Extreme translation

Increasing the degree of difficulty: three canonical authors that resist translation, each in his own way:

Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (trans Carolyn French and Nina Karsov): Betwixt the Poles of Form and Chaos, Spurred like Buridan's Ass, running on Empty ... an extended riff on gawęda, a storytelling form of the early provincial gentry that itself riffs extensively, but which in time gave rise to the national epic, Pan Tadeusz; Fatherland here takes the place of the father in Bruno Schulz for this prodigal son. This makes for challenges to English rendering that the translators tackle à la Pevear and Volokhonsky, but into a 17c style (the OED [?!] their primary reference book)—not to everyone's satisfaction—Stanislaw Baranczak's introduction is essential to setting context, and my having essayed other Gombrowicz helped to mitigate the inevitable untowardness of this approach (or any other). A romp, exitentially. No extract can be prised from the midst of this feast, so I offer only the opening course:

I feel a need to relate here for Family, kin and friends of mine the beginning of these my adventures, now ten years old, in the Argentinian capital. Not that I ask anyone to have these old Noodles of mine, this Turnip (haply even raw), for in the Pewter bowl Thin, Wretched they are and what is more, likewise Shaming, in the oil of my Sins, my Shames, these Groats of mine, heavy, Dark with this black kasha of mine—oh, better not to heave it to the Mouth save for eternal Curse, for my humiliation, on the perennial track of my Life and up that hard, wearisome Mountain of mine.

Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas (trans John E. Woods): [dalkeyarchive links still broke] Here the difficulty is in how well wordplay travels. Woods respects the text, punctually and contra, of the late Schmidt, belatedly—preserving the obscure, the arcane: how many translations send you to the dictionary of your native tongue? These have something of the flavor of John Hawkes, from the German post-war perspective, whether set there and then or in more distant peripheries of classical or apocalyptic times. Not quite up to Nobodaddy's Children (down the scroll), but that's praise by faint cavil—my only plaint is the lack of apparatus to identify allusions to prior German literature. I'll let Woods select an extract, gone fission, from "Lake Scenery with Pocohontas":

And so alone in the boat : meeting the wavelets head-on; often slapping and thumping below the bow (and Pocohontas always in my eye, my playful one; I managed once to sail right over her; the great flailing girl.) / Think. Don't be content with belief : go further. Once more through the circles of knowledge, friends ! And foes. Don't interpret : learn and describe. Don't futurize : be. And die without ambitions : you were. At best full of curiousity. Eternity is not ours (despite Lessing !) : but this summer lake, this slough of haze, gaily checked shadows, the wasp sting on your forearm, the printed yellow-plum sack. And there, the long diving maidenbelly. / Another tender snap, and a lacewing vanished within : fish ! : bream, dace, shiner, chub, bleak, sucker, rudd, roach, chevin, loach, tench, gudgeon, ide : D' you speak English ?

Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (trans Barbara Johnson): A different problem, in recasting the finely braided threads of a close-mesh net into foreign waters, unavoidably fraying and entangling the style. Divigation it may be, but salmagundi it's not: one thing leads (how? inexorably) to another, and Dr. Johnson captures the convolutions (though no doubt importing some as well), the warp and weft, and the interstices (but isn't it all?) ... relating theater and music to verse (from "Solemnity"; a lone glint from this many-faceted expository):

The record of a real Poem, as here, seems to me to be that—arising from conditions that authorize its visible unfolding and its interpretation—it first lends itself, and then little by little, ingenuously if need be, it only replaces all for lack of all. I imagine that the cause of going out together and assembling, in view of festivals inscribed in the human program, will not be the theater, limited or incapable of responding all by itself to subtle instincts, nor music, which in any case is too fleeting not to disappoint the crowd: but founding in oneself something vague and brutal that these two isolate—an Ode, dramatized or cut up knowingly; these heroic scenes making an ode in several voices.

Addendum 7.5: CONTEXT offers notes on translation in Reading Culture.

Many Distant Cites

A long sundry on many matters, reading matter first, highly migratory (but I've been flying so far under the radar I'm showing up on sonar—hey maybe I can ascribe the decreasing frequency of posts to that), best of which were Selimović and Naipaul:

Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (about to be reissued with a new preface by Anita Desai): Having read Gora, I wanted to find out more about Tagore: this is the book (thx Indranil!). His life resists summary, his talents (and accomplishments, though some efforts came to little) many, but his influence remains diffuse. This biography seeks to go beyond the arts & letters, though with a fair sample of poetry in translation; some things just don't translate. Among his many associations outside India, the most surprising to me was that with Victoria Ocampo (as she was becoming central to Argentine arts & letters), and with romantic overtones at that.

