A Canto A Day

Fortunata and Jacinta

2012-01-11T14:19:00.001Z

Hello again. It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm currently defying time and mortality by reading Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Perez Galdos, in a translation by Agnes Moncy Guillon (with occasional lookups to the Spanish Wikisource text). It's tremendously enjoyable so far, like Spanish Dickens with added sexual frankness and a believable, complex female character (possibly two - Fortunata hasn't really shown up yet).

The translation's not too irritating, either, despite being clearly American. It is annoying that place names are semi-translated, so we have for example Cuchilleros Street, rather than Calle Cuchilleros, which I'd have thought would be acceptable. There's a lot of gottens (although that's soon going to be standard UK English again). There's that funny way the Americans have of using himself as the reflexive pronoun for one. At one point Jacinta and Juan, her husband, are together:

For a while they stared at each other, each riveting his eyes on the other ... (p 72)

Here's the Spanish:

Uno y otro se estuvieron mirando breve rato, los ojos clavados en los ojos

Which reveals that the translation is not only a bit sexist, but terribly weak.

But here's the worst one. A character remembers hearing

the collectors going by, ladened with money (p 85f)

Ladened? I looked it up for examples, and found, among others, this:

It would be writer pragmatic to see it as a pursuit that pays a few century dollars a period, or swan it as a ladened reading job paid up to a few thousands if you are consenting to move it a small farther by working yearner hours on them.

Exactly.

Spiral gears

2011-04-26T16:24:00.000+01:00

Translating 'late' from English to French is a trap. The temptation is to translate 'I was late for work' as 'j'ai arrivé au travail tard', which doesn't mean the same. You have to say 'j'ai arrivé trop tard' - making it explicit that you were too late.

I've lately started watching Spiral, the English version of the French police serial Engrenages (which literally means gears). I don't know if I'm trop tard or merely tard; probably both. Despite the fact that French is my strongest foreign language, I know I wouldn't be able to follow the programme without the English subtitles: it's too fast and slangy. But, inevitably, those subtitles are sometimes a cause of annoyance.

I have sympathy for the translators. The French criminal legal system is so different from the English that you'd need footnotes to explain the role of the character Roban, a juge d'instruction. He's not quite police, not quite prosecutor, and certainly doesn't act as a judge as we know it. But surely we could cope with the fact that the leading detective is called Capitaine Berthaud. Why does she need to become a Chief Inspector in the subtitles? The most egregious act of domestication though occured when the flics needed to know the registered owner of a certain vehicle. The subtitle said the DVLA had provided the information. Again, you can understand the stress on the translator, needing to find a quick equivalent, but I can't help thinking a less specific, less Swansea-based term could have been found ('the vehicle register'?). That seemed to me to cross the line, where the next step is to change the name of the locale of the crimes from Belleville to, say, Hackney, to ease the viewer's understanding that it's a poor area with a large immigrant community.

Nevertheless, I am enjoying the programme. Capitaine Berthaud is one of the worst investigators you'll ever see, leaping to a conclusion of who the murderer is, and then focussing on any evidence that supports that view, and ignoring everything else. Which is probably just what most police detectives do, just not as blatantly.

Austerlitz

2011-04-15T22:37:00.000+01:00

and, talking of odd books, I've reread, or at least I think I have, Austerlitz by W G Sebald. The weird thing is that I could remember very little of it, and I seriously am uncertain if I did read it before. Which is appropriate, because one of the things the book is about is memory and forgetting.

You know you're in a strange world when a book begins like this:

In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks.

That mystery - here on the part of the narrator - is very much part of Austerlitz's story: he is compelled into action by forces he doesn't understand.

Austerlitz, the central character of the book, was a Jewish Czech boy, sent to Britain by his parents before the second world war to escape the coming holocaust. Over a period of around thirty years he tells his story to the narrator, once from ignorance and then from knowledge of his own background. Simplistically you could see the story as representative of Europe's coming to terms with what happened under Hitler, or more specifically with Germany's self-awareness (a theme that's present in Sebald's Natural History of Destruction), where the narrator - largely invisible - has to be mapped on Sebald himself and by extension onto Germany (though the narrator's nationality isn't mentioned, the fact that it was written in German is important).

So, let's step back a moment into translation theory. The fact that Sebald wrote in German is significant. The German language had baggage in the second half of the twentieth century. Isn't that lost in translation? Sebald's narrator didn't have to say "I (the narrator) am German", his language did that for him. Similarly, a Spanish book would mean something different if it was written in Basque or Catalan. How does translation capture that?

Let's leave that aside for now. Austerlitz is a moving, because understated, portrayal of the effects of destruction of history, personal and racial. One day, maybe, I'll look at the way it works, at, for example, the way the photos illustrate and at the same time undermine the reality of what's told. But I'll just end this post with a sadness. On the front cover an unnamed reviewer in The Times says "Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st century". He died in December 2001.

Your Face Tomorrow

2011-04-13T21:35:00.001+01:00

Because I'm a man, I have to name someone as my favourite living novelist, a successor to Jose Saramago. It might just be Javier Marías, or this might be because I've just finished the 1500 page novel in three volumes, Your Face Tomorrow, and feel it deserves some kind of recognition.

It's a very odd book, unbelievably slow-paced for the most part. In part 2, the main character's boss, Tupra, tells him to go and find someone, without delay. Twenty pages later, after a lot of reflection on what "without delay" might mean, connote, imply, involve, require, or feel like, what memories it provokes, what memories it will bequeath to the future, on how the concept of delay may be different in Spanish and in English, and on previous occasions where the leading character, Deza, using the different versions of his first name - Jacobo, Iago, Jaime - as the situation seemed to require or demand, according to whether he was dealing with his wife, Luisa, still in Madrid, from whom the separation is a cause of grief and unresolved longing, or with his colleague, young Perex Nuix, half-Spanish, whose request for a favour we are still waiting to understand, Deza goes in search of the missing woman.

But despite that it's compelling writing. Marías handles really long sentences much better than my clumsy parody suggests. And the translation is by the brilliant Margaret Jull Costa, so she too keeps them intelligible and enjoyable. Through the third volume, it occured to me that the impression the translation gives is that the book was written to be translated into English: English is where it belongs. Marías is fluent in English, and his character, Deza, is superficially similar to himself, a Spanish exile in London, and so there is a lot of explicit reflection on the way words slip their meanings in translation. I'd be interested to see how many separate words there are in the book - how big its lexicon is. It seemed huge.

I'm not going to recommend the book. Some people, probably most, will hate it because of the pace. If you want to try a book by Marías, try Tomorrow in the battle think on me.

Love poems

2011-02-26T21:15:00.000Z

One of the things Don Paterson got right in his lamentable article about Shakespeare's Sonnets was that they're almost useless as love poems. Shakespeare is just too ambiguous, too complex, for simple declarations of love. (Last time I was in love, some years ago, sadly, I had to write my own sonnets. Well, I had to, once I realised my truelove's name was fourteen letters long. Don't worry, I'm not going to share the three acrostic sonnets I wrote. Not out of shame, but because they would of course reveal my truelove's name.)

The Casa Fernando Pessoa is currently running a series of 'Poemas de amor' and today's poema is by Pessoa himself (I think in his own name). Here it is:

Antígona

Como te amo? Não sei de quantos modos vários
Eu te adoro mulher de olhos azuis e castos;
Amo-te co’o fervor dos meus sentidos gastos;
Amo-te co’o fervor dos meus preitos diários.

É puro o meu amor, como os puros sacrários;
É nobre o meu amor, como os mais nobres fastos;
É grande como os mar’s altíssonos e vastos
É suave como o odor de lírios solitários.

Amor que rompe enfim os laços crus do ser;
Um tão singelo amor, que aumenta na ventura;
Um amor tão leal que aumenta no sofrer;

Amor de tal feição que se na vida escura
É tão grande e nas mais vis ânsias de viver,
Muito maior será na paz da sepultura!

A sonnet, obviously, and I didn't at first realise it's a version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (obviously I recognised the first line, but thought it was a homage):

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

And, realising that this is from her Sonnets from the Portuguese, I wonder how far back we can go. EBB's sonnets were not translations, but referred to Camoes.

All of which obscures the point I first set out to make: that Pessoa's poem is just as useless a love poem as any of Shakespeare's. In his version, trust me, non-lusophones, the love is more sterile and cold. EBB contemplates God choosing a separation in death; Pessoa's poem seems to actively wish for death, so that the love may be perfected.

I have to say, I think EBB's version is much better than Pessoa's and not just because of this. There seems to me to be more variety and belief in it. The latinate construction of Pessoa's last tercet, for example, is too clever. Pessoa's pretending to be in love, while EBB seems to be the real thing, AND intriguingly contrasts the human love of now with the love of "lost saints". But even in EBB you (finally) hit the problem: is it really romantic to suggest that you'll love someone even better when you're dead than you do now? Well, it works with Wuthering Heights... But the power of EBB is that she's writing about her own situation; we don't share it. Pessoa is attempting to generalise, but the poem is contaminated with a sense that marble is the best flesh.

J H Prynne

2011-02-01T16:18:00.000Z

Well, at least there's an excuse for reading this slowly.

Anyone who turns is more than
the same, being in desire the pivot
of what he would most want: or
in point of fact, they say,
driving through the
early morning, to go to it.

Those are the opening lines of "How It's Done", one of the earliest poems in this huge doorstep of a book. What the hell's going on? I don't know and if I were to type out the rest of the poem (21 more lines) it wouldn't help you or me.

But I'm not in despair. And the best entrance into this poetry is (inevitably) the language. That tone of voice, I can already tell, is characteristic of Prynne: the rhythm suggests a kind of scientific discourse, but detached from any obvious referent. Actually, there is one obvious referent, which is language itself. Scraps of the text seem to challenge their own construction: in the above, for example, the second three lines might be enjoying the fact that the words normally are so easy to understand, and questioning what sort of understanding that is.

Maybe - but I won't know until I've uncomprehendingly read a lot more. And it may be comforting to think of this view by Alain Robbe-Grillet:

... today, like yesterday, new works have no reason to exist unless they in their turn bring to the world new significations, still unknown to the authors themselves, significations which will only exist later, thanks to these works, and upon which society will establish new values, which in turn will be useless, or even harmful, when they are used to judge the literature then being made. (Robbe-Grillet 1961 p123)

I've left significations untranslated. I don't think it just means "meanings" - it's also the process of meaning, the way words mean something. I love the thought that new literature always has to be strange and modern: the writer always has to produce something that he or she can't explain. By the time we can explain it, it's superseded, in one sense.

But actually, is it comforting? To know we'll always lag behind the wave ... That's the pain of doing criticism, Robbe-Grillet says, while a "simple" reader only needs to know if the book is moving and involving.

Looking back a few entries to the discussion of Katherine Howard, though, you can see that a modern book gives the reviewer some of the difficulties Robbe-Grillet talks about, and that a non-modern book doesn't. Once the world is pretty much agreed on how a 19th century realist novel, or a 20th century historical novel, works, reviewing one is largely a matter of measuring the book against the template. Modern works don't have a template. That's their definition perhaps.

And this is why I don't accept the notion of post-modernism. Any modernism is doomed to be overtaken by the next one.

Demons, at last

2011-01-27T06:02:00.002Z

Concerned readers may be pleased or appalled to learn I have finally finished Demons. Dostoevsky may be a writer for young people - I remember the joy with which I first read The Idiot in my teens; recently I found it just about impossible.

Thinking about the book, I found myself wanting to say that at the end the central character finds comfort in the gospel ... but remembered that this character (Stepan Trofimovich) isn't usually considered the main character. In fact there are three principal characters, two of whom are father and son. Hmm.

It is possible to see this long book as a blasphemous parody of the Trinity. Dostoevsky blasphemous? Well, not entirely, because there is a fourth character, the narrator, who could therefore be considered an evangelist. I'll come back to this.

Very near the end of the book, though, Stepan Trofimovich finds comfort in the gospels, in particular in the parable of the demons and swine. It's significant, of course, because it ostensibly explains the title. In a post-Christian Russia, demons rush into the empty space where faith used to be. It's a notion we still hear today: once people have stopped believing in God, they'll believe in anything. When Stepan finds comfort in the Bible which he has for long ignored, we can read this as suggesting that Russia needs to return to its Christianity.

We could, but if that was all we needed to know, a lot of paper (700 pages) has been wasted. This reading is just too small. Even if we step outside the proper range of criticism and find that this is exactly what Dostoevsky (the man) would have said, it's not what the book says.

The role of the narrator is crucial. He's not particularly unreliable, but he is unrealistically knowledgable. There's occasional comment on the research he carried out in preparing to tell the story, but in general, he's presented as silently, invisibly present in every scene in the book. I think we can take this impossibility as a structural equivalent to the fact that the book is bigger than any summary can be. It's a way of saying that the book contains far more than Dostoevsky could have said. (But yet he did.)

Evens

2011-01-14T15:55:00.000Z

I'm almost ashamed that this post reveals how slowly I'm reading Demons, but here, on p 327, a young man has killed himself after wasting the family fortune, and the inquisitive ladies of the town have gone to see the body.

Generally, in every misfortune of one's neighbour there is always something that gladdens the observer's eye - and that even no matter who you are. Our ladies stared silently, their companions distinguished themselves by by sharpness of wit and a supreme presence of mind. One of them observed that this was the best solution and that the boy even could not have come up with anything smarter;

Two uses of the word "even" there, neither of which seems to fit. I suspect there's a word in the Russian that doesn't easily translate into English, like doch in German. It's a kind of modifier of the tone of the sentence, which in English would be rendered by inflection. P-V have translated it, but probably shouldn't have. They've produced awkward English sentences when - I bet - there's nothing awkward about the originals.

But while I'm here, let's note that Dostoevsky has no qualms about using fairly obvious plot structures. There's a duel, and we see the preliminaries with the narrator expressing sorrow that he has to recount what happened too quickly, but he then delays, to give a description of one of the duellers.

And there's also a strange, almost picaresque, structure, as in the scene I've quoted from. I feel fairly sure that the suicide has no importance in the plot, but it's a "state of the nation" vignette. It also, of course, delays the main plot movement, which, as I've realised, is what writing is all about.

Demons, grains and beads

2010-12-14T12:00:00.001Z

I'm perfectly aware that writing this is a diversion from actually reading the damn book (Dostoevsky's Demons) but sometimes a word leaps out that suggests the translators' dilemma.

In Part One, Chapter 5 (which P-V translate as "The Wise Serpent", Garnett as "The Subtle Serpent", hmm) a hitherto unknown character appears. The narrator pauses a little to describe him. Garnett translates this in past tense and here's an extract:

His words pattered out like smooth, big grains, always well chosen, and at your service.

P-V translate that sentence as:

his words spill out like big, uniform grains, always choice and always ready to be at your service. (p 180)

The change in tense is interesting. I'd guess the original is written in present tense, but Garnett felt unable to use the present historic in English: it was much less common then than now. I'd imagine there are huge amounts of translation from French where this has happened. So it's an example of a wider change in the translating language enabling a translator to be more literal.

