Ramblin' Man

Life is a journey. I'm not the sojourner. Not pilot, navigator, nor passenger. Nor even the vehicle. I'm the ride, the traversal (and maybe, just maybe, cartographer). No itinerary, except in retrospect, and that keeps changing. Everything prepares me for what I'll see, though nothing could. Nobody can see everything anyway, but I try to see all I can.

Taking in the sights is a matter of accretion, of assimilation. I take a bit with me, leaving nothing of myself behind. Each experience leaves some trace, incrementing the mental topography, as fluid as any natural landscape, dunes shifting, mountains eroding, rivers changing course. The topography in turn determines how new experience will be incorporated, nothing taken in all at once, even when the change is as abrupt as an earthquake or a volcano. Or experience may be refracted through a fellow traveller, even (especially?) when meeting that traveller is the event, reciprocally reshaping the corresponding landscapes. The voyages can never be fully shared, as separate points of origin affect how significant features are received, landmarked, and the terrains remain distinct even as the maps nominally coincide. And yet, amid all the give and take, nothing is lost.

But the I of which I speak is not this internal landscape, no more than the sojourner upon it. The territory is what I make of it, and vice versa, as I make the journey. Making it up as I go along. Finding my place in the world and finding the world in my place. It is all one, inseperable in aspect.

Why do I say I? It might just as well be you. It's merely a placeholder. But even (especially?) the same words convey different meanings.

BTBA

Friday evening found me in the midst of the Washington Mews (and PEN events) for an open-air ceremony announcing the winners of the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, with Chad Post (of sponsor 3% and of Open Letter) presiding, and after a prologue introducing Finnegans List, with Bill Martin (translator and co-founder of The Bridge Series) announcing the poetry winner and Michael A. Orthofer (of the complete review) announcing the fiction winner.

The fiction winner is no surprise: George Szirtes' Laszlo Krashnahorkai's Satantango [NDP], though Marian Schwartz's Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair [Open Letter] gave it a run for the money.

The poetry prize was less of a lock, but deservedly went to Sean Cotter's Nichita Stanescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke [Archipelago Books]. (I say deservedly unreservedly, though I hadn't read the the other contenders, since Stanescu certainly merits wider notice; and I look forward to Cotter's rendering of Cartarescu's Orbitor for us in October.) (Us? I'm still getting used to pronoun usage as regards Archipelago Books, and here of course I speak for myself. Though not much lately, sorry.) This is Archipelago's first award for poetry and third overall, tops among publishers, NDP having one each in poetry and fiction. But it's great to see Open Letter gaining traction, and other lit-trans pubs getting off the ground—the kind of competition I'm into is the kind that raises everybody's game.

Aaron Swartz

It is not, nor will it become, my habit to address topical matters on this blog, but this exceptional young man calls for exception handling. Not that I knew him (though acquainted with someone who did); of him, of course, more through his open access / Creative Commons efforts than, say, RSS or Reddit (or protowiki theinfo.org). I feel I've gotten to know him better through his own words and others ' (as well as more dispersed commentary, whether journalistic or self-published).

He was a visionary, not just seeing the future but also a way to get there. He held himself to impossibly high standards, and those close to him, with whom he could be withering, to standards less high but no less impossible, but was always willing to give the best of himself to enhance others' goods.

Much has been said about the excesses of his prosecution and its possible political motivation (little about the irony of the now more widely reviled Carmen Ortiz, unsolicited protector of JSTOR's and MIT's prerogatives, also trying to prize from Boston College the confidential Belfast Project records for the Royal Ulster Constabulary Police Service of Northern Ireland), and about how this exacerbated the depression he suffered, particularly the prospect of prison time. But I believe that constraints on his future computer (and political) activities had greater bearing on him. He had already been effectively neutralized, and may have despaired of recovering any agency.

I also believe that his despair was not without calculation. The timing, between the partial opening of JSTOR's archive to the public and the anniversary of the SOPA strike, is too pat. He would have anticipated the Turing comparison, howevermuch he thought himself undeserving of it, despite having achieved so much more than most do over an entire adulthood; perhaps he thought his best already behind him. I think he foresaw that his passing would galvanize his cause, serve as martyrdom in a way that he had been largely proscribed from serving otherwise, and the engendered rage soon directed at the machine that he enraged rather than at its minions. The twitter data dump in his memory may be only the beginning.

If this is so, it is no less tragic, nor less a waste. His legacy not unalloyed, but ... so much to offer, and made to suffer so.

add 20.1: so Congress is investigating both clarifying Terms of Service in CFAA and prosecutorial indiscretion, which may have been related to Swartz's involvement with wikileaks (perhaps to turn him?) ... I've credited Swartz with a lot of insight and foresight above, but such prompt response from the lever-pullers might have surprised even him.