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain: Great men encounter great continent, latter prevails til the end of this bildungsroman: A corrective to then ('25) prevalent historical narratives, spanning from Erik the Red to Lincoln. WCW's prefactory comment: In these studies I have sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hid. In letters, in journals, reports of happenings I have recognized new contours suggested by old words so that new names were constituted. Thus, where I have found noteworthy stuff, bits of writing have been copied into the book for the taste of it. Everywhere I have tried to separate out of the original records some flavor of an actual peculiarity the character denoting shape which the unique force has given. Now it will be the configuration of a man like Washington, and now a report of the witchcraft trials verbatim, a story of a battle at sea—for the odd note there is in it, a letter by Franklin to prospective emigrants; it has been my wish to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an old misappellation. The most extended piece, an appreciation of Poe, I found the most interesting, perhaps for what it says of Williams.

Lydie Salvayre, The Power of Flies (trans Jane Kuntz): Disappointing. A one-sided conversation engaging Pascal's Pensées; but the execution does not live up to the conceit (unlike, say, Queneau). Not up to what else of hers I've read, but YMMV: cf compleat-revue, 1/4ly conversation (and Dalkey's internal linkage broken [as are redirects from centerforbookculture.org], there's also Motte reading Salvayre).

Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish (trans Bogdan Radić & Stephen M. Dickey): While thinking highly of Andrić, I think this book puts Drina in the shade. (C-R also puts it among the best.) Set in 18thC Ottoman Bosnia (in a town much like Sarajevo), it bridges the chiasmus of the ambivalence of betrayal. An iconic excerpt can say it much better than I:

Once he showed me the cripple Jemail, who was pulled by his children from place to place in a cart and who would hobble into his tailor's shop on two canes, dragging his lame, withered legs. When he was seated he astonished everyone wih his beauty and strength, his masculine face, the warmth of his smile, his wide shoulders, strong arms, and wrestler's build. But as soon as he stood up all of his beauty dissapeared, and he would hobble toward his cart, a cripple whom it was impossible to watch without pity. It was he who had crippled himself. While drunk, he had stabbed himself in the thighs with a sharp knife until he severed all of the tendons and muscles; and even now, when he drank he would drive the knife into the withered stumps of his legs, not allowing anyone to approach him. No one could restrain him, either; his arms were still incredibly strong. "Jemail is the true image of Bosnia," Hassan said. "Strength on mutilated legs. His own executioner. Abundance with no direction or meaning."
"So what are we then? Lunatics? Wretches?"
"The most complicated people on the face of the earth. Not on anyone else has history played the kind of joke it's played on us. Until yesterday we were what we want to forget today. But we haven't become anything else. We've stopped halfway on the path, dumbfounded. We have nowhere to go any more. We've been torn away from our roots, but haven't become part of anything else. Like a tributary whose course has been diverted from its river by a flood, and no longer has a mouth or a current; it's too small to be a lake, too large to be absorbed by the earth. With a vague sense of shame because of our origins, and guilt becaus of our apostasy, we don't want to look back, and have nowhere to look ahead of us. Therefore we try to hold back time, afraid of any outcome at all. We are despised both by our kinsmen and by newcomers, and we defend ourselves with pride and hatred. We wanted to save ourselves, but we're so completely lost we don't even know who we are anymore. And the tragedy is that we've come to love our stagnant tributary, and don't want to leave it. But everything has a price, even this love of ours. Is it a coincidence that we're so overly softhearted and overly cruel, so sentimental and hard-hearted, joyful and melancholy, always ready to surprise others and even ourselves? Is it a coincidence that we hide behind love, the only certainty in this indefiniteness? Are we letting life pass by us for no reason, are we destroying ourselves for no reason, differently than Jemail, but just as certainly? Why are we doing it? Because we're not indifferent. And if we're not indifferent, that means we're honest. And if we're honest, let's hear it for our madness!
Hear, hear!

Sir V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: Titled after Chirico (actually Apollonaire enigmatically arrived at the titles), how could I resist? Actually I did for too long, having been lukewarm about Mr. Biswas, but a nudge (thx Rick!) helped resolve any doubts, though that's not what it's about, it's more of a walkabout, a memoirish novel (Sebald seems to derive from this). (That Patrick French's biography of Naipaul is just out added impetus, not that I have any interest, not that he cares. Hey, it is what it is. [Tractatus 1.]) What it is is retropoco, a reversion. Empathy with those one hardly knows. Displacements. Remembering, writing, living. (Strangely, publication of EofA roughly coincided with An Unfinished Journey by his younger brother Shiva, published posthumously [nyrb credits to VS]. Strangely, the finale of EofA deals with their sister's passing.) Much has been written about all this, I won't add any more, except to recommend highly.

Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower (trans John Bátki): Exuberant melancholia (it's a Hungarian thing, you wouldn't understand, so says John Lukacs in the intro, a profile piece pulled from the New Yorker, prone to exaggeration of importance, I think, but it's a Hungarian thing ...). Character sketching along strong lines and serial imagistic epigrammatic metaphor (e.g. daughters of the bourgeoisie ... listening to the music of distant accordians, their hearts overflowing like a stone trough whose water drips from a little-used faucet) carry the story.

Nagai Kafu, During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade (trans Lane Dunlop): The seamy side of the second 20thC Tokyo, between the earthquake and the war. After Selimović and Naipaul, the best of the bunch. From the translator's preface:
Edward Seidensticker, in his authoritative Kafu the Scribbler (1965), cires a comment by Tanizaki as the most perceptive yet made. I quote from his translation:
"The old-fashioned is fairly conspicuous in Kafu's recent During the Rains. Indeed in its style and the shifting of its scenes, it might be called the oldest of his novels yet. There are chance meetings scattered all through the book, which are used to further the plot, in a manner common enough in plays and novels of another era. The oldest of this form stands in subtle contrast to the modern colors of the material."
And Donald Keene, in his monumental study of modern Japanese fiction Dawn to the West, has this to say:
"During the Rains ... ranks as one of Kafu's finest achievements ... The exceptional praise [...] won from discriminating critics was occasioned chiefly by the novelistic interest. The detached analysis of a group of people makes the story read like a work of French Naturalism, though a few passages [...] evoke the beauty of place and season in the typical Kafu manner."
Flowers in the Shade might almost be called a continuation ...

These last two I've used to interspersed Arno Schmidt novellas. Along with other odds'n'sods (selected Mallarmé, Thom Nash[e]). What newly awaits on the shelf (trans in parens):
Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line (H William Tjalsma)
Dubravka Ugresic, The Ministry of Pain (Michael Henry Heim)
Imre Kertész, Liquidation (Tim Wilkinson)
Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb (John Hoare)
Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (Alfred Mac Adam)
Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay
Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (Carolyn French & Nina Karsov)
Stephane Mallarmé, Divagations (Barbara Johnson)
Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas and Collected Stories (John E. Woods)

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Elsewhere, a World Lit bookchat has been set up by a Glaswegian litblogger (discussion threads seeded with prior postings, serves as index thereto)—I enjoy the forum form, the back-and-forth without it being somebody's territory, but it needs many voices to succeed. I hope this will achieve critical mass, since literature in translation is a strong interest of mine, and I'm already mining the site for new reading. (A translator from Estonian has piqued my interest in Toomas Vint's A Never-Ending Landscape. But I'll have to wait.) Meanwhile, I'll pull over some thoughts on translation that haven't yet sparked discussion over there (over here isn't much for discussion, it's just the way it is, but I'll save ya da click):

The Art of Translation

Translation is widely considered to be an inferior art: its product is subordinate to the original, in a way reminiscent of the ancient philosophical distinction between the written and the spoken word. Exact replication is an unachievable goal, as refraction into a different linguistic and cultural matrix distorts the nuances and allusions upon which literary character depends. Faithful reproduction is perforce an interpretation, trying to capture what's essential in the original (a matter of opinion) and to elaborate upon it in a changed context while preserving what of the original context can be transferred: translation is a derivative, highly constrained craft.

And the translator is the most self-effacing of craftsmen. The translator (unlike the critic or scholar) tries to be a version of the author, a stand-in drawing attention away from himself. Commercial and academic rewards are scant. Still, many authors (particularly poets: odd, or perhaps not, in that poetry is the most difficult to translate) devote time and effort to translating the work of others.

And so the reading of translations is similarly looked upon as debased. Not that the acquisition of non-native language is seen as much better: it remains blind to unacknowledged natural linguistic resources and to a cultural framework investing much of the meaning. For many of us, translation is as much a window on this framework as on the work itself.

An analogy I find apt is to musical transcription. It is rare for the adapter to be more recognized (though it happens: Rimsky-Korsakov Ravel is more commonly identified with "Pictures at an Exhibition" than Mussorgsky). I think of English as the pianoforte of languages, adaptable to a broad range of orchestration. But just try to render, say, Indian melody and harmony with it. Anyway, in the same way that appreciating music is at some basic level about anticipating the notes that are to follow, I view literary reading as being in large part an exercise in reconstructing meaning in expression. Translation makes this more problematic. But also more interesting.