Then the stranger speaks:

"... Only fancy, Varvara Petrovna," he pattered on, [Garnett]

"... And imagine, Varvara Petrovna," the beads spilled out of him [P-V]

It was that word "beads" that made me check the two translations. It's out of nowhere in English. You have to supply a missing metonymy: words are like grains; big grains are like beads. Again, I'm guessing, but might the word "grains" in Russian have a closer link to the Russian for "beads"? A quick look at an online dictionary suggests the words зерно and бу́син(к)а don't sound alike, but maybe they're more interchangeable culturally. Maybe Russians (in the 19th century) couldn't see a big grain without thinking of a bead.

Maybe one day this association will become part of English understanding and we won't find the transition weird, just as we don't now find the use of the present tense weird. (I doubt it, though.)

This is the kind of problem that has always put me off reading translations. I don't know if the use of "beads" is clumsy or meaningful. But the fact that P-V use the word so awkwardly strikes me as clear evidence it's a literal translation of Dostoevsky's term. Maybe Garnett's decision to repeat "pattered" is closer to Dostoevsky's original impact.

Later (p 219) the same character (Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky) is described as having "words spilling out like peas", a word that Garnett also uses.

[Untitled]

2010-12-01T11:41:00.002Z

I've written a poem.

My pen is in my hand;
My hand is in warm water.

I'm sure you'll agree it's remarkable.

Actually, of course, it's rubbish, but the good thing about it is it's rubbish in two different languages. These are grammatically correct lines in both English and Afrikaans and have very nearly the same meaning (or lack of). So does it matter which language I claim to have written in?

A minor point would be that warm in Afrikaans is more likely to mean hot, so there's a slight change in surface meaning.

But in either language there is a familiar technique of poetry: the incompleteness of motivation in the words means the reader has to construct a meaning. It would be hard enough to understand why you would ever want to tell anyone your hand is in warm water. But what's all this about the pen?

Well, of course, now that I've said this is a poem, the first line is a fairly standard bit of poet's reflection. It's common for poets to reflect on the difficulty of writing poetry, of capturing elusive feelings in words. You could expect a neat inversion:

My pen is in my hand
But no words are in my heart.

Even so, you could only see that as the start of a longer poem (and, I'd guess, a pretty poor one).

Here, though, there's no linking conjunction; the reader has to guess the relation between the two clauses. You could read a but in there: here I am, ready to write but because my hand is (literally) in warm water, I can't. Or an and: my pen is in my hand, and I'm cleaning it (them). You could try various literal interpretations, but I don't think you'd find any of them satisfactory. So then you have to explore various metaphorical interpretations of the second line. Because the poem is so short, any satisfactory interpretation would have to explain why the poem ends where it does, and would have to be adequate: it would have to be able to import a strong feeling in those few words. My poem fails as a poem because you can't do that. There's no way in which you interpret "My hand is in warm water" to give any tragic closure. I'm pretty sure that's true in any language.

Perhaps a poem has to be specific to a certain language to be able to carry a complex idea in a few words: the associations within the language enrich the bare text. (Incidentally, there is a slightly obscene reading of the English version of [untitled], which I won't go into. It's the kind of thing Leopold Bloom might have said. It depends on wordplay of course.)

Of course you can have completeness at the expense of complexity. I might have written:

My pen is in my hand
But it is out of in

which at least is slightly funny and does explain its own brevity. The 'poem' is complete, but doesn't have enough serious content to detain us. The reader has a fairly simple job of seeing the trick. And it probably doesn't work in Afrikaans.

So I've written (or more accurately, assembled) two things that look like a poem, but aren't. There are plenty of those out there. Here's another one, which I'll call "Guest List":

Tim Key, poet.
Rufus Hound, comedian.
Pope Benedict XVI, protestant.

Why bother?

2010-11-30T14:54:00.001Z

I've just clicked, excitedly, on a link on the Observer website to an article from Sunday that promised:

Writers pick their favourite translations...
Novelists and translators on the translated books that have impressed them most

What a let-down! Six writers have a paragraph each, and three of them don't in any way mention the quality of the translation - including Tim Parks, who is himself a translator. Here's the most useless contribution (in whole), from Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese‑English Dictionary for Lovers.

Some of the most poetic and imaginative sentences I've ever read are from Italo Calvino's novels, especially Invisible Cities, as well as Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. I think those works have reshaped and enriched our vision of history and reality.

A total waste of space. Once again, a reason to be glad I don't get the Observer.

(Apologies for this post, which might itself be considered a waste of space. But the Observer isn't taking online comments on the article, so I can't vent there.)

EDIT. Since writing this post, I've discovered that Jo Nesbo, one of the writers, is Norwegian, and his choice, Knut Hamsun's Hunger, is Norwegian. So he presumably didn't read it in translation (unless he's really perverse.) Pfft. Why didn't they just call the feature "favourite books in forrin"?

Chekhov/Garnett

2010-11-23T10:08:00.000Z

Inspired by Elif Batuman, I impulse-bought a collection of stories by Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. Publishers love the Garnett translations because they're out of copyright. Scholars seem less fond. This led me to a fascinating New Yorker article by David Remnick about "translation wars", where among other things I learned that Garnett was working at high speed and so didn't polish the translations, or indeed take time over difficulties. So, maybe, reading her translations is a fairly accurate re-creation of the experience of reading the originals with a limited skill in reading Russian: the experience that most readers, even Russian readers, will have.

In the first two pages of the story I've just started reading, "Peasants" (itself possibly a near-enough translation that really requires a footnote), we find these phrases:

What lots of flies!
... huge stones jutted out bare here and there through the clay.
"It's lovely here in your parts!" said Olga [...] "What space, oh Lord!"

I could "improve" all of those, without any knowledge of Russian, without damaging the sense. But I'd be making them more regular, more English. The awkwardness is a reminder that we're reading a foreign text about foreign experiences, and I'm glad it's there.

Elif Batuman

2010-11-01T10:41:00.000Z

While waiting for the post let's make some big what ifs.

If I had been younger, female, Turkish-american, I like to think I'd have been Elif Batuman.For evidence I refer you to this article, which manages to deal lightly, humorously yet reverently with Derridean concepts, to show how theory can have real effects on writing, as well as reading. One particular example is the use of proper names, and the contrast between Chekhov, where, for example, the Lady's Lapdog doesn't have a name at all, and modern American short stories, in which everyone is given a name, largely from laziness.

I also refer you to this piece in the Guardian a few weeks ago, a really funny account of the temptations of downloading books while drunk. It first alerted me to her work, and I found out she's a serious academic with a brilliant sense of humour. That's quite unusual.

Anyway, the post has been now, and it hasn't brought what I was hoping for. It has however brought me the latest Lakeland catalogue, which is almost as exciting. At my age, photos of glossy cooking appliances have the same effect as the women's underwear pages in my mum's Marshall Ward catalogue used to have.

Oh, since you ask, here's what I was hoping for. It's not published in UK, so I've ordered a used copy from some American dealer via Amazon. It was shipped (by which they mean "sent") on 21 October at "standard shipping speed". I have no idea what that means, but right now I'm otherwise concerned. PHwoar, look at that silicone muffin tray!

Sonnets

2010-10-17T22:10:00.001+01:00

An article by Don Paterson in yesterday's Guardian is a shameless plug for his new book on Shakepeare's Sonnets. An awful, awful piece of writing that took prime location in the review, it's created a flurry of comments which reverse the usual position: usually, the inarticulacy and ineptness of the commenters makes you realise how rare good writing is. Here, despite the inarticulacy and ineptness, you feel they're right: Paterson is madly wrong.

First, he raises and conclusively answers the non-question "Was Shakespeare gay?". A host of comments rightly say that this is anachronistic: the category gay is of our time, not Shakespeare's. This is damaging because he does depend on a biographical approach, and flirts with the questions of who the real people encoded in the sonnets are.

But what's worse, and which only a few comments directly refer to, is the writing. Right from the start:

The problem with reading Shakespeare's sonnets is the sonnets themselves, by which I mean their reputation.

Well, if that's what you mean, why not say so? It's just a lame attempt at a verbal trick. And if there isn't a typo in the next quote, I wish there was:

Here is not the place to elaborate, but suffice to say that the square of the sonnet exists for reasons which are almost all direct consequences of natural law, physiological and neurological imperatives, and the grain and structure of the language itself.

I suppose the "square" might be a reference to the shape of a sonnet on the page. But the rest of it, including the deathly "suffice to say", doesn't make me want to visit the place where all is elaborated.

Fun with bad books

2010-10-11T10:48:00.000+01:00

After an unexplained pause, I return to The Confession of Katherine Howard to look at how critics and theorists can find pleasure in books that aren't good for reading for pleasure, which I'm boldly calling "bad books".

I didn't much enjoy Katherine, and in some ways the fact that I did begin to analyse it critically almost as soon as I started reading it is symptomatic of that. The reasons for my lack of enjoyment are probably partly clear from what I've already written. The manipulation was too obvious, the shifting focus of the narrative made an unsatisfying whole, and there were some instances of sloppy writing/editing. There are other reasons: I don't think I've yet mentioned that the "bad mother" motif cropped up again; and I don't have the interest in historical fiction or the specific subject of this book that would grasp a reader who did.

So, two kinds of reasons for not liking it: those that seem to be inherent in the book itself, and those that depend on my background, experience and preferences as a reader. Can we classify these reasons so clearly? It goes against the grain to say that something can be inherent in the book itself but at the moment I can't find a better way to put it. On the other hand if I had been a "good reader" - ie someone disposed to like this sort of thing - I'd probably have not found the portents & omens so glaring. In this encounter (Brian v Katherine) I'm a bad reader and it's a bad book. Which suggests that, given a good reader, it could be a good book.

So, with that understood, let's agree that for the purposes of this discussion, it's a bad book. (I do feel bad about that, Suzannah, and I wish I could be bothered to find a less harsh way of putting it.) Nevertheless, it's given me a lot of enjoyment, or fun. Bad books can be fun.

First for the reviewer. I imagine many regular book reviewers must love it when they get a new book by a well-known but not very powerful writer, and find it's bad. What fun to point out the awkward sentences, the inconsistent characterisation, the factual errors! Even better if you've a score to settle. Understandable, but should be resisted. I haven't stated this openly (or indeed thought it through) but the main purpose of a review must be to give the reader enough information for them to know if they are likely to enjoy the book. That's pretty much what I tried to do with my outline review of Katherine. But it has to include some concession that the reviewer may, in this case, be a bad reader.

And then what fun for a theorist. Some months ago in this blog I covered a self-published book I had bought from the writer who was door-to-dooring it. What was striking was the absence of artifice in that narrative. It was a brilliant book for the purpose of considering what we normally expect a novel to look like. Katherine is a bit like that. Because it showed some of the construction lines, it led me to thinking about portents and omens as a way a novel controls the release of information. I may in time change that model. I certainly think I need to change the names. But it's been fun, it really has.

I suspect the real challenge for theorists is to analyse the best books - which I guess must mean the books that most people are good readers of - and to show how they achieve it. Maybe that's why a lot of theorists don't attempt it. Maybe that's why a book like The Last Man can attract so much theoretical interest.

Review

2010-09-24T12:19:00.000+01:00

If I were to pretend to be a reviewer, what would my review of The Confession of Katherine Howard be? Um, first, let's think about the structure of a typical book review.

First, I guess, there's a summary of what the book's about, and a bit of contextualisation - what kind of book has this writer produced before.

With The Confession of Katherine Howard Suzannah Dunn continues her exploration of the troubled and usually shortened lives of the wives of Henry VIII. This time her attention turns to the fifth wife, who rose from obscurity, but whose reign and life ended in allegations of adultery.

Then we might turn to what kind of writing it is.

The story is told by a minor player in the unfolding tragedy. Cat Tilney, largely Dunn's invention, has known the Queen since they were children, and, mostly in flashback, shows how she got to this impossible, untenable position. As with previous books, Dunn brings a modern language to these Tudor characters. Katherine says that she has been questioned about "the matter of who I was fucking before I became queen".

I guess what's happening there is all part of letting the reader know if this is the sort of thing they will like, swearing and all. (Actually, there's very little swearing in the book.) This is where there could be more about Suzannah's style, and some smart-arse quibbling.

One feels that tighter editing might have given the central section of the book more pace. And how can sentences like this survive: "I was happy to let him go, because he wasn’t whom I thought he was"?

In the interests of balance, you'd need to quote some of the very nice writing.

At its best, Dunn's prose is musical and surprises with its imagery. When Cat compares herself with the Queen, she says: "I was narrow-hipped and sharply articulated, and my heart, unlike hers, was diamond."

Then the review needs to establish the reviewer's authority for giving a judgement.

Katherine's story is well-known, and the outcome can be no surprise, so Dunn's task is to maintain our interest despite this.

And some kind of judgement ...

As the novel goes on, one senses that its focus switches from the actions of the Queen to those of the narrator, and their relationship, with its threads of jealousy and ultimately betrayal, moves into the foreground. In its latter part the novel doesn't quite fulfill its initial promise of exploring the motivation of this Queen, but neither does the early part adequately set up the rivalry between the two women, which could, and ought to, intensify the tragic dilemma of the ending.

... without giving too much away.

Portents and omens

2010-09-23T11:03:00.000+01:00

A little note about what I meant by portents and omens.

In The Confession of Katherine Howard the narration covers two broad periods: November 1541, when Katherine's position is coming unstuck; and time before then, from the time the narrator, Cat, first met Katherine, until shortly before the November events.

In the November narrative in particular, Cat uses portents and omens to signify her authorial knowledge of what will happen.

Here's an example of a portent: on page 3 Cat says: "Kate looked to have a lifetime of queenship ahead of her". Obviously, it's the word "looked" that gives it away. Sometimes, they are less subtle. "Little did they [Cat's family] know that there’d come a time when my obscurity was all they’d wish for.” (page 48).

Omens, I think, are a bit different. They refer to things that have happened in the past (relative to the narration). The mere fact that they are mentioned is significant. On page 14 Cat says "It was unimaginable to me that the jocular, twinkly man [Henry VIII] had, within the past five years, exiled one wife to a lonely death and signed an execution order for her successor.”

When I isolate them like this, both portents and omens can seem unsubtle, manipulative. And it's part of the writer's craft to hide the manipulation. A reviewer's job would be to consider how well the writer has done this, presumably by reflecting on their own experience of reading the book, but also by drawing on wider experience. For example, the phrase "Little did they know ..." is a danger sign. Too many of those, and the reader feels manipulated, resentful; or, even worse, any tension is dissipated.

In this book, you could argue, the whole of the second narrative is a collection of omens. Incidents of Kate's past life reveal a character for which the tragic ending comes to seem inevitable. You could argue, but I'm not sure that's right. I think omens have to be incidents that occurred before the surrounding narrative time. So when Cat's telling us about her (and Kate's) teenage years, an omen has to refer to something that happened before then.

Reading, reviewing, analysis, theory

2010-09-22T16:57:00.000+01:00

That title's intended to deter. This post is hardcore literary thinking.