Loose Ends

Closing the books on 2012, just over 100 of which qualify as lit; my book-of-the-month (prose, that is) selection:
Jan: Patrick White, The Tree of Man
Feb: Joseph Heller, Something Happened
Mar: W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Anthea Bell)
Apr: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango (George Szirtes)
May: Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Jun: Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (Marian Schwartz)
Jul: Junichiro Tanizaki, Seven Japanese Tales (Howard Hibbett)
Aug: Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
Sep: Julio Cortazar, Blow-Up and other stories (Paul Blackburn) [reread]
Oct: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Edith Grossman)
Nov: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils [reread, inadvertently]
Dec: Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (Lillian Vallee)
but lots of honorable mentions, Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair (Marian Schwartz), Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, and Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts just in the past month; also, stuff covered a couple of posts back ...

Prosers new to me this year: Goncharov and all the Dec honorable mentioned; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (x3 *), Olga Tokarczuk, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Evelio Rosero, Gert Jonke, Orhan Pamuk, Glenway Wescott, James Merrill, Mark Helprin (and Jorge Amado, current reading) and via Archipelago, Herman Charles Bosman, Albert Cohen, and Antonio Tabucchi.

* Other authors I read more than one by: Ismail Kadare, Patrick White, Amos Oz, Elias Khoury, Danilo Kis, César Aira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kingsley Amis (and if poetry counts, Roubaud and Merrill as well). (And other stuff left out, such as getting more breadth and depth in Brazil and Poland, beyond those mentioned ...)

Poetry Readings

Attention Conservation Notice (should the post title not suffice): meanderings not along any set line

So, I've been reading proportionately more poetry this year, not so much by intent or design, more a matter of getting an itchy understanding up to scratch. Which I guess is one reason why poets write, especially given the propensity for poems to be about poetry, as if it's a set problem. Not that I have any pretenses towards styling myself a poet, though I have perpetrated poetry, and verse. No, my writing is at least mostly in the service of my reading, and getting poetic is just part of getting poetics.

I've long interspersed poetry into my literary reading, if haphazardly, the bulk of it pre-WWII, also predominantly British or American when not premodern, and little below the rank of major, but filling in more diversely in recent years, at least as regards the first two categories; with so much territory to cover in order to get grounded, who has time for minor topological features? This year I took on more of the collected-selected variety (Delmore Schwartz, Marianne Moore, Tomas Tranströmer [via Robin Fulton], Clive James, Wislawa Szymborska [Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh], Francis Picabia [Marc Lowenthal], e.e.cummings, Li Po [J.P. Seaton], Vladimir Nabokov, Nichita Stanescu [Sean Cotter], James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Heinrich Heine [Louis Untermeyer], Samuel Beckett, and in progress, Czeslaw Milosz [various, adjudicated by himself]). These are invariably ordered chronologically (as I just did vis-a-vis my reading), so one follows the development of the poet's idiolect while in the process of learning it for oneself. (Having said before that I try to reread the first time through, again who has time, the Heine was an exception, but from pre-adolescence, part of my Heritage Press intro to poetry that also featured Longfellow, Whittier, Poe. [Well, Poe and Nabokov (and so Pope) and Shakespeare also exceptional, but that's different.] But I got sidetracked waybackthen by the Little Brown Ogden Nash.)

(But I digress. So what else is new?)

For all this, I'm still far from consolidating my understanding, far from having a handle on this art as on others (not just Arts as such, but all such domains of human endeavor, philosophical, mathematical, just f'rinstance). Now, I've always pretty much been a strict interdisciplinarian, even though becoming expert in some matters, but the context supplied by such boundaries seems singularly lacking in poetry in all its particularity. One distinguishing feature of literature (eg from genre, though there is lit-genre writing, ornamented rather than intrinsic) is that it creates its own context; poetry takes it another step, even beyond the idiolectical use of language, in creating its own aesthetic (genre being verse), form and function becoming inseparable in execution. Even determining any given aesthetic is quixotic (eg Arnold, Yeats), moreso given its flux (eg Auden), so trying to place some meta-aesthetic above seems more so still. Not that there isn't something to be gained in trying. But, more than in other arts, it always leads back to the particularity of the poet and of the poem, and for that matter of the reader. (And I think myself a fairly particular reader.)

Differences in degree, not in kind? Sure, I'll grant that much. But nothing else so intensifies, so heightens the contradictions. No overarching theory suffices, nor combinations thereof. Attempts to establish categories are categorically unsound (well, maybe historical, but History shares this dynamic–well, to a degree: in poetry every word count–but then there's also the Great Man perspective) (oh and I should mention A.C.Graham's renderings of Poems of the Late T'ang; historical anthologies at least giving temper of time and place if not so much the individual writers).

