Probably worse for being better? The awkwardness of the final phrase isn't matched in the German and becomes problematic.

And here a reader/translator is brought up against reality. Although this novel is relatively short, Winston has, in sequence, translated Handke's massive "My Year in the No-Man's Bay," "On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House," and "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos." Weighing every word and every sentence that comprise the 1500 pages of these difficult works, she has brought into English some of the most important prose written in the last two decades. Unless she's superhuman she's made some mistakes, has made some unfortunate choices. But for the most part, as far as I can tell, not having the patience to compare every sentence of the original with every sentence of the translation, these are good and welcome translations.

Joel Agee, if he wants to take exception, and with his good ear for good language he might well want to take exception, ought to have the grace to do so with specific examples.

Meanders: Zarko Radakovic, Julije Knifer, Storytelling

3:23 a.m. For sleepless hours the title line from Richard Thompson's "From Galway to Graceland" has been flickering in my mind, catching like a torn toenail on the loose fabric of family worries and job worries and restless turning and a recurring need to pee. I pull out Zarko's description of his trip from Germany through Zagreb to Pristina on the occasion of Slobodan Milosevic's catastrophic speech at the field of blackbirds, Kosovo polje, read his careful cadences, follow his restless mind, enter his world just as he finds an old friend:

. . . we walked listlessly down Amruš street, whose meandering course took us unfailingly to the house number thirteen.

At Julije Knifer’s, the atmosphere was “cozy.” The dog gnawed at one of my shoes. Nada was coating eggplants with bread crumbs. Ana was unaffected and sweet. Knifer, as always in similar situations, held his joined hands at the nape of his neck. Those were moments of pure feeling, of clear looks and inner peace. Even the voice of Slobodan Miloševic on television was slightly more restrained.

Zarko once took me to visit Knifer in his apartment in Paris. Paintings of meanders everywhere. And in the night I ease my mind into slow meanders, let the ticking clock move me along the currents of black paint on white, of simple form.

ads without products reads peter handke

In spending the morning folding shirts, rolling up socks, cutting my nails, bathing and showering, sipping tea from time to time on the balcony, I succeeded for the first time in conceiving of such activity as a possible way of life (for a while)

Must admit that reading Handke’s is interfering with my getting back to blogging. It feels now that the blog should be something like this, but on the other hand, what an impossible act of solipsism that would be.

My friend Michael Roloff pointed out this blog, being written by a professor of literature in London. He has discovered, or is rediscovering, Peter Handke's aphoristic works, including "The Weight of the World." The first quote above is from Handke, the second from the blogger.

The blogger relates such passages to Joyce's epiphanies, which makes good sense to me.

And finally, the whole set of thoughts leads to questions about a writer's notebook and his or her writing. Teaching a class called WANDERLUST, thinking about travelers who write, I find my mind swinging back and forth between notebook and text, between note and sentence, between observation and explanation.

[HERE a link to the blog]