It's clear that there are at least three different approaches to reading a book, specifically a work of fiction.

Reading for pleasure is what most of us do most of the time. Reading to review is what reviewers, including bloggers, do. Reading to theorise is the most specialised form of all. Why do these three kinds of reading seem to use such different language?

I've just read The Confession of Katherine Howard by Suzannah Dunn. I made some notes as I went through it, because it struck me really early that there was an obvious mechanism in use, by which the narrator hinted at what was to come later, and, in effect promised to tell us more later. I called these "portents". At the same time, there was another mechanism by which the narrator referred to past events in a knowing way, aware that we would share her sense of the dramatic irony. I called these "omens". Now, I'm not sure if that's a model that will stand upin the long run: can we characterise a novel's control of information that way? I've also little doubt that the mechanism's been discussed before, though maybe not using those terms. But I was reading the book as a theorist.

As I went on, these devices seemed less prominent, or less obvious. What happens is that early promises (portents) are delivered, and the need for mystery becomes less. The notion of portents and their fulfillment is close to Barthes's S/Z, but I think he sees them as structural, rather that instrumental. This may be because he under-examines the process of reading for pleasure, so I'll move to that.

In the early stages of a novel, you need some incentive to stick around. You haven't yet formed any attachment to the characters. You need the promise that something interesting is going to happen. Portents, then, perform this function, just as the questions Barthes identifies ("Who is Sarrasine?") do. He talks a little dismissively about the possibility of a naive reading, and in the case of Howard that's a valid point. Regular readers of historical fiction will have a pretty good idea how it's going to turn out for her, and even I was able to deduce - applying the "divorced beheaded died divorced beheaded survived" mnemonic - the ending.

But that makes it harder, and the next type of reading - for review - would have to concern itself with how well the book engages the interest. So a reviewer might say things like "Dunn retells a well-known story with a fresh look", or "Although the outcome is never in doubt, Dunn keeps us guessing as to exactly how it will come about".

Reviewers also, inevitably, have to talk about character - a bit of a dubious area for theory. Characters have to be assessed for their believability, and maybe less so for their likeability. (It's usually important to be able to like the narrator.) Long ago, on this blog, I wrote about The Last Man. One of my big objections was that the characters' personalities were implausibly inconsistent. Theory would have difficulty in explaining why that matters. Again, it may be because the process of reading for pleasure isn't adequately considered.

A theorist would need to consider what it means for a character to be consistent; a reviewer would need to point out instances where there had been unreasonable inconsistency, and a reader would perhaps just feel that the novel isn't convincing: "I don't believe she'd do that".

I'll leave this thinking aloud there for now, but I will come back to it. One of the questions I want to look at is the way a poorly written book can be enjoyable when read for theory or, come to that, for criticism.

Being literal

2010-08-11T10:14:00.000+01:00

Maybe one of the reasons I won't take up translation studies formally is because, sooner or later, the Bible has to come into it. In Britain, and in protestant countries, I think the question of translation was crucial in the development of the church. It was as much a mark of divergence and identity as the quebecois translations Annie Brisset talks about claim to be.

Jerome and Nidal have already raised the question, but what underlies it is the whole question of the possibility of translation. Muslims, as I understand it, learn Arabic so that they can read the original Q'uran. But the original - like all Arabic - is written without vowel symbols, which have to be inferred, which must mean that in some cases there are genuine, plausible alternatives in literal meaning, which, I assume, the authority of scholars is required to elucidate. (I apologise if I have misunderstood this, and would be grateful for correction.)

I'll return to the Christian Bible, with which I'm slightly more familiar. I've been listening, for amusement rather than education, to broadcasts on Premier Christian Radio of mainly American evangelists. This started with a months-long series by Dr David Jeremiah, explaining the Book of Revelation chapter by chapter. He takes what would usually be called a literal view of the text. He sees it as prophecy of actual physical events to come (pretty soon). This is in contrast to more mainstream Christians, who, if they respect Revelation at all, see it as a moral allegory, or as an encoded polemic against the Roman empire.

I want to come back to that, because I think it can be used to argue that there is no such thing as a literal reading. Actually I'm not sure that's really a novel or difficult-to-argue view. It's basically a restatement of the view that texts don't have an independent life; they can never be read naively.

I'm taking an easier target today, a preacher I heard last night, who was arguing that one's attitude to God is more important than one's actions. It's not the praying and the tithing that matter, it's the spirit in which you do it. Unless you do it out of pure disinterested love for God, it doesn't really count. There are numerous attack points in the argument, of course, but what interested me was his style of quoting biblical authority.

He used a range of quotations from both testaments, unlinked by any narrative within the Bible, linked only, in fact, by his argument. As far as I know, each individual quotation was accurate, but as we well know, putting items into an ordered collection gives them a meaning that may be greater than, and maybe different from the sum of their parts. Choosing and ordering these verses is an act of interpretation. It may give a good result, but it's not the direct transmission of divinely inspired writing, which is what I believe fundamentalist preachers aim at.

Another thing I heard, and I'm not sure who said it, is that divine revelation stopped with the New Testament. I think for Protestants this means that the writings of the Church Fathers, for example, are purely human. But, curiously, all these guys seem to prefer the Authorised Version of the Bible. I don't really know why, but if they think it's because those translators had divine inspiration, their position is inconsistent. But my exposure to this kind of Christianity is having one major effect on me, in making me think the whole basis of the religion is inconsistent. But that's nothing to do with this blog.

Museums and modernism

2010-07-19T09:38:00.000+01:00

I visited Smallhythe Place last week. It's the house where Ellen Terry lived, and now houses a museum about her and the theatre of her era. It's an old-fashioned museum, which means it's curiously modernist.

I mean it's like the Cantos. Individual objects are displayed together, with no, or little, interpretation. You have to make up your own narrative to connect them, to put them into a story. Current museum practice is not like this. For example, the Rude Britannia display at Tate Britain has a commentary in the form of Roger Mellie cartoons. Which is joky, but it does provide contextualising information.

It's a long time since I've been to the Horniman Museum, but its natural history collection used to be displayed in the old style: lots of specimens in cases.

What these old museum displays presuppose is that someone else will provide the narrative. Either the visitor will have the knowledge to put each piece in context, or, more likely, an expert will provide a commentary. The expert might be a teacher accompanying a class visit, or a museum guide.

So, if we continue to see the Cantos as a museum of curiosities, it's an old-fashioned museum. Either we need to know as much as Pound, and recognise the objects and put them in their context, or we need a guide, to gently lead us through the exhibition and show us how it goes together.

How could this picture apply to modernist poetry of a less learned nature? I suppose the chances are increased that a reader can provide their own context. I'll look out for examples.

TRS: Kwame Anthony Appiah

2010-07-06T17:30:00.001+01:00

Kwame Anthony Appiah is apparently a philosopher and so his reflections on "Thick Translation" spring from some fundamental theories. He begins by looking at some proverbs from the Twi or Akan language (there's evidently an iceberg of reasons why both names have been used for the language).

In their literal translations, these proverbs don't seem to mean much ("The drongo says: if he had known that the palm nuts were going to ripen, then he would not have married the raffia palm with a twisted leg"), but Appiah then goes on to consider their "literal intention". He makes a working assumption that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, however true or not, doesn't mean translation is impossible. Twi has no word for "neutral boson", but then neither did English until recently. YOu can always build a concept by the use of existing words within a language.

So to Searle's notion of direct and indirect speech acts (which is different from the notion of literal and non-literal). Direct speech acts occur when the main point of the utterance is accounted for by the literal intentions. Actually, I think he goes wrong here, since he then says "sometimes indirect communication proceeds by way of literal intentions and sometimes it doesn't." But it looks like the concept in fact means that all speech acts have literal intentions; the degree of directness depends on the closeness of the utterance to that intention. For example, if I say "This is a very busy road" to a traffic surveyor, it's a direct utterance. If I say it to a child, it's indirect, because my literal intention, the meaning of my speech, is "Hold my hand". I think the term "literal intention" is the problem here, but I guess we're stuck with it.

In the rest of the essay, Appiah argues that it always possible to reconstruct the intention of the original text, if necessary with the use of "thick" contextualisation. This brings up something that's been nagging at me for some time: does a translator have to consider the intention of the source text, in a way that a modern reader would regard as inappropriate? Appiah tackles this question, but again, I think he muddles the meaning of "literal intention". I also suspect he's not adequately distinguishing between "meaning" and "intention". It all becomes a bit of a mess.

And then this:

But for literary translation our object is not to produce a text that reproduces the literal intentions of the author - not even the one's [sic] she is cancelling - but to produce something that shares the central literary properties of the object-text; and, as is obvious, these are very much under-determined by its literal meaning, even in the cases where it has one.

So many begged questions there. But the essay closes better with the view that there is a variety of valid approaches to translating (as there are to reading).

I feel impertinent in suggesting that Appiah has misled himself in his argument, but that seems to be the case and it's infected the whole piece, so I can't rely on the conclusions.

But to return to the question of the author's intention. I'm beginning to think the translator must try to understand this, in order to reproduce it. From the examples of the proverb, it's clear that you need to know that the utterance isn't intended to be an Attenborough-ish comment on the behaviour of the drongo. If you were translating, say, Siegfried Sassoon's war poetry you'd need to know the ironic intent, and it would help to know something of his personal story. That, modern theory would say, isn't something you need to know in advance of reading the poems.

I took a long time over that last paragraph. Something's wrong here, and I'll come back to this again.

Mitwegsein

2010-06-28T10:17:00.000+01:00

This is quite amusing. I've googled "Mitwegsein" and found just a few references, all connected with Spivak. Here she is, talking, purportedly, about Edward Said:

I think he often thought I was a fool, to be so persuaded by "theory." His stand, as president of the Modern Language Association, against pretentious and obscure language was against me as well. I think I tried his patience precisely because he cared. I sat next to him on the plane coming back from the Chicago MLA, where he had excoriated unnamed but easily recognizable persons who wrote fatuously obscure books. I asked him why he had so trashed me at the MLA; it was transparent. He said, altogether unconvincingly, and he knew it as he said it, that it wasn't about me - and he named an eminent "French-feminist." And he was amused by my on-the-ground political commitments that had to be different from his, for they were "post"-colonial. "The first critic of the state of Palestine," I had heard him say in 1981. My idea of practical usefulness - I was no stateswoman - was to show the state the usefulness of a different kind of teacher training for the largest sector of the electorate. It seemed such a difficult project, so different from most literacy or science efforts, that I kept quiet about this for the first ten years or so and finally opened my mouth by a happenstance that I will describe in my memoirs. So, anyway, when Edward would ask, "Gayatri, what do you do when you go to those villages?" I would give the usual answer, "Hang out" (Mitwegsein, suspend previous training in order to train yourself, you know). The answer was not satisfactory.

This really is dreadful writing.

TSR: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

2010-06-24T17:27:00.002+01:00

What to make of an article ("The Politics of Translation") that begins with this laziness:

The idea for this title comes from Michele Barrett's feeling that the politics of translation takes on a massive life of its own if you see language as the process of meaning construction.

I think she means "the process of constructing meaning", so why leave in the irrelevant and confusing ambiguity?

The whole piece varies between lazy writing, which is often impenetrable, and bizarrely low-register phrases. Here's a sentence where they're mixed:

When you hang out and with [sic] a language away from your own (Mitwegsein) so that you want to use that language by preference, sometimes, when you discuss something complicated, then you are on the way to making a dimension of the text accessible to the reader, with a light and easy touch, to which she does not accede in her everyday.

[That's my "sic", not hers.] Whose is the "light and easy touch"? Does it really help to say "Mitwegsein"? Actually, what does "a light and easy touch" actually mean?

And there's a failure to expand on some references. On page 373 she talks about a discussion of "Sudhir Kakar's The Inner World, [in which] a song about Kali written by the late nineteenth-century monk Vivekananda is cited as part of the proof of the 'archaic narcissism' of the Indian [sic] male." That's her "sic", not mine. I presume it means that Indian is being used here to mean South Asian, or subcontinental, or even is a mistake and should be Bengali. The point is that the vast majority of readers won't know what all this is about: it needs more explanation.

After two slow readings, I'm closer to understanding the meaning of the whole piece. It is a subtle argument about the need to submit to the source text in order to translate it. She suggests, strongly, that you need an intimate knowledge of the source language (that's what the above quotation means) and of the culture. The article is predominantly about translating third world women's writing, and Spivak argues that the translator has to understand the social and cultural framework around the source text, especially to avoid assumptions of an orientalist kind. It also challenges one-size-fits-all models of feminism, and in that sense it's a vigorous hybrid of post-colonial and feminist thinking.

She's writing from an active feminist perspective: one of the aims of translation is to expose and thereby change women's experiences. Which raises the question - a much bigger question - of whether actions and choices must always be explicitly grounded in praxis. She's taking it for granted that they must be, and while I can understand that, I haven't worked it through completely enough to feel exclusively driven by it.

There's a lot of good stuff here but oh my word how badly it needs an editor.

TSR: Annie Brisset

2010-06-24T10:57:00.000+01:00

Terrific piece on questions evoked by the practice of translating plays into Quebecois, that goes way beyond the initial question to look at the ways, in general, that language defines national identity, and in particular the status of the French language in Canada.

Annie Brisset is a Professor at the University of Ottawa. This essay, "The Search for a Native Language: Translation and Cultural Identity", was written in French, so I assume that's her mother tongue, and it was apparently chapter 4 of her book Sociocritique de la traduction. Théâtre et altérité au Québec (1990).

She looks at plays that have been labelled (by the translators) as translated into Quebecois, and asks what that means. The clearest point is that these translations are part of a project to claim language status for Quebecois, as part of a nationalist movement. She refers to several links between the Quebecois movement and xenophobic sentiments. In fact, the language is part of Quebec's self-told history. What surprised me is the extent to which the movement arises in opposition to "international French"; it rejects the association of francophonie. So it positions Quebecois as a doubly oppressed language.

Meanwhile, however, those translators are explaining their actions in "standard" French; even the stage directions use the non-Quebecois language. Brisset gets quite scathing about the pro-Quebecois movement - she's clearly not politically aligned with it - but even without taking sides you can see this as a real-life experiment in language development. In some ways, then, it's similar to the position Susan Sontag described in Bosnia, where a translation into Bosnian was demanded, although there's little difference from Serbo-Croat.

TSR: Antoine Berman

2010-06-23T12:49:00.000+01:00

Berman's 1985 piece, "Translation and the trials of the foreign" focuses particularly on translation of novels, in which bad translation can go unnoticed:

It is easy to detect how a poem by Holderlin has been massacred. It isn't so easy to see what was done to a novel by Kafka or Faulkner, especially if the translation seems "good". The deforming system functions here in complete tranquility.