All of which helps make poetry the most democratic of the arts. Which of course means a greater number aspiring to high office (ntm placeholders' legacy issues, and party affiliations & broadsides) (did I mention astroflarfing?) as all the while turnout (readership) diminishes. After all, the personal is poetical ...

(Other 2012 poetry readings: relatively recent by W.S. Merwin, Ruth Patel, Tadeusz Rozewicz [via Bill Johnston], and Jacques Roubaud [Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop].)(oops, Ashbery's Self-Portrait too ...)

previously

Best Translated Books of 2012

(updates downthere)
It'll be three months before the long list for the Best Translated Book Awards is announced, but I feel I've already read many of the books likely to be on it. Not by design, just that this year's releases hit my buttons one way or another in a way that last coupla year's didn't (including the BTBA long list) (though I read half of the first coupla year's list, which got longer as the award established itself) (how do the judges do it?). So without much ado, and in the order read, a list of the worthies [with links to publisher sites] (and translator in parentheses) (when is a translator not in parentheses?) (oh yes, BTBA ...):

Jacques Roubaud, Mathematics: (Ian Monk) [Dalkey Archive]
Elias Khoury, As Though She Were Sleeping (Marilyn Booth) [Archipelago Books]
Eric Chevillard, Prehistoric Times (Alyson Waters) [Archipelago Books]
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango (George Szirtes) [New Directions]
César Aira, Varamo (Chris Andrews) [New Directions]
Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life (Johnny Lorenz) [New Directions]
Andrei Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man (Geoffrey Strachan) [Graywolf]
Danilo Kis, Psalm 44 (John K. Cox) [Dalkey Archive]
Antonio Tabucchi, The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico (Tim Parks) [Archipelago Books]
Danilo Kis, The Lute and the Scar (John K. Cox) [Dalkey Archive]
César Aira, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (Katherine Silver) [New Directions]
Mikhail Shishkin, Maidenhair (Marian Schwartz) [Open Letter]
(and on order: *
Juan Filloy, Faction (Brendan Riley) [Dalkey Archive])

Of these, I expect Kraznahorkai and Shishkin to make the short list (four months away), along with perhaps Lispector or Makine (or Chevillard) (or non-exclusive, but there's only so much room) ...

Some likely long-listers I haven't read:
Laurent Binet, HHhH (Sam Taylor) [FSG]
Sergio Chejfec, Planets (Heather Cleary) [Open Letter]
Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One (Don Bartlett) [Archipelago Books]
Andrés Neuman, Traveler of the Century (Lorenzo Garcia) [FSG]
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (Anne McLean) [New Directions]

And I haven't even mentioned new translations of Nobelaureates, nor university press offerings, nor the hard-to-categorize (such as Yves Bonnefoy's The Arriére-Pays (Stephen Romer) [Seagull Books] or Roberto Calasso's La Folie Baudelaire (Alastair McEwan) [FSG]) ...

but there's also a BTBA for poetry, which I've been delving into more, including a couple candidates for that long list:
Li Po, Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po (J.P. Seaton) [Shambhala]
Nichita Stanescu, Wheel with a Single Spoke and other poems (Sean Cotter) [Archipelago Books]

... but further elaboration will have to be fodder for a future post.

(11.12.12) * at least I hope it's on order: snailmailed for Dalkey's special sale, running thru 15 Dec, online via Amazon account.

(12.12.12)Raised from comments: So far as Nobelaureates go, Miguel is right to highlight José Saramago's Raised from the Ground, which I will be reading at his instigation.
Also, while not eligible for BTBA (because previously translated even if out-of-print), one of the best of 2012 I've read is Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (Lillian Vallee) [Yale]. Similarly ineligible but nonetheless noteworthy is Juan Rulfo, The Plain in Flames (Ilan Stavans w/ Harold Augenbraum)[Texas].

Foreign Exchange

I've been accepted on to the Board of Directors for Archipelago Books, "a not-for-profit literary press dedicated to promoting cross-cultural exchange through international literature in translation", a mission I can get behind. Which is where I want to be, rather than out in front of it: I've never been in sales, relying instead upon the product to do the persuading, preferring to be cast as support rather than to the spotlight. That's just how I role. And getting on board isn't much about group identification for me; I'm more fitter than joiner, and this suits my journeymanic ramblings.

But I'd like to unpack that mission statement a bit, give some indication as to why it's important (beyond what I've already had to say about literary translation and awards [and much more passim/en passant]). Not to unpack all the way down to "literature" or "culture", other than to note that it is the individual writers that ultimately constitute both, and this is the most telling; such personal perspectives reveal much more than any pedagogy or punditry can, thanks to the tension, artistic and otherwise, between individual and literature, culture, society. As writers both refract and affect culture, so translators broaden its reach through artfully self-effacive impersonation. So what makes culture accessible is this double movement, this intensely personal interaction, window and mirror–the writer setting him/herself apart, the translator, within.

