November 2013

New York palette

Teju Cole pays tribute to Saul Leiter.

Undoubtedly, the charm of some of Leiter’s pictures lies in the fact that they depict fifties places, fifties cars, and fifties people (we rarely dress so well today), and that the analog reds and greens are more moving, somehow, than what our own digital cameras or streetscapes can offer up. But pictures such as “Through Boards” (1957), “Canopy” (1958), and “Walking With Soames” (1958) would be winners in any era. They are high points of lyric photography which, once seen, become — like all the best pictures and poems and paintings — a permanent part of our lives.

Wine dark sparks

‘How to Guzzle Books Like Wine’, Tom Jokinen on Jonathan Franzen, e-books, and Bohumil Hrabal‘s Too Loud A Solitude.

A read book is permanent, even if some of the details disappear with. I’ve read Emma but can’t remember much about it except that everyone has a governess and sews. But if my own work-in-progress concept of empathy is based on a lifetime of misunderstanding other people, it’s also been informed, just a tick, by Emma and the other novels which dramatize the folly of vanity. The details are gone but the ideas remain. Franzen is wrong: books are defined not by format but by the vagaries of art, through which something mystical sneaks into the reader’s mindand then won’t go away.

No style is a style

S.J. Fowler, author of Enemies, vanguardist and bright spark behind 3:AM Magazine‘s Maintenant! poetry series, is delivering a series of short lectures at the Rest is Noise Festival. So far, B.S. Johnson, Thomas Bernhard, and New York Dada and ethics. All great audio essays, but we want to give particular mention to ‘The occluded: British avant garde poetry in the era of Britten’ [below], which discusses David Gascoyne, Michael Horovitz, Bill Griffiths, Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher and Bob Cobbing, amongst others. S.J. Fowler contributes six new poems to gorse #1.

Writer as translator, translator as writer

3 Quarks Daily on Lydia Davis‘ Proust.

Regarding her reasons for re-translating Proust, Davis herself has commented in the McBride Interview, “it is an ideal of mine to stay as close as I can to the original while still producing a living, breathing text in English. . . . In fact, imposing my own style would take away some of the enjoyment of translating for me—which is to leave my own style and my own sensibility behind and enter fully into the sensibility and style of another writer, to be able, in a sense, to take a vacation from my own writing, while still writing” and her discussion of her essay on her “close translation” reveals her desire to stay as close to Proust’s language in terms of etymologies of words, sounds, sentence length, tone, etc. Nevertheless, the critic André Aciman takes Davis’s translation to task in his December 2005 review, “Proust’s Way?” which appeared in the New York Review of Books.

The potential of literature in translation

The Stinging Fly have posted my essay from their summer translation issue (June 2013). Using Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction series as a starting point, the essay takes in the recently translated Georges Perec‘s La boutique obscure as well as the 65th anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau‘s Exercises in Style, and also Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito’s excellent The End of Oulipo? (the title of my essay is a play on Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, workshop of potential literature). One of the most exciting translation projects this year had to be Adam Thirlwell‘s Multiples project:

According to Paul Klee genius is the error in the system, a sentiment Adam Thirlwell shares. ‘There are no perfect translations, just as there are no perfect styles,’ he says. ‘Something is still translatable, even if its translation is not perfect.’ The first imperfect French translation of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was made by Joseph Pierre Frénais in 1776. Imperfect, for not only did Frénais omit Sterne’s stylistic tricks (looped lines, diagrams, blank pages, and so on) he left out sentences that bored him, restructured paragraphs and tampered with Sterne’s ‘impolite’ jokes. The translation was not without its merit. In it, Frénais invented the word dada as an equivalent to Sterne’s word ‘hobby-horse’, later plucked from the dictionary by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara in search of a name for their anti-art movement of assemblage and readymades.