He lists 12 deforming tendencies ("there may be more"). I won't list or describe them here, since the article is refreshingly clear. They describe ways in which translators may attempt to clarify or improve the original text. What was maybe new to me were the less obvious problems. For example, a Spanish text (Berman's work often involves translations from Spanish to French) may use a network of augmentatives, which is hard to reproduce in French (or in English, no doubt). The last four tendencies concern linguistic diversity. How for example would you translate favela slang, or local words like lisboeta? He quotes one apparent astonishing success: Maurice Betz's translation of The Magic Mountain. In the original two characters speak to each other in French. Their two Frenches differ from each other, but in the translation they also differ from the novel's French, in which Betz has "let Thomas Mann's German resonate".

I think there's a possibility that much can be subsumed in the question of rendering appropriately the variety of languages in the original.

Berman is in the tradition of Schleiermacher, advocating translations that challenge and therefore develop the translating language (at this point I am beginning to see that "target language" isn't always the right term). He explicitly references Plato, saying that "the Platonic figure of translation ... sets up up as an absolute only on esssential possibility of translating, which is precisely the restitution of meaning". In contrast to literal(ish) translation, which "stimulated the fashioning and refashioning of the great western languages only because it labored on the letter and profoundly modified the translating language".

But where Vermeer focussed on skopos, while understating its mootness, Berman seems to ignore it. There are times when a domesticating translation is right. Children's literature, for example, I suppose.

TSR: Hans J Vermeer

2010-06-18T12:00:00.000+01:00

Maybe I'm missing something, but this piece, "Skopos and commission in translational action", seems to be a glaring example of dressing up the bleeding obvious in long words.

Vermeer seems to have developed his theory of skopos and commission over a long time. I'll try to explain it.

Translation is a specific kind of translational action - which I think is similar to the concept of refraction. An action is defined as behaviour that has an aim or purpose, and Vermeer calls that a skopos. (He says "skopos is a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation" - dodgy use of the word "technical" there, I think - he's claiming a shared use of something he is essentially proposing as a technical term.)

The skopos for any particular translation is negotiated with the client who commissions the translation. Thus, the commission may specify that the translation is intended to show how the source language works, for example, or may give as an aim to entertain. The translation strategy adopted by the translator will depend on the skopos defined in the commission. This is why we shouldn't expect all translations to be the same.

So, what it amounts to is this: translation strategy depends on the intended purpose of the translation. I really don't think you need to have recourse to "technical" terms.

But have I missed something? The middle part of the essay raises and disposes of some objections to the theory. Basically the objections are that works of literature and/or translations don't necessarily have a purpose, so aren't actions, and can't have a skopos. It seems like an unnecessary discussion. A more serious objection might be that the choice of skopos is itself part of the translation process, and so translation theory needs to discuss and account for it.

Less exciting than it sounds

2010-06-16T09:32:00.001+01:00

I was talking to my sister the other day and mentioned that my main reading currently is The Translation Studies Reader. She looked unimpressed, and I should have added "and it's not as exciting as you may think".

I started reading the piece by Shoshana Blum-Kulka on "Shifts of coherence and cohesion in translation" and found this first example. The source language reads "Marie was helping Jimmy climb the biggest branch of the tree in the front yard ...", and the translation is "Marie était en train d'aider Jimmy à grimper sur la plus haute branche de l'arbre ..." . Blum-Kalka's point is that the French text is more explicit and has more redundancy but she doesn't seem to notice the factual mistranslation. Translating back, the French reads "Marie was helping Jimmy climb the highest branch of the tree".

It's not her translation, I should point out, but surely she should have chosen better. This missed detail has, frankly, damaged my respect for anything she says. So, exciting as the article may be, I'm leaving it there.

TSR: Itamar Even-Zohar; Gideon Toury

2010-06-07T15:19:00.001+01:00

Back to bogginess and the 1970s. But apparently these two writers provided some of the background for Lefevere, so I ought to look at them.

Even-Zohar's "The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem" soon recovers from that awful title. Here he's essentially looking at the different ways in which translation can affect the host "polysystem" (which is similar to the system Lefevere refers to). I think he provides some social/political context to this, although I'd say there's too little reference to sheer political power of one society against another, in economic or military terms. He looks more at the cultural state of the host culture, and it feels right to believe that a new or developing culture is more open to change by the practice of importing translations than a stable old culture would be. It's a pretty short piece, though, not much more than a sketch of what might be investigated further.

Gideon Toury has a simpler title, "The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation", but quickly sinks to this:

The acquisition of a set of norms for determining the suitability of that kind of behaviour, and for manoeuvring between all the factors which may constrain it, is therefore a prerequisite for becoming a translator within a cultural environment.

It's not impenetrable, it's just that it could have been said much more plainly. And so it goes on. The broad argument is that in translation there are some things that you have to do (rules), some things that are at your choice (idiosyncrasies), and those that it's on the whole best to do (norms). All of these are subject to change.

Blimey, I just summarised 12 pages in a paragraph. Of course there's more to it, but it's tough. So he draws us a diagram. The caption says "Schematic diagram showing the Return Potential Method for representing norms: (a) a behaviour dimension; (b) an evaluation dimension; (c) a return potential curve, show the distribution of approval-disapproval among the members of a group over the whole range of behaviour; (d) the range of tolerable or approved behaviour." I'm not even sure if this is just an illustration of what a return potential curve graph looks like, or if it's in any way a mapping of what Toury thinks is the relation between translation norms and acceptability.

Because:

At this stage we must be content with our intuitions [...] [M]uch energy should still be directed toward the crystallization of systematic research methods, including statistical ones, especially if we wish to transcend the study of norms, which are always limited to one societal group at a time, and move on to the formulation of general laws of translational behaviour, which would inevitably be probabilistic in nature.

So I can't help thinking this isn't nearly as scientific as it wants to be. The concept of norms etc seems to me very close to Genette's framework of vraisemblance, and I'm eager to see if anyone has made that connection.

TSR: André Lefevere

2010-06-07T11:47:00.000+01:00

I've pretty much abandoned chronological order in looking at TSR, so now I'm looking at this essay from 1982, "Mother Courage's Cucumbers", which must be one of the first examples of the "Wittgenstein's Poker" school of titling.

Starting with some unarguably bad translations of Brecht, he then goes on to look at how translations, like other "refractions" (critical essays, stagings ...) are situated within one system of language, and have to use various strategies to adapt the original work. Each system includes ideological, economic poetic assumptions. With the poetic differences there are four strategies, and, André, you could have been clearer at this point. A list, such as follows, might have helped.

(i) One can recognise the value of the plays themselves, while dismissing the poetics out of hand
(ii) One can go in for the psychological cop-out: Brecht's poetics can be dismissed as a rationalisation of essentially irrational factors
(iii) One can integrate the new poetics into the old one by translating its concepts into those of the old poetics
(iv) to show that the system can in fact accommodate the new poetics, and be changed by it.

A similar pattern applies to Brecht's ideological content. Translations and other refractions have to fit within the system of the time.

Finally, economic considerations affect whether Brecht's plays are translated, staged, anthologised. (An amusing consideration is that if there are too many songs in a play in America, it becomes a musical and according to theatre custom and practice requires a full orchestra.)

So, applying these deliberations to translation, it becomes clear that translations are a mediation between different systems. While we may think early translations of Brecht were bad, this is not because the translator nodded, but because s/he had to adapt the plays to make them acceptable. We can only afford more accurate translations because the early ones built Brecht into the canon of drama.

On my other blog, I've recently commented on the National Theatre's production of Women Beware Women. A production is a refraction, certainly, and it might be interesting to try to apply this model to what I've written there.

TSR: Abé Mark Nornes

2010-06-05T09:28:00.000+01:00

I've skipped forward in TSR to look at this, because the 60s/70s was getting boggish, with discussions about basic terminology and concepts that was reading like Les Liaisons Dangereuses, pretentiousness fans, in that the shadow of a revolution was upon it. There was (inevitably) an extract from Steiner, looking more than ever like a relic of a different age.

Nornes' piece is about subtitling films into a different language. This is something he does professionally, and so there's a lot of fascinating stuff about the technical limitations: how many characters can you fit into a line; how long should the line be on screen, etc. Obviously he finds that subtitles are generally inadequate, but offers some evidence that the inadequacy becomes ideological. In a very specific example, he shows how Japanese verb-forms femininise the speech of female protagonists.

But the most intriguing passage concerns anime films. He talks of fan activity, where people (viewers) create and circulate their own versions of subtitles. Using computer animation techniques, these can be much more adventurous than the usual line across the bottom of the picture. He says that some even give long descriptions of unfamiliar terms - effectively footnotes - which the viewer can choose to read by pausing the video, or can ignore. It's that kind of thinking about how we can use modern technology that excites me.

TSR: Jakobson

2010-06-01T12:09:00.000+01:00

Jakobson's essay "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation" is a generally optmistic view of the possibility of translation between different languages. Because every language has metalinguistic capability, "All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language". But poetry is untranslatable, being essentially a framework of puns.

TSR: Vinay and Darbelnet

2010-05-31T16:53:00.000+01:00

Writing in 1958, Vinay and Darbelnet proposed certain methodological concepts for use by translators. Their work was apparently hugely influential, and on the surface is practical and untheoretical. For the sake of reference, I'll list here the seven procedures they outlined. They start from the viewpoint that translation is easy until you meet lacunae - gaps where there is no direct equivalent in the target language. How do you cope with these gaps?

1. Borrowing. If you can get away with it, use the foreign term. Sometimes the foreign term will be established in the target language already, making this a fait accompli. Otherwise you may need to stretch the target language a little.

2. Calque. A calque is where a foreign phrase is reassembled in the target language using simple translations of the elements of the original phrase. I suppose that's what German did with television to Fernsehen.

3. Literal translation. I don't really understand why this is listed here. It really belongs to the pre-lacuna stage. The comments here, though, do say that literal translation can go from the more specific to the more general or vice versa. Also by literal translation they include translation of common phrases. At the simplest level would be a phrase like "of course" where it would be folly to attempt a word by word rendering. At a move complex level, a phrase like "leave it on the back burner" probably has a well-used equivalent in other languages, which may be nothing to do with simmering. I guess the point is that literal translation operates at a level above individual words, which must be true, but begs several questions.

4. Transposition. Where a grammatical formation in the source language is altered. Many examples spring to mind. "Avant son arrivée", for example, might read better as "before s/he arrived".

5. Modulation. Not very different from transposition. Here there's a "change in the point of view", generally to make the translation more natural. An example would be the way the pronoun "on" is used much more in French than "one" in English. So if a character says "On y va?", it's much better if that's translated as "Shall we go?", even though both the tense and the pronoun are changed.

6. Equivalence. This seems to me more like the more complex version of literal translation. One example given is "too many cooks spoil the broth", translated into French as "deux patrons font chavirer la barque", where there are no cooks. It's literal translation at phrase level.

7. Adaptation. This is the remotest, and the most problematic technique. When an action does not fit into the translation language context, it may be changed. There's a weird example quoted of an interpreter recasting a comparison with cricket into terms based on the Tour de France. Personally, that seems like a highly dangerous approach, and it's in this area, I realise, that I tend to get riled most often. It's by way of adaptation that "cien metros" becomes "100 yards" and in the film Central Station the charge for writing a letter is "one buck".

In the introduction, Venuti mutters darkly about Vinay and Darbelnet's inherent conservatism. I think he may be meaning the apparent laxity they show towards the use of adaptation. (Incidentally, Venuti's section introductions are written in an entirely inappropriate present historic tense. Talking about Nabokov, he writes "few English-language translators at the time follow [his] uncompromising example". And he means "followed". At "that" time. Twat.)

TSR: Nabokov

2010-05-31T11:41:00.000+01:00

Nabokov's contribution is a note about his attempt to create a translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (though even the spelling of that is moot). Nabokov brings a poet's ear to the task initially, examining the different ways in which Russian and English use stress, consonants etc. And this contributes to his final view that it is impossible to translate Onegin into English verse. His concept of translation, then, is overwhelmingly concerned with meaning, and he's quite happy to separate meaning and form. So, he has to sacrifice the music of Pushkin's original, and settle for a series of footnotes which describe "the modulations and rhymes of the text as well as its associations and other special features". Which is contrary: explaining the effect of rhyme etc is like explaining a joke. In practice, it's the kind of translation I'd like, because I don't have a particularly high regard for the music of poetry; but a lot of people do.

As Venuti's introduction points out, Nabokov has in mind as a reader of his translation himself, or someone very much like him. To the extent that early in the piece, reflecting on the alternative versions and deleted stanzas, he says:

All this matter, as well as Pushkin's own commentaries, the variants, epigraphs, dedications, and so forth, must be of course translated too, in appendices and notes.

Of course.

TSR: Benjamin, Pound, Borges

2010-05-30T17:50:00.000+01:00

So I'm looking again at Walter Benjamin's essay on "The task of the translator" (see earlier comments). Here it's accompanied by notes on the translation, which make it clear that the translator, Harry Zohn, made some basic errors (omitting to translate a "nicht" is the grossest example), and doesn't seem to have understood Benjamin's argument. Well, I can forgive him for that, even if a second reading has made it clearer, if no more plausible. (Compared to Schleiermacher, it's lucid and limpid.) We are stuck with Zohn's translation for copyright reasons. And I noticed a tiny difference in this book. I earlier quoted this passage;

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, [...]

Here the word block is replaced by black, which is probably just a misprint, but who knows?

Read in this context, following from Schleiermacher, it's easier to see how this piece fits into a developing theory of translation and its purposes. I think without getting hung up on the concept of "pure language", we can see that Benjamin is putting language at the centre of literary activity, including writing as well as translating. Every act of writing or translating serves to improve, extend or refine language (in general) and the translating language in particular.

By the way, one of the translation faults was the omission of a reference to "messianisch".

The piece by Pound is a typically feisty note on translating Cavalcanti.

The Borges article is on translations of the 1001 Nights. Borges values translations (like Burton's) that use the richness of the translating language and its literature. Apparently the language of the 1001 Nights is quite impoverished, and a straight translation would be dull, apart from the rudeness and the anecdotes themselves. He seems perfectly happy for translations to be improvements.

TSR: Goethe, Nietzsche

2010-05-27T17:22:00.000+01:00

The first section of TSR, "Foundational Statements" ends with two short pieces, by Goethe and Nietzsche.

Goethe says there are three kinds of translation. The goal of the ideal translation is "to achieve perfect identity with the original, so that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other's place." I wonder what the German is here; what's the actual difference between "instead of" and "in the place of"?

The very short Nietzsche extract from The Gay Science is fairly unremarkable except in its identification of translation with imperialism. For examples, ancient Romans translated extensively:

They did not know the delights of the historical sense; what was past and alien was an embarrassment for them; and being Romans, they saw it as an incentive for a Roman conquest. Indeed translation was a form of conquest.

So this section has covered over 1500 years, when people had theories about translation, but generally seem to have rubbed along. We now move to the 20th century, when things change.