What's going on at the atomic level doesn't explain the interactions in aggregate. Culture is more than mere aggregation, more than history (rationalization of incidence, reconciling unlikemindedness), more like memory (not that I'm ascribing consciousness to it). The act of remembering alters the memory, brings it into current context, among other perspectival shifts. For the writer, one of the most fruitful modes of movement is to smuggle in something from outside the local culture and adapt it, whether by responding to writers from other parts, or importing forms from elsewhere, or, in extremis, exile. But what is new within the local (particularly non-European) culture may be the very thing affording purchase for the international reader to the established local matrix (in an echo of the writer-translator dynamic). And recognition from abroad may feed back into better reception at home and a consequent cultural enlargement and diversity.

So this notion of "cross-cultural exchange" is not just about the benefits to the reader, but to culture, whether regional, national, or global. But I'm happy to reap the benefits as a reader, in better understanding the world, and in better connecting with those I've worked with in finance, one of the more internationalized business venues, though these were not my principal motivations in exploring the territories marked out by literature in translation. And I am gratified to have an opportunity to encourage others to make the trip. Your mileage may vary, but you'll go far.

Reiterations

Getting back in the loop (due for a while). More anon ...

As the year closes its books, donations to non-profit indepedent publishers remain a sure bet; one way of having something to show (and place) is a winning bid at Archipelago Books annual auction near month's end.

More throwaway lines:

There's a lot I don't know, but I'm sure there's a lot of epistemic uncertainty.

Taxonomy is the exercise of fitting what we don't understand into the Procrustean bed of what we think we do.

Suigineers: Uncategorically self-made men.

Quine has an interesting take on translation, but the bit about gavagai is just splitting hares.

Haruspication entails evisceration.

Just because we share our misanthropy doesn't mean we have to like each other.

Those who believe in hierarchy believe their belief justifies a raise.

For any CEO that wants to "focus on core competencies", management isn't one of them.

The journey is the destination, but you can't get there from here.

Donne wasn't very good at geography. Man is an island. Manhood is a peninsula.

I remember when finding romance wasn't a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Of course I'm dating myself.
It's cheaper that way, especially if I go Dutch.

My computer keeps saying "The Bittish are coming! The Bittish are coming!"
1 if by LAN, and 10 if by C.
Serves me right for installing RevereWare.

Science seeks to understand,
Technology, to control;
Means each takes as close to hand
Are the other's distant goal.

A plaque on both your houses:
John Logie Baird: 22 Frith Street, Soho, London W1 & 3 Crescent Wood Road, Sydenham, London SE26
Mahatma Gandhi: Kingsley Hall, Powis Road, Tower Hamlets, London E3 & 20 Baron's Court Road, Hammersmith and Fulham, London W14
T. E. Lawrence: 14 Barton Street, Westminster, London SW1 & 2 Polstead Road, Oxford, OX2
John Lennon: 251 Menlove Avenue, South Woolton, Liverpool L25 & 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, London W1H

marking time ...

with an I for Incomplete. Another bloggiversary, little to show for it. Just some marginal notes ...

Reading the market: It's been 3 years since I prognosticated on the possibility of a humped inverted Treasury yield curve (in ~4 years; one to go, but probably more given deferred Fed unwind). This is a big deal in that most interest rate term structure models do not admit such a configuration (nor does the standard taxonomy of yield curves). The TIPS curve (Trasury Inflation-Protected Securities, real rather than nominal yields) has now been both inverted and humped for a couple of months, suggesting that the market considers short-term inflation retargeting to be on the table after the election. This configuration could migrate to nominal rates, but Fed interventions swamp any signal there (there's a host of technical factors involved as well: dearth of high-quality assets, long-term short-term financing problems, currency woes & overseas negative nominal rates ...), though it's remarkable that the steepest part of the curve is now out to 7 years (from 5 previously), consistent with a lower potential growth rate in developed economies, which is in turn inconsistent with the common pension fund assumption that 8% returns are feasible going forward (since it's been that way since WWII, just like a few years ago house prices never fell).

Reading the books: A lot more poetry in the reading mix so far this year, including in translation, but I'll only mention what's on the off-beat path: Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation (trans Marc Lowenthal): Collected stuff (except awful novel Caravansary, per ML). One thing you can count on is his unreliability. Not just embracing contradictions but trying to penetrate every orifice. Starts out automatic before hitting stride in full Dada, then after hiatus gets lyrical, technically better and thus not so good, before finally repurposing Nietzsche, pressing his suit with alterations (occasionally reversing fabric), especially The Gay Science, sadly. More pervasive irony than the Brooklyn hipster scene. (Of course I'm biased, Picabia one of my faves, though behind de Chirico & Duchamp.)

fishfishfishing with Basho

toss another frog into the pond
grasp it by the leg and flick your wrist
to make it skip across the water