Half of all Statistics are Bayesian

Abstract: A metadata analysis was performed on the reliability of statistics, using Google Search. The methodology employed was a biased sampling using the first one hundred occurrences of the phrase "of all statistics are"; given the documented link precedence utilized by Google, this was taken as representative of the approximately 71,300 primary instances of the phrase. Of these, 95 (95%) included a percentage figure and an assessment (the remainder only contained the phrase in links, excepting the first such, from the UN Office of the Under-Secretary-General: "First of all, statistics are generally recognized as one of the cornerstones of national and international policies.")

The assessment was, in the vast majority of cases (75%), "made up". Equivalent categorizations (fabricated, invented, ...) accounted for another 10% of the observations, while half the remainder were "worthless", the other half similarly equivalent (useless, wrong ...). Most estimations of the proportion of statistics that fell into these categories were to 2-3 significant digits, though a high degree of precision was implied in a handful of cases. Fractional representation was not employed (in the full sample, "half" appears only once).

The observed proportion to which these assessments applied varied from a minimum of 36% to a maximum of 99.9%, with a mean of 70% and a standard deviation of 21% (with the usual caveats regarding employing Gaussian measures to bounded ranges). The overall empirical distribution displayed a strong mode at approximately 42.7% ("made up on the spot") to 43% ("worthless"), and curiously no observations at all between 48% and 61%; a minor second mode was evident at 98%. The subsample comprising "made up" statistics dominated these results (mean 71% stnd dev 21%), though with a propensity for those "made up on the spot" to cluster at the lower end of the distribution.

Given the uniformity of the assessments above, it was determined that no further statistics need be derived to confirm the validity of this analysis.

Hello I must be going

My reading over the past fortnight was confined to books that had been remaindered to my custody by bookculture, one of which had been put on my most wanted list by another book going under the same alias, The Lost Steps: I'd pled nolo contendere on Carpentier's sentence rendering here back in December, but having submitted to its appeal, I will reopen the case with my initial reactions from a LatAmLit bookchat that took it up (though that discussion stutter-stepped into incoherence [despite good individual commentaries] as the participants couldn't get on to the same page):
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Disorientation: Narrative shifts from stage to backstage include displacements in time. Story moves forward as subject goes backwards (and movement westward is another etymology for disorienting): this is an anti-modernist tract in modernist drag. The critic turned upon himself, the mask depicting a mask slipping to reveal a mask. The narrator's misdirections are difficult to resolve, unreliability not necessarily of motive. There's a lot to say about time, music, creativity, and how each is reflected in the unfolding of the narrative itself, but it can wait ... Aside from the malleability of time, this strikes me as apart from magic realism (2x13 ways of looking at MR), perhaps because the perspective is from outside, unattained. The opposition to Surrealism is real enough though, and taking on the fashions and fascisms of the time is no surprise, but Nietzsche and especially Ludwig van get a bum rap (maybe it's that Ludovico thang)—I said anti-modernist already, but it's also anti-decadent, with a sort of Rousseauic flavor. Perhaps it's the anti-Heart-of-Darkness. The Lost Steps strikes me as quite distinct from The Kingdom of this World (the phrase occurs twice, once midway through and once near the end) primarily due to the protagonist's viewpoint. Ti Noël directly experiences what our current narrator merely mediates, the veneer of civilization running so deep in him, holding him back from what he thinks he wants. There's also an insane jealousy about him. These combined to make me wonder to what extent TLS is a specific critique upon Rousseau (ed: cf Reveries of a Solitary Walker).
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The anti-surreal indictment, which identified a prime suspect, was prepared by Timothy Brennan's introduction to Harriet de Onis' translation:

Perhaps none of Carpentier's fiction [...] was a more decisive repudiation of the pretenses of surrealism, which had occupied him and his international circle of Parisian friends between 1928 and 1939.
The title itself is an allusion to André Breton's volume of essays, Les pas perdus (1924), which means, significantly, both "the lost steps" and "the not lost." As if to make the most of the latter meaning, Carpentier set out to stress that Breton's book had been the sort of evasion that an intellectual from the colonies might best overcome. Breton had written contemptuously of the "ridiculous condition of existence here below" and counseled that we all remain unattached "in a state of perfect disponibilité (availability)." We understand Carpentier when we grasp how much he hated those words, smacking as they do of a bourgeois European effeteness. Throughout the 1950s Carpentier sought to make good on his years of self-training in the study of the Americas—a training prompted by his own simmering resentments over the previous two decades as he watched politics and magic coalesce in the creative minds of the European avant-garde. Since at least the late 1930s he had been trying to make the point that without knowing it, the avant-garde was only whoring after a surrealism found fully formed in the Cuban babalaos and the village shamans of the Latin American continent.