TSR: Dryden, Schleiermacher

2010-05-27T12:19:00.000+01:00

I looked at Friedrich Schleiermacher while reading The Translator's Invisibility, and wasn't convinced. TSR contains the essay "On the different methods of translating" so I can now see exactly the point Schleiermacher was making. Or can I? It's a ponderous piece of writing, with at least two paragraphs that are three pages long. The paragraph that begins on page 46 of this volume, for example, works up to a claim that there are two alternatives: paraphrase and imitation, and then discusses each of these within the same paragraph. Oh, I'd be inclined to forgive the translator who broke this text up.

But it then moves on the main point: there is a choice between two strategies:

either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer towards him.

But then, I think, Schleiermacher is misled by his own metaphor. Only one of these "paths" can be followed because:

any attempt to combine them being certain to produce a highly unreliable result and to carry with it the danger that writer and reader might miss each other completely.

He, as we saw earlier, goes for the first choice for reasons of improvement; of the reader and of the culture that refreshes itself on the new concepts that initially seem so alien.

Reading this now, after my canter through modern literary theory, I'm struck by how much he refers to the writer, rather than the text.

Earlier, John Dryden's introduction to translations of Ovid was a much livelier read. It's a contrast with d'Ablancourt, in that it pretty much says that translations should be warts'n'all although "the sence of an Authour, generally speaking, is to be Sacred and inviolable"

TSR: Jerome, D'Ablancourt

2010-05-27T10:20:00.000+01:00

The first piece is, as I've said, by St Jerome and dates from the end of the 4th century. The background was that Jerome had provided a private translation of a letter sent by Pope Epiphanus from Greek into Latin. The letter, to Bishop John of Jerusalem, had included a discussion of possible heresy. The translation had been leaked, and people had accused Jerome of mistranslation. His letter is an angry rebuttal of that. I think the anger and the intensity of Jerome's argument must come from the fact that this was an issue concerned with heresy, where there were big risks. The accusation, which Jerome accepts, is that he did not translate each word accurately. He argues that he translated sense for sense, not word for word. He quotes several examples from the Bible, where for example Jesus quotes the Old Testament somewhat inaccurately, to establish the validity of his method.

In researching this, I came across the septuagint, something I'd never heard of before, and it seems to me that here there are more theological questions involved than translational ones. The septuagint was a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, made around 300BC. The tradition is that 70 scholars worked independently on the translation, but all the translations were identical, proving that the scholars had been divinely inspired. This was why Augustine (and many others) thought than any "inaccuracies" were improvements. Jerome's later translation of the Old Testament (the Vulgate) was not bound by the septuagint, so he clearly disagreed.

Jerome's argument about his translation of the Pope's letter implicitly accepts that word for word translation doesn't work, and that concepts within one language may not have a direct equivalent in another, so some sort of paraphrase becomes necessary. Augustine's position would seem to accept that, but he sees divine inspiration as helping in the act of paraphrase. Jerome seems to be in a more modern position: the source words contain the meaning and are a sufficient indicator of the writer's intention - even when the writer is God. He basically doesn't see that the process of translating the Bible is structurally different from translating a Pope's letter.

The second selection, two pieces by Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt, gives a different view. They are prefaces to two translations from Latin and Greek: Tacitus and Lucian. He argues that it is legitimate to make changes to the original in order to make it clearer or to make it more fitting for contemporary tastes (he was writing in the mid-17th century - the time of Racine and Corneille). He tackles some of the things that bother me: should he translate currency terms, for example? His answer is no, but for a strange reason, which is that the figures would be silly. Arminius, at one stage, proposes a reward of a hundred sesterces. That's a plausible round figure, whereas the equivalent figure in contemporary currency would be seven livres and ten sous, which isn't. He also talks about translating names, and accepts the French practice of frenchifying names like Marc Antoine, while accepting that it's inconsistent. It seems to me this is very much in line with the Académie's attempt to mould classical drama into something suitable for 17th century France. French wikipedia shows that d'Ablancourt's translations were the first to be labelled "belle infidèle", so even at that time, his approach was questioned.

The second piece, on Lucian, is more interesting. He freely admits that he has changed the content of some pieces to remove Lucian's references to homosexuality, for example. And where one piece was wholly untranslatable, he's substituted a piece of his own invention.

D'Ablancourt's clear intention is to give the contemporary reader something like the same experience an original reader would have had. He accepts that he's on the border between translating and adapting, but asserts he stays the right side of the line. I think the position of that line moves, and currently, as evidenced by the use of Ted Hughes's "version" of Phedre, it's moving back towards him.

French wikipedia shows that d'Ablancourt's translations were the first to be labelled "belle infidèle", so even at that time, his approach was questioned.

Before I close this post, one point about Venuti's translation of d'Ablancourt. In his brief note of Lucian's life, d'Ablancourt says "his father, lacking the means to maintain him, resolved that he should learn a métier". Why "métier"? It's not in italics, and the word "trade" would be a simpler translation.

New fuel

2010-05-26T16:41:00.000+01:00

I've neglected this blog and the work behind it recently, but today brought me two new books that ought to get me going. On the right, and following up on my last post is the collection of essays by ARG on the new novel. The immediate impression is of the lovely design. The covers are simple card with, as you can see, simple and authoritative typography. Inside, the text has what I guess is the original setting, with an unpretentious and so far timeless serif font. Also, ARG's prose is beautifully straightforward. I'm looking forward to reading this.

The second book in the Amazon package was The Translation Studies Reader, a collection of pieces dating from St Jerome onwards. Again, it's a beautifully produced book. A large format, and cleverly using serif for the essays, and sans for the commentaries. So far I've read the piece by St Jerome, which is surprisingly alive. He wrote in defence of his own translation practice in response to an attack. He went on to produce the standard Latin version of the Bible, so he's an important figure. The introduction to this section of the book says that St Augustine had an interesting view of translation. The septuagint, which was the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures prepared in the third century BC, was, to him, more accurate than the Hebrew original, because it was divinely (re-)inspired. (As if God needed the opportunity to make some revisions.)

More comments on both these books will follow, you can be sure of that.

Robbe-Grillet

2010-05-13T21:06:00.000+01:00

A short post, this, just to anchor this link to a comment on Alain Robbe-Grillet's essays on the novel. It's coincidental that he's quoted as saying:

the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking

which is similar to what Susan Sontag said. She'd also echo his view that most novels written today are no advance on Flaubert, technically. She was talking about the twentieth century American novel, and I'd rather read this

than any exquisite examination of the human condition. (It's Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine.)

Against Interpretation

2010-05-05T18:23:00.000+01:00

I've got this out of the library, and before talking about it, I want to slag off Penguin books once again.

This collection of essays dates from 1966, so once again there's no new material in it to justify the cover price of £12. In fact, Penguin haven't even reset the text. My picture shows the start of one essay, with what's a really dated (and American) use of sansserif chapter heading and a really ugly Bodoni-ish initial capital.

So the only new content is the cover, which is admittedly very stylish. No-one should have to pay £12 for this, and presumably no-one does. Which means that small independent bookshops don't have a chance of making profit on backlist like this.

The book begins with two essays that have related themes. The first, "Against Interpretation" attacks the idea that the purpose of criticism is to interpret works; the point is to show how the works achieve their effect. The second, "On Style", initially sets out to examine the theoretically professed view that you can't separate style and content, compared with the pretty universal critical practice of doing so. It wanders a bit, but the essential argument is that works of art aren't statements; they don't exist to provide information, or to improve public morals, but to provoke reflections, comtemplation.

Interesting stuff, which I largely like. But I still wouldn't have paid twelve quid for it.

PS After publishing this post, it occurred to me that in talking about the typography I might indeed be looking at style or form as opposed to content. Irony, there.

What?

2010-04-28T15:49:00.000+01:00

This is really troubling. It turns out that Iris Murdoch was besotted with Raymond Queneau. In the letter quoted, she says

Anything I shall ever write will owe so much, so much, to you ... As I think more about literature [...] I realise more and more how crucial for me is everything you write. [...] I would do anything for you, be anything you wished me, come to you at any time or place [but] you don't need me in the way in which I need you.

(I've included the extracts as given in the Guardian. It's not made clear if she wrote in English or French, though. The French versions in Le Monde could be the originals.)

I haven't read much Murdoch, to be fair, but the reason I didn't read more is precisely because what I did read seemed to lack the qualities that attract me in Queneau's writing: playfulness, verbal invention, an engagement with current idiomatic speech. Maybe she saw in him the things her writing lacked. So this is like finding that Andrew Lloyd Webber was a passionate fan of Stockhausen.

The article in Le Monde suggests that the guardians of the Murdoch temple might now wish to reread her work, to trace the influence of Queneau in it. Good luck to them, if they do. I won't.

Hopkins/Rilke

2010-04-27T12:35:00.001+01:00

As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

A randomly chosen poem by Hopkins, but can we call it modernist, in the way I was talking about in relation to Rilke?

Who is speaking here? Who says "I say more"? I think that in this poem Hopkins is unproblematically adopting a persona of poet. The poet's observations and opinions have a special value because they are the poet's. Poetry had established this as a legitimate stance. With Hopkins, moreover, you get a very individual diction; the poetry creates the poet. So perhaps there is the relationship with form. The verbal dexterity of Hopkins certifies him as a poet, and gives him that credibility.

Is this actually so different from Rilke, in fact? In his poems, at least as far as I can tell with the peculiar translations I have, he's depending on this assumed status and prestige. He's much less formal, but in a passage like this, you can see, even without understanding it, linguistic dexterity:

Wer zeigt ein Kind, so wie es steht? Wer stellt
er ins Gestirn und gibt der Mass des Abstands
ihm in die Hand? wer macht den Kindertod
aus grauem Brot, das hart wird ...

The most obvious trick there is the repetition of "wer", but there's a melody running through the language too. Like Hopkins, Rilke earns bardic respect from his way with words. Do modernist poets forgo this certification?

I'll come back to that, but also need to think about poems written in character, whether that be Browning or Pessoa.

Rilke

2010-04-26T11:13:00.006+01:00

My German isn't good enough to read Rilke's Duino Elegies, and probably never will be, but can I rope his poetry into the investigation I seem to be making into a modernist poetics? I've now read Martyn Crucefix's translation, and although I have problems with it, which I'll come back to, there's enough here to suggest that Rilke's work provides some of the same challenges that we see in other modernist poetry.

To over-simplify, the big question in modernist poetry seems to be that of Roland Barthes, in S/Z, "who is speaking here?" The Elegies begin with a bold first-person question:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks
Of the angels?

And, to be honest, I'm already damaging my own proposition, because the voice throughout the Elegies seems to remain consistent. But maybe it's a more subtle anonymity: the poetic voice gives away so little of its speaker's past, we don't know what is the occasion for these elegies.

There's another anonymity, in that the poet addresses a "you":

Yes - the springtimes needed you. There were stars
waiting to be seen by you. A wave rolled
to your feet in the past, or as you strode
beneath half-shuttered windows, the bowed violin
leant itself to you. All this was your mission.

It's not obvious if this "you" remains the same during the elegies, or what the relationship between the poet and this character is.

So, what might be happening is that one of the characteristics of modernist poetry is the refusal to accept a privileged role for the poet, whose voice is one of many. Pessoa embodied this in the use of heteronyms, Pound by his whole method. And this kind of distinction is much more important than the formal concern (all these poets used what we could inadequately call free verse.)

But there ought to be a relationship between verse form and authority. Does the use of metre and rhyme in itself claim for the poet's voice a structuring authority that modernism refuses? That's a potential line of enquiry.

As for the translation, it's curiously prosaic. Rilke's German of course uses compounds which are hard to transfer into English, and so the lines get longer, and Crucefix's version actually have more lines than the original. Which I think is unusual.

Beowulf

2010-04-10T10:27:00.000+01:00

One of the embarrassing gaps in my reading history - how did I get through my degree without reading this? Now that I have done, in Seamus Heaney's translation, I know how.

The thing is, Beowulf doesn't have much to do with English literature. It's so much more remote than Gawain, for example. It's partly the language, of course. In this version, the first page is given in parallel Anglo-Saxon and English, and even so, it's hard to see which word is which. Then there's the subject matter. The story is set in Denmark, and so it appears to be largely nostalgic. The tale is longer than I expected, and Grendel and his mum are killed off fairly early. Beowulf then returns to his homeland, becomes king and rules wisely and well for 50 years, before the third battle of the poem, a fatal encounter with a dragon. After that, the decline of the kingdom is presaged, a decline that has been evident in the fatalistic musings of the aging Beowulf. These are the best bits of the poem: the descriptions of the king facing his mortality are universal and moving.

Earlier, the poem shows signs of an oral culture. Each battle is described twice, first in the poet's voice, then in quotation from a witness/participant. The repetition would be appropriate for a listening audience, of course, but it also shows a diffidence, perhaps, about the role as author. The author isn't entirely trusted to know and tell everything, he has to adduce evidence. In a few places, the poet refers to himself explicitly, saying things like "someone told me this".

So the poem, for all its qualities, feels a lot like the end of a tradition, not the start of a new one. Sadly, it's less relevant to English literature than Homer, for example.

As for the translation, it seems a bit sluggish. It doesn't have the energy of Armitage's Gawain, perhaps, I'd venture, because there's not the shared dna of language that Armitage exploited. I suspect that might be part of the reason the final sections stand up so strongly - their mood is a better match with Heaney's verse.

This all sounds very negative, and shouldn't. It is a very fine poem, and of course I should have read it before now. I'm not going to learn Anglo-Saxon but I will look for other translations.

Heteronyms

2010-03-30T16:11:00.001+01:00

Gathered here for reference, the biographical details of Pessoa's heteronyms.

Alberto Caeiro, born Lisbon 1889, died of tuberculosis in 1915. Average height, and frail build, blond, blue-eyed. Only completed primary school. His parents died at a young age and he was brought up by an old great-aunt. The others, including Pessoa-himself, regard him as "o mestre", the master.

Alvaro de Campos, born Tavira, 15/10/1890 at 13:30. "Branco e moreno" (I'm not sure what that means), uses a monocle, brings to mind a Portuguese jew. He's 1.75m tall, thin, slightly hunched. Trained as a navel engineer, he has been around, stays in the best hotels, and drives a Chevrolet. There are three distinct phases to his work: the decadent, the futurist, and the apathetic. But Pessoa wrote the poems of the second stage first.

Ricardo Reis, born 1887 in Porto, jesuit-educated. Trained in medicine. After 1919 he goes into exile in Brazil, since he is a monarchist. Pessoa never killed him off, which is why Jose Saramago had to do it.

Bernardo Soares, who wrote O Livro do Dessassossego, is described as a semi-heteronym, a simple mutilation of Pessoa's own personality.

(All this is from the introduction to Poesias: Heterónimos, which in turn derives from a letter of 13 January 1935 from Pessoa to Adolfo Casais Monteiro).

MCT: Terry Eagleton

2010-03-30T14:08:00.000+01:00

The final selection in MCT is by Terry Eagleton, and a quick bit of research shows he has been an amazingly prolific thinker and writer. I've most recently come across him in his latest role as scourge of the "new atheists". His review of The God Delusion caused all sorts of jollity, and his book Reason, Faith and Revolution argued for (it appears) a scarcely visible god who created the universe as a pleasant experiment.

