Extreme reading
Different ways of telling a story by writer's writers, lives of letters:
Robert Pinget, The Inquisitory (trans Donald Watson): An interrogation of a hard-of-hearing old retainer, in the service of investigating an unnamed crime, depicts provincial society through the filter of a peripheral character who, though reticent, nonetheless seems well informed, and so depicts his character through the filtering, as various subplots revolve around a missing plot. Beckett thought well of it, as well he might have, though he was reductive where Pinget was expansive. For me, definitely redemptive after the disappointment of Mahu.
Henry Green, Concluding: At a school for girls, future servants of the State go missing, while servants past (hard-of-hearing) and present (short-sighted) try to prevent events from getting out of (their) control as the day unwinds. Various subplots fail to resolve around a missing girl. While this was his favorite, it shan't be mine, I hope, as everyone else's is apparently Loving; RCF provides précises, but Dalkey concentrates on reissuing early and late work.
Nathalie Sarraute, Here (trans Barbara Wright): Commonplaces of language closely examined, found wanting, a word salad provoked by a missing ingredient. Not currently in the publisher's catalog, it's a late and somewhat belated work, probably not the best place to start, but one has to start somewhere ... and Wright, Queneau's premier translator, thought the effort well worthwhile (Maria Jolas had long been Sarraute's primary translator, Dalkey is reissuing). Sarraute also thought well of the late works of Henry Green (despite others' complaint that he did not have the same ear for his own class), how the language betokened an underlying psychology, though for her it seems that the psychology is the language. So, I won't give up on either just yet (it seemed to work with Pinget).
Giannina Braschi, Empire of Dreams (trans Tess O'Dwyer): A multipart exuberation, defying type: Assault on Time suggests Michaux in its rhythms, while The Profane Comedy reads like the love child of Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, and The Intimate Diary of Solitude goes the full pomo in a daisy chain of rôle assumption, as if Pessoa's heteronyms swapped personae. And, surprisingly, it all works, though you can't say just how. (PS 17.7 Ignore the extravagant introduction.
Winding down with Bernhard's Extinction now ...)
Robert Pinget, The Inquisitory (trans Donald Watson): An interrogation of a hard-of-hearing old retainer, in the service of investigating an unnamed crime, depicts provincial society through the filter of a peripheral character who, though reticent, nonetheless seems well informed, and so depicts his character through the filtering, as various subplots revolve around a missing plot. Beckett thought well of it, as well he might have, though he was reductive where Pinget was expansive. For me, definitely redemptive after the disappointment of Mahu.
Henry Green, Concluding: At a school for girls, future servants of the State go missing, while servants past (hard-of-hearing) and present (short-sighted) try to prevent events from getting out of (their) control as the day unwinds. Various subplots fail to resolve around a missing girl. While this was his favorite, it shan't be mine, I hope, as everyone else's is apparently Loving; RCF provides précises, but Dalkey concentrates on reissuing early and late work.
Nathalie Sarraute, Here (trans Barbara Wright): Commonplaces of language closely examined, found wanting, a word salad provoked by a missing ingredient. Not currently in the publisher's catalog, it's a late and somewhat belated work, probably not the best place to start, but one has to start somewhere ... and Wright, Queneau's premier translator, thought the effort well worthwhile (Maria Jolas had long been Sarraute's primary translator, Dalkey is reissuing). Sarraute also thought well of the late works of Henry Green (despite others' complaint that he did not have the same ear for his own class), how the language betokened an underlying psychology, though for her it seems that the psychology is the language. So, I won't give up on either just yet (it seemed to work with Pinget).
Giannina Braschi, Empire of Dreams (trans Tess O'Dwyer): A multipart exuberation, defying type: Assault on Time suggests Michaux in its rhythms, while The Profane Comedy reads like the love child of Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, and The Intimate Diary of Solitude goes the full pomo in a daisy chain of rôle assumption, as if Pessoa's heteronyms swapped personae. And, surprisingly, it all works, though you can't say just how. (PS 17.7 Ignore the extravagant introduction.
Winding down with Bernhard's Extinction now ...)
posted by nnyhav | 21:01
5 Comments:
'Wright, Queneau's premier translator'
Suggest you add 'in English'. The decisive test, anyhow, is Q's 'Exercices de style'. I have in mind Umberto Eco's translation into Italian.
I had thought that implicit. But Eco translating Queneau is wonderful (he may well be the premier translator of Exercises in Style, which I've mentioned elsewhere is the only novel [in English] I've not read [I haven't exhausted the sonnets either], a self-imposed constraint I'll have to relax; and I've read a lot of Eco [not just fiction or essays], largely thanks to William Weaver), and I'll have to hunt down his remarks. His Perfect Language notwithstanding, translations of literary investigations into language are difficult to treat as universal, and it's hard to tell what's lost. Apparent not only in the Sarraute but also in the Bernhard (the narrator complaining of the ponderous language he's writing in).
'I'll have to hunt down his remarks.'
He has published a larger series of reflections on translation more recent than the book you link. Namely, 'Dire Quasi la stessa cosa' Bompiani, Milan 2005 (a few remarks on Queneau's text, and the difficulties, may be found on pp.299.
(2) YOu remark that Sarraute thought Green's ear for the speech of his class wasn't up to snuff, compared to the precise redress he accords how the underclass downstairs speak. I know Russians are marvellous linguistis, but do you think her one year at Oxford, even hobnobbing with Nabokov, was sufficient to endow her with an acute sense for merchant upper middle class verbal nuance sufficient to justify her criticism here?
Let me rephrase that post.
You wrote: 'I'll have to hunt down his remarks.'
He has published a larger series of reflections on translation more recent than the book you link. Namely, 'Dire Quasi la stessa cosa' Bompiani, Milan 2005 (a few remarks on Queneau's text, and the difficulties, may be found on pp.299ff.)
(2) You remark that Sarraute thought Green's ear for the speech of his class wasn't up to snuff, compared to the precise redress he accords the chat of the underclass downstairs speak. I know Russians are marvellous linguists, but do you think her one year at Oxford, even hobnobbing with Nabokov, was sufficient to endow her with an acute sense for merchant upper middle class verbal nuance sufficient to justify her criticism here?
23/7/06 12:06
(1) I'll have to await translation.
(2) My poor phrasing: should be 'despite the common complaint', per high-end litcritters -- Sarraute made no such imprecation, quite the contrary.
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