I don't dispute the verdict about what became of surrealism in the thirties and beyond, but the evidence from Breton's original brief now having been examined, I see Carpentier retracing the steps that Breton took away from Dada, steps that had to be taken even if later taken back. Les pas perdus (trans Mark Polizzotti, University of Nebraska Press) is a seminal document of protoSurrealism, with all its promise intact; it prefigures the narrator's journey, and the narration, that Carpentier relates in his version. I take as a point of departure more prefactory commentary, supplied here by Mary Ann Caws and supplemented by the translator:

It is against any settling at all that the essays of The Lost Steps are assembled, the idea of wandering and meandering already expressing the state of expectation that characterizes Surrealism at its best. This work is the perfect prefiguration of the waiting state, even as it is the perfect prefiguration of a transition. The essay most nearly approximating Breton's open state of mind announces a general departure: "Leave Everything"—a phrase appropriate for train stations like Gare de Lyon, where, to use the memorable image that Breton will later offer, the train is always shaking with convulsive beauty, always just about to leave. [MAC]
Actually the title—Les pas perdus in the original—evokes not so much loss (although this, too, is present) as aimlessness, it inevitably recalls for its French audience the locution salle des pas perdus, the waiting room of a train station, where expectant travelers errantly pace. Like many of Breton's titles, this one acts as a billboard: the following writings, individually and as a whole, form above all a record of imminent departure. [MP]

Or perhaps immanent.

But enough of hearsay. Witness the conclusion of "Leaving Everything":

Leave everything.
Leave Dada.
Leave your wife, leave your mistress.
Leave your hopes and fears.
Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere.
Leave the substance for the shadow.
Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future.
Take to the highways.

Breton also provides ample testimony implicating his co-conspirators. But it's time to move on to the parole hearing ("Words without Wrinkles"):

We are beginning to distrust words; we were suddenly noticing that they had to be treated other than as the little auxiliaries for which they had always been taken. Some thought that they had become worn down from having served so much; others, that by their essence they could legitimately aspire to a condition other than the one they had—in short, we had to free them. The "alchemy of the verb" had been superseded by a veritable chemistry that first and foremost had puts its energies into disengaging the properties of these words; of these properties, only one—meaning—was specified by the dictionary. It was a matter (1) of considerinh the word in itself and (2) of examining as closely as possible the reactions words could have to each other. Only at this price could we hope to restore language's true destination, which for some (myself included) promised to take knowledge a giant leap forward, and exalt life by as much. We thereby lay ourselves open to the usual persecutions in a domain where good (good usage) consists mainly in remembering the etymologies of words, in other words, their deadest weight, and in making the sentence conform to a mediocre and utilitarian syntax, where everything is in agreement with paltry human conservatism and with a loathing of the infinite that never wastes an opportunity to show its face. Naturally such an enterprise, which is part of the poetic impulse, does not demand so much clear will from each of those who take part in it; one does not always have to formulate a need in order to satisfy it. And my intent here is only to develop an image.

It was by assigning color to vowels that for the first time, consciously and in full knowledge of the consequences, someone turned the word away from its duty to signify. That day it emerged into concrete existence, such as no one had ever suspected it might have. There is no point in debating the exactness of the phenomenon of colored audition, on which I will be sure not to rely. The important thing is that the alarm has been sounded and that from now on it seems imprudent to speculate about the innocence of words. We now know that, all in all, they have a sonority that is sometimes quite complex; moreover, they have tempted painter's brushes, and very soon we will be studying their architectural side. This is a small, intractable world over which we can float only the most insufficient surveillance balloons and in which, even so, we occasionally spot some flagrant violations. In fact, the expression of an idea depends as much on a word's aspect as on its meaning. There are words that work against the idea they are claiming to express. Indeed, even the meaning of words is not always pure, and we are nowhere near determining to what degree the figurative sense progressively acts on the literal sense, each variation in the latter supposedly entailing a variation in the former.
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Modulo the rest of the remaindered reading:

Alberto Savinio, The Lives of the God (trans James Brook & Susan Etlinger, Atlas): Doomed to be an echo of the other brother, Chirico, though their paths diverged. These Surrealist writings probably don't do him justice; curiously, like Carpentier, he had his stint as music critic as well. (more, and better)

Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (trans Michael Hofmann, Granta): Last words—one for the road.