Eagleton's been a consistent Marxist, although his marxism, like his belief, has always been subject to the reservation that a lot of what passes for marxism (religion) isn't.

So his analysis of "The rise and fall of theory", from After Theory (2003), is based on the economic and political conditions during Theory's heyday. It's fun to read, but it really doesn't challenge the arguments so much as deplore the consequences. I suppose the main problem is that so much of the substructure of Eagleton's view is hidden from view here, like the substructure of religious thought. It's an internal ideology.

Felix Randal

2010-03-29T22:51:00.000+01:00

That last entry tempted me to look up the text of Hopkins' poem, and in doing so, I found one of the sites where essays are for sale, presumably to school students. Here's the sample of the essay offered:

Poem Analysis: Felix Randall By Gerald Maneley Hopkins [...] This poem written by Hopkins, in 1880, is a religious sonnet addressed to the dead Felix Randall, the farrier. It is a sonnet, meaning that it contains 14 lines, divided up into two quatrains and a sestet, which in turn is divided up in two tercets. This way of writing in fact keeps Randall from expressing himself completely because he is following a fixed rhyme scheme, but nonetheless he has written a powerful poem with an extensive use of vocabulary. The story that is told in the sonnet is divided up into two different perspectives: the physical state, and the mental or spiritual state. The fist quatrain is told in a physical point of view and is an introduction to Felix Randall who is horse farrier. This being mentioned immediately brings to mind that he must be a strong man, which in turn creates the [and there the extract ends].

It's more than a bit shit, isn't it? I love the suggestion it's the verse form that keeps Randal[l] from expressing himself completely, rather than the fact that he's dead. And of course "an extensive use of vocabulary" is so important. In fact, I'd suggest that the use of vocabulary should be compulsory in language, never mind poetry.

Anyway, here's the poem (from Bartleby):

FELIX RANDAL the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

Cunningham talked about Greg Woods' reference to Randal's beautiful sweat, and as he said, there's no mention of sweat here at all. Was Woods vaguely remembering the word "sweet"?

Of course, I don't know anything about Woods' analysis except what Cunningham cunningly quotes. But it seems clear to me that Hopkins is open about the physicality of Randal, and accepts the ambiguity of the religious and the personal relationship between the priest and the farrier. There's so much more in this poem to be interested in: in the lexicon the apparent bathos of the final word "sandal", the "random grim forge", the "mould of man"; the use of colloquialisms like "and all", "all road ever"; that chiming repetition of "all", which in certain accents would rhyme with "Randal" and "sandal"; the on/off alliteration. And above all, that phrase "How far from then forethought of": I'm still not sure what that means, but I feel the sense of it.

MCT: Valentine Cunningham

2010-03-29T15:45:00.000+01:00

Near the end of MCT, now, and the first of two post-theory (a begged question, of course) pieces. "Touching reading" is a sparkling read, and you can imagine how good a lecturer Cunningham must be. It's a chapter of his 2002 book Reading after Theory. It's essentially an attack on mainly US proponents of Theory, centered around the concept of tact in reading. In a twist ironically redolent of Theorist writing, he approached this by looking at how the concept of touch has been handled (I know) in criticism of, among others, Great Expectations and the poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins. There's a brilliant dissection of William A Cohen's "Manual conduct in Great Expectations" and of Greg Woods' reading of "Felix Randal" in terms of queer theory.

The point of this is to reinstate the view that the purpose of reading is make us better people, to reinstate the human figure into literature, which he says Theorists have excluded. There are various suggestions that the founders of Theory (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida) never excluded the human in the way their 'followers' have; for example, Foucault's work is witness to "an interest, a truly human interest, in the human owners of those bodies [which are affected by the power relations]" (p 775).

This is good, insofar as it restores the focus of literary endeavour to understanding the act and purpose of reading. I think there's an underlying tendency to throw out a few babies with the bathwater, though. You can theorise about "the Author", locate the text as part of a wider discourse which speaks through the author, without disregarding the humanistic aspects of reading.

Similarly, though you can deplore the overuse of (eg) queer readings, his gungho approach risks losing the insight that identity politics has brought; and it's hard to think about those issues without using some of Foucault's views on discourse.

At the end of the piece, Cunningham quotes from Stephen King, in a calculatedly anti-theoretical act. King likens the relation between writer and reader as a kind of telepathy. By using words, thoughts and pictures that were in the writer's mind are now in the reader's. Once again, though, I as a reader don't care about what the writer was thinking.

MCT: Alexander Stille

2010-03-29T13:02:00.000+01:00

The extract in MCT is the last chapter of Stille's 2002 book The Future of the Past: how the information age threatens to destroy our cultural heritage, a title that may owe more to its publisher's marketing department that to its actual thesis, at least on the evidence here. Being a final chapter, it offers a round up of the previous chapters, in which Stille seems to have spent a lot of time of the history of history, and in particular the role that writing, and later printing, had on our relationship to the past. He moves on to television, and all's going well, with discussion of findings of how tv watching correlates with social activities (negatively), until this paragraph:

Television has created a flat, two-dimensional world of an eternal present - in which everything, whether it is depicted in the present or the past, appears to be happening now.

The change of tone is really apparent when you read it. The tautology doesn't help - I really don't know what he means by "flat, two-dimensional" - but the sudden switch into a declarative mode is weird.

Which is a pity, because there's more interesting stuff about the efffects of the internet: fragmentation, disintermediation and homogenisation. These are things that worry me, too, but I don't think he goes beyond setting out the questions. Maybe inevitably: the internet is so new and changing so fast, no-one can know where it will take us.

One thought from this chapter is that the change to the internet may be less fundamental than the introduction of printing (and of mechanical reproduction). Before that, Stille says, even books were rare objects. One way of looking at the internet is that it makes even more objects available, so it's an extension of the power of printing.

MCT: David Scott Kastan

2010-03-26T18:08:00.000Z

I've skipped a few passages in MCT to look at this, and found it interesting, despite its being about textual scholarship, which generally doesn't move me. The essay, "From codex to computer; or, presence of mind", is the fourth chapter in Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001), and looks at the relationship of electronic texts to bound books. It's full of provocative ideas, but I think may miss some points.

The original concern is whether an electronic text is less authentic than a printed one. Kastan points out that particularly in relation to Shakespeare any printed edition is mediated more or less explicitly. Shakespeare himself had no attitude towards print, took no part in getting the plays printed, and so any editorial adjudication on what he meant is dependent on an a priori view of what Shakespeare would have been like to say. (Reading this section, I was reminded of translation practice. There also the question of the writer's intention has importance.)

Kastan quotes T E Hulme as saying that "the covers of a book are responsible for much error" (p 734). By this he means that they artificially isolate the text. Kastan also argues that book-publication gives an artificial fixedness to the published text. And this is a relatively new phenomenon, becoming more prominent as authors' moral rights are more strongly protected.

OK, so what's the comparison? He refers to an online version of King Lear, which I can't immediately find online now. But a screengrab shows that you can see a modern spelling text, the folio and quarto texts, and a facsimile of an early printing (and more) on the screen at the same time. This opens up the play text to all the intertextual links that may be relevant. Well, not all of them. Some selection is being made by an editor even here. And this version of Lear doesn't replace what most people will want, ie an edited text that they can read or speak.

I think the missing point in this is that ebooks generally are more like printed books than this. With ebooks, I think, most people just want a reasonable version of the text. Though the technology does allow hypertextuality, it doesn't enforce it. My suspicion is that it will be a minority taste. I think one effect - either of ebooks or of new developments in print publication (print on demand) is that more obscure works will become more available. But as Kastan accepts, we don't yet know (him in 2001 or me in the space age future).

MCT: Stuart Hall

2010-03-25T15:26:00.000Z

"New ethnicities", the essay in this book, dates from 1989, and was published in an ICA book Black Film, British Cinema. It's an odd piece, in that it uses some very theoretical arguing (about the nature of representation) to make some very understandable, almost common-sense points.

Essentially, the argument is that it is now time to develop a more nuanced view of race and the problem of representation by and of blacks. Hall says that previously there has been a fairly simplistic view where the black experience is rather homogenised. Perhaps understandably, give the more urgent need to correct and transform the existing position, there has been a tendency to view 'black' as an umbrella definition. He argues that, of course, 'black' is a politically constructed term, and that hitherto the argument has overlooked the differences within black culture - eg gender and class, as well as, though he's less explicit about this, the different experience of different ethnic groups. (I think that around this time there had been racial violence in Birmingham where Afro-caribbeans had been in conflict with Asians.)

So he says that the concept of ethnicity is more important. Everyone has an ethnicity, including white English people who, if you let them, will act as if ethnicity was something only black people had. It's important to recognise and use that fact, and with it to recognise that among black people there's the same range of experience as among any others. He quotes Hanif Kureishi:

writing [about Britain today] has to be complex. It can't apologize or idealize. It can't sentimentalize and it can't represent only one group as having a monopoly on virtue.

True, but simple, and quite disappointingly trite, really.

MCT: Fredric Jameson

2010-03-25T11:57:00.000Z

This essay, "Postmodernism and consumer society" dates from 1983. In it, Jameson tries to outline some of the key features of postmodernism, to show how it links with the transformation to a post-capitalist, consumer society, and to argue that postmodernism isn't just another modernism. His tools are sweeping assumptions and generalisations.

I shouldn't sound so dismissive, not yet, but in the first paragraph of the essay he puts forward The Clash as exemplars of postmodernism (together with Talking Heads and The Gang of Four). I've never seen the point of The Clash. If you wanted to hear reggae, punk or rock, there were always much better performers available. On the other hand, if you wanted a gentle blend of the three, I suppose The Clash were ideal. In fact, postmodernism as Jameson describes it seems to be all about Clash-like experiences.

For example, he suggests that there is a genre of nostalgia film (which includes the Indiana Jones series, and Star Wars, where the nostalgia is not for the past, but for the past forms of film. He sees pastiche as one defining characteristic of postmodernism. The other is "schizophrenia". Drawing on Lacan's view, he sees the schizophrenic experience as one in which streams of events or language are broken into relatively isolated elements. But his big example of this seems unconvincing. He looks at a poem called "China" by Bob Perelman. About 25 separated statements which might add up to a portrayal of a multivocal self-portrait of the country. But, he points out, as if he is being ever so clever, all is not what it seems. Perelman bought a Chinese magazine, and wrote his own captions for the photos in it, and these are the poem. In Jameson's view, this means the poem is at least twice removed from its apparent subject; its primary reference is to the magazine, not the country. It's an incredibly weak argument, but he is saying this is all part of the world of spectacles, as described by (eg) Baudrillard.

A key part of the argument is that "classical modernism" has now been so thoroughly assimilated that it presents no challenge. Finnegans Wake, he'd have to say, is no longer odd. And he sees Ashbery's poetry as postmodern, whereas I'd say they're precisely in the modernist tradition. (As is Perelman's poem). In many ways, postmodernism as he describes it seems to me to be just the everyday popular culture. There is still a strain of elite culture, which has the same difficulty as modernism has always had.

Finally, to return to the start of the essay, he says that "theory" has marked the end of philosophy as such. Really?

MCT: Luce Irigaray

2010-03-24T14:42:00.001Z

Luce Irigaray is clearly an interesting figure, but the extract in MCT is unimpressive in its methods. It's a speech, "The Bodily Encounter with the Mother", that she gave to a conference on mental health in 1981. The main thrust of the first part of the speech is to deplore orthodox Freudianism as banishing or censoring the role of the mother/child relationship. She argues that orthodox thinking - of which Freudianism is a part and a driver - thereby places male attributes as the norm. So far so good, but she (in this speech) attacks Freud using the same shabby tools that he used: speculation and self-reflection mixed with an ideological predisposition. The only difference being that in her case the predisposition is to valorise women's existence.

I don't have any problem with her doing that, but it seems to me it is a project, a call for further investigation, rather than a proof of anything. By the end of the lecture she is arguing that women have a different way of experiencing sexuality, and that they therefore may need a different way of speaking, a langage to supplant the existing langue. Which of course is where the lecture interfaces with literature.

The lecture ends on reflections on religious attitudes towards women, in particular the Catholic Church's views on contraception, abortion and women priests:

A woman celebrating the eucharist with her mother, sharing with her the fruits of the earth she/they have blessed, could be delivered of all hatred or ingratitude towards her maternal genealogy, could be consecrated in her identity and her female genealogy. (p 540)

Well, yes, could be, and it would be great if that happened. But it's all built on such shaky foundations I don't have much faith in it.

Baudelaire - A une Dame Créole

2010-03-20T21:55:00.002Z

This was the first-written of the poems in FdM, a result of Baudelaire's trip to Réunion. In many ways, it's a fairly bland courtly love exercise; the poet argues that the Creole lady in question has beauty that would make French society take notice. But then the last line is so problematic for us, now.

Au pays parfumé que le soleil caresse,
J'ai connu, sous un dais d'arbres tout empourprés
Et de palmiers d'où pleut sur les yeux la paresse,
Une dame créole aux charmes ignorés.

Son teint est pâle et chaud; la brune enchanteresse
A dans le cou des airs noblement maniérés;
Grande et svelte en marchant comme une chasseresse,
Son sourire est tranquille et ses yeux assurés.

Si vous alliez, Madame, au vrai pays de gloire,
Sur les bords de la Seine ou de la verte Loire,
Belle digne d'orner les antiques manoirs,

Vous feriez, à l'abri des ombreuses retraites
Germer mille sonnets dans le coeur des poètes,
Que vos grands yeux rendraient plus soumis que vos noirs.

In the perfumed country which the sun caresses,
I knew, under a canopy of crimson trees
And palms from which indolence rains into your eyes,
A Creole lady whose charms were unknown.

Her complexion is pale and warm; the dark enchantress
Affects a noble air with the movements of her neck.
Tall and slender, she walks like a huntress;
Her smile is calm and her eye confident.

If you went, Madame, to the true land of glory,
On the banks of the Seine or along the green Loire,
Beauty fit to ornament those ancient manors,

You'd make, in the shelter of those shady retreats,
A thousand sonnets grow in the hearts of poets,
Whom your large eyes would make more subject than your slaves.

Again, translation tactics reveal some of the problem. In this translation, Aggeler translates "noirs" as "slaves". Roy Campbell (1952) makes them "negro slaves", while Geoffery Wagner (1974) has "Blacks". Another significant difference is that Campbell displaces the word. In the original, it's the last word, and that makes it particularly jarring to modern ears.

There have been warning signs: exoticism is connoted in the first quatrain, and it's personalised in the rhyme enchanteresse/chasseresse. The Lady is seen as different (and we could note that she's a very inert presence throughout).

But in the last line, Edward Said might say that the foundation of this Lady's wealth is made explicit, and what's shocking is that it's presented as a fact of nature, rather than of politics or violence. These days, you can't raise the subject of slavery without signalling some attitude towards it. The expression is so flat and bathetic. And if the Lady is inert, how much more so are the "noirs"?