The Original of Laura

The fate of Nabokov's last, unfinished novel has been a hot issue of late (yes well it's obligatory, all this to burn or not to burn folderol), sparked (OK I'll stop) by Ron Rosenbaum on Slate. My interest in The Original of Laura is in better understanding the methods of construction of a master craftsman, as one aspect of my larger interest in literature is in how things are made, and how this is integral to the final product (which then becomes foundational material for future construction, both for writers and readers; cf prior post); I have little interest in manufactured controversy. But in the particular case of Nabokov, a coincidence of interests have made the ephemera more attractive, as I've even built additions (well, lean-tos) on other incomplete work (the metaphor of the chess problem has some force as regards publishing draft material; the intended solution has to work [be sound] and be properly framed, put into context, made interesting). Rosenbaum's latest installment includes second-hand reports on what TOOL's all about (as well as a more interesting colloquium on its fate); these deserve more extensive quotation than he afforded {his extracts curliqued}:

"Brushing through 'veiled values and translucent undertones': Nabokov’s pictorial approach to women", Lara Delage-Toriel, Transatlantica 2006-1 (Apr 6 2006)

In his last unfinished, and supposedly testamentary, novel, The Original of Laura, this type of vertiginous mise en abyme becomes a ruling narrative principle. Like a Möbius strip or an Escher print, the manuscript’s involuted plot expands upon the ambivalence of the sign inscribed within its very title. The referential indetermination of “original” and “Laura” is indeed refracted by a complex matrioshka-type of narrative in which pictorial and literary representations appear to mirror each other and thus unhinge the classical foundations of mimesis. {Its central female character seems to be Flora, the wife of the narrator and, most likely, the ‘original’ of Laura, who is the eponymous heroine of a novel titled My Laura. This novel is sent to the narrator and main protagonist of The Original of Laura by a painter, a rejected admirer of his wife, Flora, of whom “he did an exquisite oil a few years ago.” In My Laura, the mistress is less lucky: she is destroyed by the “I” of the book whilst “in the act of portraying her”—‘literally’, as a writer. Apparently “the portrait is a faithful one,” its features being “absolutely true to the original.” Our desire to peer through the frame—like the unfortunate protagonist of Nabokov’s short story ‘La Veneziana’—is thwarted by the elusive nature of this ‘original’: does it refer to the mistress of the “I,” the Laura of My Laura, or to the probable mistress of this novel’s author, the Flora of The Original of Laura? The manuscript’s playful juxtapositions obviously incite the reader to fuse both ‘originals’ into a single original, a gesture which Nabokov graphically performs in ‘chapter’ 5, by contriving an amusing hybrid, ‘Flaura’. On close observation of the manuscript, one notices that the name contains in fact two capital letters, ‘F’ and ‘L’, as though Nabokov had been loath to give precedence to either name and had instead opted for some typographical monster, a bicephalous cipher of sorts.}

Nabokov’s dove-tailing conundrums become even more artfully significant when we consider the fact that portraits of courtisanes called Flora or Laura are well-known masterpieces by such Renaissance artists as Titian and Giorgione and already constitute variations on the theme of Petrarch’s Laura.

The watermarked presence of these artists beneath the surface of his text is another feat in Nabokov’s chiaroscuro deftness of touch. The adjectives “veiled” and “translucent” which Nabokov selected to define chiaroscuro in Pnin suggest nuances that may be either conspicuous or concealed, depending on the way they catch the light or the angle from which they are perceived. But the visibility of these nuances is equally tributary of the degree of saturation with which the artist endows them; he can shade them in to reveal a veiled value, or shade them off to convey a muted glimmer-effect, a “translucent undertone.” When I first referred to chiaroscuro, I explained that it was a device contrived by Leonardo da Vinci to create an illusion of volume on a flat surface. Chiaroscuro is thus intimately linked to the deceptive quality of art. When addressing fledgling artists in his treatise on painting, Leonardo also singles out indirection as a paramount virtue: “Light too conspicuously cut off by shadows is exceedingly disapproved by painters […]; do not make your figures appear illuminated by the sun, but contrive a certain amount of mist or of transparent cloud to be placed between the object and the sun.” It is particularly significant that Leonardo should mention a “transparent cloud,” as though the old master’s phrase were foreshadowing Nabokov’s own terms. It induces the same type of shimmer-effect, designating, like the “veiled”/ “translucent” couple, a screening device that may at once conceal and reveal.

In this respect, the convoluted structure of The Original of Laura, with its web of metatextual allusions and its iridescent play on “original,” could be considered an elaborate bow to the subtle art of the Renaissance. The manuscript depicts various portraits of a deceitful woman, each of them faithful, each of them mere images, offered to the viewer’s appreciation. If you look at Giorgione’s Laura or Titian’s Flora, you will notice that what is offered to the viewer is just as ambiguous: the woman seems to ignore the spectator, averting her gaze as though lost in her own thoughts. At the same time, the carefully calculated baring of her breast is a clear acknowledgment of the spectator’s presence. Quite obviously the true appeal of these portraits springs less from the features of the woman than from the way these are presented. We are seduced, etymologically led astray, because unsettled by the power of her enigmatic stance, which is neither entirely modest, nor entirely immodest. Although Nabokov’s manuscript remains rather sketchy, its embryonic plot does also reveal the same qualities vis-à-vis the reader; it is up to him to decipher the myriad signs generated by its specular structure. The disconcerting seductiveness of its deceitful mistress is paradigmatic of Nabokov’s preoccupations with representability, authenticity and faithfulness. What Nabokov’s pictorial representation of women lays bare is the fact that the seduction of art lies in its very deceptiveness, its tantalizing oscillation between “le vrai et le vraisemblable,” to quote the title of one of Nabokov’s essays. Because it functions, like the female figure, as a “double-talk mirror,” mimesis cannot be taken at face value only.

"Vladimir Nabokov, his masterpiece and the burning question", Stefanie Marsh, London Times, Feb 14 2008

Other people have seen the text. Only a handful, but, with a little digging, it becomes apparent that this most delicate of literary quandaries is not quite as veiled in secrecy as it once was. Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of the Journal of Nabokov Studies, was in that Cornell lecture room on the day Dmitri surprised his audience with an impromptu reading of Laura. “To me the passage or passages he read sounded very much like the passages of Nabokov’s densest, erotically charged prose,” he told me.

“I wrote in my notes that Laura may well be a woman and a book and that its chocolate mousse prose was not entirely safe from sounding like a parody of Lolita.”

Is Laura any good? {Talk to enough Nabokov scholars and the outline of a plot emerges: Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.}

Is Laura in a fit state for publication? Nabokov wrote most of his novels including Lolita and Pale Fire nonlinearly on index cards, which he would shuffle as part of his editing process. As Laura was unfinished and Nabokov often wrote the middle section of his stories last, it is questionable whether, published in her current state, Laura would have resembled the book that its author had intended to write. These are fragments – 50 cards compared with the 2,000 cards it took Nabokov to commit Ada or Ardor to paper.

“It seems revealing that the novel itself seems to be about work that seems to be unfinished,” says Boyd. “How finished it would have been if completed, I don’t know. There would have been deliberate lacunae.”

Rosenbaum found these accounts of what's TOOL's about somewhat at odds. But I find them consonant with what, given these sketchy reports, I would propose as a primary source: Poe's "The Oval Portrait", a short short that takes the relation of Art to Life to an extreme (and which, as a discourse upon a discourse, welcomes extrapolation [or is it involution?] to the story itself, as well as to critical appreciation). TOOL would be an elaboration of, a doubling of, an argufying of and an answering of TOP's theme. This conjecture also puts Delage-Toriel's in a new, somewhat different light. Beyond which, as Vera is dedicatee and first-row audience for Vladimir's fictions, it may indeed have been the capstone of the oeuvre that he piled up over his long career (rather than continuing the falling off that Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins! are taken to be).

So perhaps all this talk of putting TOOL to the torch has illuminated some dark corner of Nabokovia. And perhaps its publication will bring a deeper appreciation, not in and of itself, but of prior work, all unnoticed before. Per TOP:

Long--long I read--and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by, and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.
But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated.

there and here

I've been accorded the privilege of helping to pre-inaugurate Spinozablue, An Eclectic Journal of the Arts, with an essay (perhaps a cautionary exercise), "To Assume a Pleasing Shape". I promise not to expound on how I came to write it; my numerical analysis training (custom-Taylored) leads me to eschew terms beyond the second derivative anyway. But it's flattering to be asked to take an early lead; more content to follow in coming days.

Reading: After Saramago's Gospel came just-reissued Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing (trans Magnus^2son; thx JAbel for the heads-up!) and J.G.Farrell, The Singapore Grip. Now it's A Bad Man's turn (that would be Stanley Elkin). Each of the voices is familiar (trans included), each mixes light irony with dark humor; these examples may not be the best each has to offer, but it's better than what most others can.

mo' uses of literature

An unwelcome intrusion upon our premises has come to its inexorable conclusion, due to an overbearing taste for literary matter.

In addition to an overflow of reading material, the cellar had harbored a number of crickets; these began to diminish as autumn ended, which we put down to seasonal effects, until a couple of weeks ago, when I went downstairs to find the dustcovers and bindings of many books in shreds. It was then clear that, the supply of crickets exhausted, our heretofore undetected house mouse had turned to literary nourishment. Disdaining paperbacks, he had sampled a number of works, finding some not so much to his taste (Steven Pinker, John Allen Paulos, Teachout's The Skeptic, Doug Adams, Kharms, Saramago, Eco, Grushin, and some old Latin & German primers), and others worthy of deeper attention (books on the Civil War and Lorenzo the Magnificent, Robbe-Grillet/Magritte's The Fair Captive, Urban's The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes) -- but his tastes were betrayed by those tomes he absolutely devoured, cover to cover:
Faulkner, Light In August
Koestler, Darkness at Noon (a penchant for Everyman's evident here so far)
Martin Gardner, The Night is Large
Burgess, Earthly Powers
Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave
Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan
Christine Stansell, American Moderns
Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James
Sholom Aleichem, Tevye's Daughter
Over all, not one for translations. His library privileges have now been revoked, along with residency.