We could waste many hours discussing how Baudelaire's contemporaries would have read this, but now, having read and thought about this a lot, I think the last line of this sonnet is not reconcilable these days. We don't have a framework of understanding for it, and so probably have to shrug and pass on to the next poem. That's quite a serious conclusion, implying that certain works are incompatible with a given cultural formation. Yet we'd have no problem in saying that an eighteenth century audience would have no way of understanding the Cantos. Why should we assume that all we do, across centuries, is gain understanding? There comes a point when the difference between our understanding and the understanding of the culture that created a work is so fundamental that we'd be better off not trying. Another example might be Shakespeare's comic banter.

If we don't do this, we may find ourselves doing a C S Lewis - attempting to become a contemporary reader. I have doubts about the possibility of doing so, and even bigger doubts about the worth of it. We don't (well, I don't) read literature to learn about the society that created it, but because there is something in it that is relevant to us, now.

I'll probably come back to this. I'm aware that there's a hidden question here: doesn't the fact that I can recognise a difference between our understanding and that of Baudelaire's time require me to have some knowledge of the understanding of Baudelaire's time? I've a feeling this isn't an insuperable problem, though.

Structure of Les Fleurs du Mal

2010-03-18T13:41:00.000Z

A fairly factual entry, this: to note the parts of FdM (the 1857 edition). The book is divided into five main sections, after the dedication and the introductory poem, "Au Lecteur".

The largest, "Spleen et Idéal" is largely about the contrast between ideal love, and love as it must be experienced in Baudelaire's decadent world.

Then, in "Les Fleurs du Mal", the focus is more on victims of this world. One way of recuperating "La Martyre" for example is to see it as the depiction of the result of the violence that the world of ennui and spleen can cause.

A short section, "Révolte" contains three poems on religious themes, followed by "Le Vin" and "La Mort".

A whole new section, "Tableaux Parisiens" was added in the edition of 1861.

We have changed

2010-03-18T09:38:00.000Z

A very quick entry, just to note this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/mar/17/critics-notebook-lyn-gardner

The Guardian's theatre critic making the point that a critic's response to a play largely depends on their experience, past and present. Relevant, of course, to any reader-response theory.

Baudelaire (3) - sadism

2010-03-17T14:35:00.003Z

Well, durr, no prizes to me for spotting a sadistic strain in Les Fleurs du Mal. I'm going to look at two poems which are both too long to quote in full: "A celle qui est trop gaie" and "Une martyre".

The first is in "Spleen et idéal", while the second is in the second part of the collection, "Les Fleurs du mal".

"A celle qui est trop gaie" was one of the poems condemned by the legal process against the 1857 edition for offence to public morality. Baudelaire's note suggests that the judges thought it had a reference to syphilis. Initially the poem is a basic love/hate lament: the loved one is too happy; why can't she share the poet's misery? Just like a bright garden can lead him to crush a flower underfoot, so her beauty can lead him to cruelty and violence, albeit only imagined. But how imagined! These are the last three quatrains (of nine).

Ainsi je voudrais, une nuit,
Quand l'heure des voluptés sonne,
Vers les trésors de ta personne,
Comme un lâche, ramper sans bruit,

Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse,
Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné,
Et faire à ton flanc étonné
Une blessure large et creuse,

Et, vertigineuse douceur!
À travers ces lèvres nouvelles,
Plus éclatantes et plus belles,
T'infuser mon venin, ma soeur!

Thus I should like, some night,
When the hour for pleasure sounds,
To creep softly, like a coward,
Toward the treasures of your body,

To whip your joyous flesh
And bruise your pardoned breast,
To make in your astonished flank
A wide and gaping wound,

And, intoxicating sweetness!
Through those new lips,
More bright, more beautiful,
To infuse my venom, my sister!

Again, that's the straight translation by William Aggeler.

It's hard to read and hard to translate. The basic meaning is blatantly sadistic, and even if we say that everyone has violent thoughts, the expression of them here is detailed. It's worth looking at some of the other translations.

And so, one night, I'd like to sneak,
When night has tolled the hour of pleasure,
A craven thief, towards the treasure
Which is your person, plump and sleek.

To punish your bombastic flesh,
To bruise your breast immune to pain,
To farrow down your flank a lane
Of gaping crimson, deep and fresh.

And, most vertiginous delight!
Into those lips, so freshly striking
And daily lovelier to my liking —
Infuse the venom of my sprite.

(Roy Campbell)

Likewise, some evening, I would creep,
When midnight sounds, and everywhere
The sighing of lovers fills the air,
To the hushed alcove where you sleep,

And waken you by violent storm,
And beat you coldly till you swooned,
And carve upon your perfect form,
With care, a deep seductive wound —

And (joy delirious and complete!)
Through those bright novel lips, through this
Gaudy and virgin orifice,
Infuse you with my venom, sweet.

(George Dillon)

Thus I would wish, one night,
When the voluptuary's hour sounds,
To crawl like a coward, noiselessly,
Towards the treasures of your body,

In order to correct your gay flesh
And beat your unbegrudging breast,
To make upon your starting thigh
A long and biting weal,

And, sweet giddiness,
Along those newly-gaping lips
More vivid and more beautiful,
Inject my venom, O my sister!

(Geoffrey Wagner)

I think there's a general squeamishness about "Une blessure large et creuse", which Aggeler translates quite straightforwardly as "A wide and gaping wound". Actually "deep" would be better than "gaping", but nonetheless, at least he depicts it with the same kind of forensic accuracy that the original has. Compare it with "a lane of / Gaping crimson, deep and fresh" or "a deep seductive wound".

"Une martyre" purports to (and perhaps does) describe a drawing by an old master, depicting a corpse lying on a bed, its head removed and placed on a "table de nuit". Reading this the first time I didn't notice that the gender of the body isn't explicitly revealed until late in the poem. Before then there have been suggestions, growing in strength, but I'm sure you can already guess that it turns out to be a woman. A young, beautiful woman, at that. And I didn't deliberately try to guess, but I knew well before the explicit revelation ("Elle est bien jeune encor!").

So, the woman in the painting has been killed. The poet ponders how she died:

L'homme vindicatif que tu n'as pu, vivante,
Malgré tant d'amour, assouvir,
Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante
L'immensité de son désir?

Réponds, cadavre impur! et par tes tresses roides
Te soulevant d'un bras fiévreux,
Dis-moi, tête effrayante, a-t-il sur tes dents froides
Collé les suprêmes adieux?

The vengeful man whom you could not with all your love
Satisfy when you were alive,
Did he use your inert, complacent flesh to fill
The immensity of his lust?

Reply, impure cadaver! and by your stiffened tresses
Raising you with a fevered arm,
Tell me, ghastly head, did he glue on your cold teeth
The kisses of the last farewell?

(Aggeler's translation)

Again, there's the notion that love finally expresses itself in extreme violence.

It's disturbing obviously, but unlike some of the translations we have to look at it straight on. I don't think you can avoid the conclusion that in both these poems women's bodies are seen as capable of giving pleasure but that may need to be at the cost of their lives. I think, on the whole, it's better to be dehumanised by being seen as a mountain, than by being killed or wounded. In all cases, however, there is a move to deny the independence and will of the woman; they are troublesome.

Good grief, I'm liking Baudelaire the person less and less the more I read of Baudelaire the poet.

Baudelaire (2)

2010-03-16T11:52:00.001Z

I'm enjoying this week of Baudelaire. My task means that I have to know about the biography, though, which I'd normally pay less attention to. But it is interesting. As we proceed through FDM we find more reflections of Baudelaire's views of women. In my previous post, the poem was inspired by Jeanne Duval. Another woman in Baudelaire's life was Apollinaire Sabatier, aka La Présidente, who was a respected courtesan and hostess. According to French Wikipedia, everyone who knew her praised her beauty, goodness and joy. Finally, she "yielded" to Baudelaire, with unsurprising consequences. He wrote to her:

Il y a quelques jours, tu étais une divinité, ce qui est si commode, ce qui est si beau, si inviolable. Te voilà femme maintenant... (A few days ago you were a divinity, all that is right, beautiful, inviolable. Now you are just a woman.)

And he memorialised her thus:

Que diras-tu ce soir, pauvre âme solitaire,
Que diras-tu, mon coeur, coeur autrefois flétri,
À la très belle, à la très bonne, à la très chère,
Dont le regard divin t'a soudain refleuri?

— Nous mettrons notre orgueil à chanter ses louanges:
Rien ne vaut la douceur de son autorité
Sa chair spirituelle a le parfum des Anges
Et son oeil nous revêt d'un habit de clarté.

Que ce soit dans la nuit et dans la solitude
Que ce soit dans la rue et dans la multitude
Son fantôme dans l'air danse comme un flambeau.

Parfois il parle et dit: «Je suis belle, et j'ordonne
Que pour l'amour de moi vous n'aimiez que le Beau;
Je suis l'Ange gardien, la Muse et la Madone.»

What will you say tonight, poor solitary soul,
What will you say, my heart, heart once so withered,
To the kindest, dearest, the fairest of women,
Whose divine glance suddenly revived you?

— We shall try our pride in singing her praises:
There is nothing sweeter than to do her bidding;
Her spiritual flesh has the fragrance of Angels,
And when she looks upon us we are clothed with light.

Be it in the darkness of night, in solitude,
Or in the city street among the multitude,
Her image in the air dances like a torch flame.

Sometimes it speaks and says: "I am fair, I command
That for your love of me you love only Beauty;
I am your guardian Angel, your Muse and Madonna."

It's different. The poet transforms this woman, not into a mountainside, but into something ethereal, a "fantome", and her flesh becomes spiritual. She is idealised out of existence. The last line possibly gives the game away: this is a Catholic poem. That's an over-simplification, of course, but suggests that the influence of that religion persists and will turn up elsewhere.

Baudelaire - La Géante

2010-03-15T17:25:00.001Z

I'm reading Les Fleurs du Mal by way of a bet with myself. Can I learn enough about Baudelaire in a week to outdo the contestant who has chosen this as a specialist subject on Mastermind on Friday?

As a result I have come across this poem.

Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux,
J'eusse aimé vivre auprès d'une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d'une reine un chat voluptueux.

J'eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme
Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux;
Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux;

Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes;
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,

Lasse, la font s'étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l'ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d'une montagne.

At the time when Nature with a lusty spirit
Was conceiving monstrous children each day,
I should have liked to live near a young giantess,
Like a voluptuous cat at the feet of a queen.

I should have liked to see her soul and body thrive
And grow without restraint in her terrible games;
To divine by the mist swimming within her eyes
If her heart harbored a smoldering flame;

To explore leisurely her magnificent form;
To crawl upon the slopes of her enormous knees,
And sometimes in summer, when the unhealthy sun

Makes her stretch out, weary, across the countryside,
To sleep nonchalantly in the shade of her breasts,
Like a peaceful hamlet below a mountainside.

(This translation by William Aggeler and several more poetic translations can be found at fleursdumal.org. I've chosen this one for its literalness.)

One thing the poem immediately illustrates is how hard it is to ignore biographical readings. The underlying story of Baudelaire's life was his relationship with his mother, complicated by her second marriage to a military man who seems to have been the antithesis of Baudelaire himself. It's the kind of upbringing that any amateur psychologist would see as ideal ground for producing a gay man, but Baudelaire was excessively heterosexual. You could use these poems as evidence towards an analysis of Baudelaire's sexuality, but I don't think that should be the purpose of criticism.

You can, however, legitimately use the context in which the poem appears. In the sequence of the 1857 edition it immediately follows "L'Idéal", in which the poet suggests that Lady Macbeth is more to his taste than the pale white roses of Gavarni's society drawings. So we can reasonably say that the poems at this point are exploring ideals of femaleness.

The first stanza refers to more ancient times; suggesting not just the mythological reality of giants, but also a lack in the present. Even without the biographical knowledge, we see here an inversion of normal relations: giants are normally male, and the image of a "voluptuous cat" is inherently female.

The second stanza continues this: the giantess is valued for her size, and her terribleness. But there's some admixture of humidity with flame.

In the third stanza, the woman is visualised as landscape. I suppose you could say that the poet expresses a kind of ownership of the landscape/woman; he climbs over it/her, with no regard for her wishes. In fact the transformation by metaphor removes her ability to even have any wishes or opinions. She is inert.

So a feminist reading of this poem is entirely plausible, and would regard it as objectifying the imagined woman, and lamenting perhaps that in modern times women aren't big-kneed and passive.

And yet, the image of the speaker is a bit pathetic. The female figure is unmoved by the male exploration. He seems irrelevant to her. The images of the man as cat and sleeping village are far from virile. The poem is certainly not a celebration of male power. On the contrary, you could see it, even without knowing what we know about Baudelaire's life, as an expression of fear and sexual ambiguity. I'm not (honestly I'm not) using this to help me understand Baudelaire the man. Why would I want to do that?

MCT: Patrocinio P Schweickart

2010-03-08T16:35:00.000Z

Oh, those American names! I love the way she kept that P in the middle, just to avoid confusion, no doubt, with all the other Patricinio Schweickarts. The essay, "Reading ourselves; toward a feminist theory of reading" is actually easier to read than her name suggests.

She begins by saying that reader-response criticism, in either of its forms, elides questions of class, race and sex, proposing a privileged reader, who we may take to be white middle class. Incidentally, she talks of a divergence in reader-response views over the relative importance of the reader and the writer. I hadn't seen that. According to this, Stanley Fish and others see the reader as holding the controlling interest, while for Iser, Poulet and Riffaterre, it's the writer. (She quotes from Poulet, who still seems to me to be way off the mark.) Later in the essay she suggests that this language of control or domination is itself part of a patriarchal approach.

But the major part of the essay concerns two topics, which she thinks have to be separated: women's reading of male texts; and women's reading of female texts. She suggests that women can learn to read against male texts; by seeing the patriarchal assumptions they can reclaim what is more essential in them. There's a certain amount of reflection on her personal experience here. Why can she still enjoy reading D H Lawrence?

There's a lot more to discuss here. I wouldn't question the starting premise that a lot of male writing is inherently patriarchal, but in my liberal way I'd prefer to think that good writing always allows readers to read against it.

The second "chapter", as she puts it, is the story of how women read women. She develops a view that reading becomes much more a process of sharing. I suspect the arguments here are fallilble, for the same reason as Poulet's are.

What's obviously missing is any discussion of men reading women. It does happen, you know.

Some of the closing comments are about whether this is all rubbish anyway, since deconstructionism means that any view is equally valid. She seems to share my view here: if that's true, it's really boring, so let's act as if it isn't. She's happy to use a version of the interpretive community as the validation mechanism.

MCT: Michael Riffaterre

2010-03-08T15:03:00.002Z

An entirely new name to me, Riffaterre seems to have remained fairly loyal to the semiotic approach. This essay, from 1985, after a heavy-going start turns out to be a clever and detailed examination of how translation practice highlights the "presuppositions" which are present in any literary text. This leads to the essay's title "Transposing presuppositions on the semiotics of literary translation", which really needs more work.