Meanwhile, books that have been keeping me occupied:
Robert Walser, The Assistant (trans SBernofsky) not to my tastes
Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations yum! I must find more of GJ
Claude Simon, The Flanders Road (trans RHoward) ... and more of CS (via RH).
Currently in Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans GPontiero), going slowly, moreso than ordinary, as it seems to be a rereading from many years ago, though it being an oft-told tale, I could be mistaken.

Exploits & Opinions

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the seizure of the 27 equivalent books of Dr. Faustroll, and so I seized upon Exact Change's rendering of Jarry's neo-scientific novel, even though available at the Pataphysics Research Lab. In short:

Doctor Faustroll is dunned for back rent by the bailiff Panmuphle, who inventories and seizes his library of "twenty-seven equivalent books." (BOOK ONE)
The elements of pataphysics are briefly set down and illustrated by an experiment in relativity and surface tension. (BOOK TWO)
Doctor Faustroll escapes the law in a skiff or sieve which travels on both land and water. He is accompanied by the baboon, Bosse-de-Nage, as navigator, and by Panmuphle, tamed by drink and chained to his seat, as oarsman and narrator until the next to last book. Their peregrinations carry them to fourteen lands or islands, whose topography and inhabitants are so described as to convey Jarry's comments on fourteen friends (or enemies) in the world of the arts - among them, Aubrey Beardsley, Léon Bloy, Gauguin, Gustave Kahn, Mallarmé, Henri de Régnier, and Marcel Schwob. (BOOK THREE)
After further navigations, discussions, and a great banquet, Faustroll discourses on death and starts a holo­caust in which Bosse-de-Nage perishes - provisionally. His monosyllabic and all-sufficing language ("Ha ha") is carefully analyzed. (BOOK FOUR)
After a coprological aside on the "legless cripple" who represents Pierre Loti, Faustroll puts Henri Rousseau in charge of a "painting machine" to "embellish" the aca­demic canvases hanging in the Luxembourg Museum. (BOOK FIVE)
While Faustroll has an erotic adventure, the painting machine under the Lucretian name of Clinamen executes thirteen paintings, each described in a short prose poem. (BOOK SIX)
Faustroll dies by drowning after sinking the skiff to avoid collision, and his body, like a tight scroll unfurled by the water, reveals the future in its spirals. (BOOK SEVEN)
The final book, entitled "Ethernity," resumes the treatise on pataphysics begun in BOOK TWO. Two tele­pathic letters from Faustroll to Lord Kelvin regarding the latter's experiments in measurement, matter, and light, are followed by a crowning pataphysical discourse on the "surface" and nature of God. In accurate geometrical theorems He is demonstrated to be "the tangential point between zero and infinity." (BOOK EIGHT)

'Pataphysics is teh Science ...

(... also leading to rediscovering Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, via influence ...)

Recto

The imposed storylines of authoritariantive versions:

Dezső Kosztolányi, Anna Édes (trans George Szirtes): Reactionary bourgeois narcissism, in which only the murderer is innocent (even the author is implicated in the end). [review]

Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (trans Chris Andrews): Postulating a full-fledged movement, borrowing detail from literary actualities. As Amulet is embedded in The Savage Detectives (or, the former an elaboration of a section of the latter), so Distant Star is in Nazi Literature in the Americas. A bibliography of invented works includes Poe's "Philosophy of Furniture", from which interior description is directly lifted. [review; excerpts: The Mendiluce Clan, The Many Masks of Max Mirebalais, The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys, and in the same neighborhood but not in the book, "Álvaro Rousselot's Journey"]

Imre Kertész, Detective Story (trans Tim Wilkinson): A tables-turned fable, special police investigation. [review]

Hermann Broch, The Spell (trans H.F.Broch de Rothermann): A stranger comes to town, as once did an Austrian watercolorist-housepainter. Written thrice, the version published 25 years after Broch's death followed the first (1940) with elaboration from the first rewrite only in the purple patch of the narrator's first love. [summareview]

Ricardo Piglia, The Absent City (trans Sergio Waisman): Story machine escapes between the interstices of state machinations. [brieview]