Let's start with the final sentence:

Perhaps the simplest way to state the difference between literary and non-literary translation is to say that the latter translates what is in the text, whereas the former must translate what the text only implies.

The things the literary text implies are, broadly speaking, what Riffaterre means when he talks of presuppositions. For example there is an "intertext", which is the background of knowledge that a native reader may have.

The first example he looks at comes from Milton's translation of an ode of Horace. I'll skip over that to the second, which is a passage from Catullus. Depicting the moment when the Nereid Thetis sees and falls in love with Peleus, he argues that the word used to describe her partial nakedness (nutricum) has in Latin unavoidable connotations of breastfeeding, so puts motherhood forward as a concern of the poem. Nutricum literally means nurse; but in Latin it can (just about) be used metonynically to mean breast. In English, you can't do that; there just isn't a word that can hold both meanings. Riffaterre doesn't offer his own solution to this, but in the second example, he does

and this is where the essay really started to grab me. He looks at a tiny extract from a poem by Maurice Fombeure (again, never heard of him. Apparently a mid-20th century lyric poet.) One word, septembrales, is considered. Every educated Frenchman would know that this is a coinage by Rabelais, is the only adjective derived from a month's name, and connotes with wine (Rabelais's usage is in the phrase purée septembrale, a euphemism for wine.)

There's no equivalent word in English that contains both a month and the connotation of wine, so he translates "brumes septembrales" into "mists of the vintage-season".

Both examples, then, are evidence of the importance of the reader's context to understand the full implications of a literary work. I think that's the most useful thing to be taken from the essay, and you could make the point without using the term presuppositions, which seems to me too vague while appearing to be explanatory. The piece is also useful for the view on translation it gives. As always, close examination of difficult passages is enlightening.

Note
I've now looked at how Peter Green translates the Catullus passage. In a quite apposite demonstration of Riffaterre's view, he has the Nereids "mother-naked to breasts and below", expressing the maternal theme in a slightly transposed way, and also, I suppose, keeping some of the awkwardness that "nutricum" has.

MCT: Geoffrey Hartman

2010-03-02T20:52:00.000Z

Hartman, like Paul de Man, was a member of the deconstructionist school associated with Yale University. He should have taught de Man something about clarity. The essay here, "The interpreter's Freud", was originally given as a lecture, and is included in a collection called Easy Pieces.

He talks about a passage from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and one of Wordsworth's Lucy poems, "A slumber did my spirit steal".

First he looks at how Freud's dream interpretation does not reduce the dream to a simple statement of meaning, but actually complicates it, searching out and reconciling references. Then he writes, extremely perceptively, about the poem, commenting on his own reading to show that again he is exploring a range of associations that the words of the poem (and its layout on the page) throw up.

The gap in the essay is any sense of where to stop, or of how to evaluate which associations are useful or meaningful. I think there's a suggestion that you shouldn't do such an evaluation. It's part of the general drift of post-structuralist deconstructionism that all associations are valid, and that it's not possible to claim more importance for any of them.

I still don't think that can be true, or that, even if we suspect it is true, it's a useful line to follow. It's similar to the (I think) undefeatable suggestion that all actions are determined by past actions. It's no fun to hold that view, and in practice people always reflect on human actions as if they are free. Similarly, critics always and inevitably act as if some reading of a poem is a better fit. And, in practice, critics and theorists understand that some literature is better than others, in whatever sense you want to give that 'better'. De Man talked unentertaingly about resistance to theory. One of the reasons for such resistance is that it's no fun to hold a totally relativistic view, which is what deconstructionism seems to tend towards, in its most fundamentalist form.

MCT: Lyotard and de Man

2010-03-02T14:14:00.003Z

I'm back with MCT after a break, and the first essay, by Jean-François Lyotard is "Answering the question: what is postmodernism".

The simplest answer to the question is that it is the means by which modernism supersedes itself. So, Picasso was postmodern in relation to Cézanne. Unfortunately for me, Lyotard doesn't leave it there: "I would like not to remain with this slightly mechanistic meaning of the word." (p 418)

He introduces the concept of the sublime, which seems curiously old-fashioned and initially out of place. The sentiment of the sublime

takes place ... when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. [...] We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to 'make visible' the absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible. (p 417)

This comes from the section headed "Realism", and it seems to be part of an analysis of why realism has to be superseded. In the section headed "The postmodern", Lyotard looks at the way Proust and Joyce attempt to make the unrepresentable perceptible; Proust by way of sacrificing the identity of consciousness, Joyce by sacrificing the identity of writing. These discussions are barely longer than my summary; clearly Lyotard had better thought-out bases for these views, which might have made clearer what he means. But both are representatives of the modern:

Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unrepresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. [...]
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms. [...] The [postmodern] writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. (p 419 - 420 emphasis in original)

I think this is deeply flawed reasoning. Part of the time, Lyotard is saying that postmodernism is the mechanism by which modernism arrives. But then he seems to be saying that this postmodernism, that we're experiencing now, is different. I think it's right to say that every new modernism has its new rules, which only become apparent after the work has been around for a while; that applies to Ezra Pound, for example, but also applied to Sterne. I could also question his separation of content and form.

The other point about postmodernism that Lyotard is known for, not mentioned in this essay, is that it "rejects meta-narratives", which are described in the editors' introduction as "any explanatory framework taken to connect separate items for analysis usually on the basis of some imposed value system." (p 411) Now, that doesn't sound right, but I have nothing here to expand on that.

The second essay "The resistance to theory", by Paul de Man, was written in English, and so at least proves that translation is not a necessary ingredient of unintelligibility. It's a horrible piece of writing. It looks at the reaction (in USA) to theoretical approaches to literature, using a lot of the concepts of classical poetics and rhetoric.The argument is essentially non-theoretical approaches don't have the tools in their box to do the job properly, but that resistance to theory shouldn't be deplored because resistance is inherent in theory itself.

I really disliked this essay (can you tell?). It goes on a lot but says very little.

Translating Wallander (again)

2010-02-20T22:14:00.000Z

I'm watching one of the BBC Wallanders, starring Kenneth Branagh. They are different from the Swedish ones, in ways I generally don't like. A lot of this is to do with the fact that they're in English, but there are other reasons.

First, the BBC versions have a big star as the lead, which means a lot of the attention is drawn to him. This is intensified by the style of cinematography. There is typically a shallow depth of field, with ostentatious focus-pulling, which means that often only one face is in focus, and of course that's usually Branagh/Wallander. There seems to be much greater use of close-up, again usually Branagh/Wallander. The effect is to characterise the programmes as being about him, his troubles and his development. Of course the Swedish versions did this too, but less so, I think.

All the characters have - inevitably - some kind of accent. Posh/common/regional for example. I'm sure the Swedish characters did too, but we didn't know what they were. We didn't have any presuppositions offered to us. So the characters were much blanker canvases.

In all, the effect is to make BBC Wallander much more lisible. I recognise that Swedish Wallander would have similar effects, but I'm talking about my response, not the response of a Swedish audience.

I could go into this further, but not now.

What has struck me now, is a scene where Wallander takes a phone call from the pathologist. She tells him she has sent him an email and so he looks at his inbox. Here's what he sees:

To make the obvious point, they're all in Swedish! So, all these people who talk to Wallander in English revert to Swedish when they send him an email. There's something wrong here, but I don't know exactly what.

Genette and Le Cid

2010-02-18T11:39:00.002Z

My first thought in returning to literature was that I could reassess my view of Pierre Corneille, and I started doing that, but didn't get very far. For me the question was whether there is mainstream reading of the tragedies against which it's possible to pose a subversive view. Two of the plays I was looking at then were Le Cid and Horace.

I have now read Gérard Genette's essay "Vraisemblance and Motivation", which is obviously a major source of Jonathan Culler's thinking on the various ways in which fiction validates itself to the reader. Genette talks a lot about Balzac - the ways in which he mentions, in a way that suggests a shared understanding, the assumptions about society that are inherent in his novels. This is the part that was taken up and expanded by Culler

But before that he talks about Le Cid, and here is where there is more concern about the conventions of genre. There's an interesting quotation from René Rapin:

Truth only makes things the way they are, and vraisemblance makes them as they ought to be. Truth is almost always defective, due to the mixture of singular conditions that compose it. There is nothing born in the world that is not at some distance from the perfection of the idea from which it was born. One must seek for the originals and models in vraisemblance and the universal principles of things--where nothing material or individual enters in to corrupt them. (Reflexions sur la poetique (1674) 2.115-16)

That is very reminiscent of La Bruyere's comment that Racine described people as they are, while Corneille described them as they should be. I'm not sure who came first, but it's clear that Rapin is talking about vraisemblance as the appropriate aim of "la poetique" - in this case of Tragedy. This recognises the essential difference between untidy truth and carefully selected fiction.

Genette goes on to discuss ways in which this vraisemblance is negotiated. In the case of Le Cid there are a number of, sometimes conflicting, assumptions made about the appropriate behaviour of Chimene, which can be expressed as rules. I think it would be fair to say, though, that the rule that says "a daughter should not marry the man who killed her father" is a strong one. As is the rule that says "a king should punish a man who killed a respected adviser". Both of these rules are broken. From Culler we might say the reader/audience therefore needs to do more to reconcile (recuperate - I really need to settle on a term for this) the action. The play itself provides a justification for the king's failure to punish Le Cid. It's debatable, but it's open. The question of Chimene's action is harder, and it's up to the audience to provide some further justification. For example, when I recently read the play, it seemed likely that Don Gomes had been a pretty bad father, and Chimene might not miss him too much. That can be shocking and without going fully into "La Querelle" I can see that it could be useful to view the argument as a conflict of broken assumptions. Vraisemblance, as Rapin describes it, seems to have a limited range: stray too far from the assumptions we share, and you break the link with truth.

Vraisemblance, then, underlies the principles of French classical drama. The three unities were formal definitions of how truth can be represented, but bienséance, which is particularly at issue in Horace is much more slippery. Some time I'll look again at that play in the light of these ideas.

Glen Woodroad

2010-02-16T15:26:00.000Z

A few days ago a woman called at my door, which is exciting enough in itself. She was selling copies of a book that she had written and self-published, called Glen Woodroad*. Although I didn't hold out much hope the book would be very good, I admired her initiative and bought a copy, which I've just read.

It isn't very good, but it's short. I don't know exactly how short, as the pages are unnumbered. It took me about an hour to read it. As she explained, it was a cheap printing job, and that shows up in the way the print size varies from time to time. It's also clearly not had even a basic level of editing: some obvious typos and punctuation errors throughout; let alone the service of a professional editor.

A professional editor could improve it, but what's striking about it is the form. It's basically soap opera: a series of events linked by character, mainly concerning the question of whether the central character can trust her partner. (The answer is mostly no.) Halfway through the book the original central character dies; her daughter then steps into the role, grows up very quickly, and has similar problems.

But right near the end there's a hint of the novel that this might have been. Earlier, there'd been the hint of a secret - a mysterious reference to someone called Glen in the mother's papers At the end the daughter finds herself in a wonderful dreamlike landscape and meets someone called Glen Woodroad, a kind of guardian angel, who gives her the mental strength and courage to rebuild her own life, using the power of love.

One of the big drives for reading is to find out what happens. When the mother died in this book, it felt like the end. There had been enough detail of her life to make it interesting, whereas the daughter was a almost entirely new character. There is a link between the two halves of the book but it's completely underused. The Glen character should be the unification, and could stand for all kinds of things, from the supernatural (she's an angel) to the earth-feminist (she's the indomitable spirit of woman), but instead she's a vague wish fulfillment (who, incidentally, turns up when things aren't nearly as bad as they have been).

It's maybe only when you read a book like this that you realise how artificial fiction as we normally know it is. Here things happen generally in sequence, and are explained as they happen, apart from the could-be big mystery in the middle.

*I've changed the name. It's unlikely, but the author might otherwise find this, which would be unfair.

Orientalism

2010-02-16T11:10:00.000Z

Reading this book has become a bit of a slog, to be honest. It's incredibly erudite, and there's a host of names I've never heard of, but it seems to be piling on the learning to bomb-proof an idea that Said presumably knew would be subject to attack. As when I read the extract in MCT, a lot of that idea now seems uncontroversial: ultimately it's not helpful to define half the world simply in terms of difference. In many ways that message is even more important now. In the book, Said talks a lot about the way Islam sometimes stood for the Orient, sometimes not. We could argue whether that itself suggests the Orientalist view is more nuanced that it sometimes seems to be portrayed as, but I think a lot of people still see Islam as a single, unvaried, really existing thing, whose defining characteristics are the things that make it different.

One bomb that Said does not seem to have anticipated is feminism. Of course there's the usual business of male pronouns, which I'm beginning to get used to, but it's clear that (i) the orientalism Said describes did not examine the relative roles of men and women and (ii) Said doesn't comment on this omission or (iii) examine whether it is a serious omission in its effects on the research. There's no trace of the fact that men and women may have different interests. I'm pretty sure that point will have been made long before I got here.

(But I think it does prove the point about inclusive language. If you always refer to typical people ("the reader", "the writer", "the Arab") as "he", it's easy to not notice that you're ignoring half the world.)

Another big question is why does this affect literary theory? How does it affect our reading of literature outside this particular arena? I suppose the point is that it's a methodological lesson: received ideas are not to be trusted (Said refers a lot to Bouvard et Pecuchet. OK, I've got that.

The last passage I've flagged in the book, before I flagged, is about narrative and vision. Vision "presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically". Against that, narrative "is the specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision." Vision is the orientalist view; narrative disrupts it, and so orientalism tries to deny history to the orient. At this premature conclusion of the book, I still can't say if the conclusions about orientalism are true, but as an example of a sceptical approach, it's (ambiguous praise) interesting.

Philology and evolution

2010-02-09T14:20:00.000Z

Continuing with Orientalism, I've now read the section on Ernest Renan (1823–92), who's best known for his atheistic Vie de Jésus, but who was also an example of the growth of philology.

Although it's not part of my immediate interest here, I'm surprised the parallel between 19th century philology and the scientific revolution headlined by Darwin isn't more commonly made. Just as scientific discoveries were showing that the biblical view of the physical world couldn't be true, linguistics was showing that the biblical story of language couldn't be correct. Hitherto, the aim of linguistics (in the west) had been to show how languages derived from the pre-Babel single language. Now it appeared that, for example, Sanskrit had much older roots.

I wonder why the implications of this have had so much less impact on public debate than evolution. Why aren't there crazy Americans denying the antiquity of the Indo-European languages? Maybe there are, but we just don't hear them.

Renan, according to Said, dealt with Semitic languages in a slightly perverse way. Now that their biblical specialness was denied, he went to another extreme, proving that "the Semitic languages are inorganic, arrested, totally ossified, incapable of self-regeneration" (p 145).

Again, I'm not specially interested in the specific content, but in the way Renan is said to have approached the question. Said compares him to a museum keeper:

What is given on the page and in the museum case is a truncated exaggeration, like many of Sacy's Oriental extracts, whose purpose is to exhibit a relationship between the science (or scientist) and the object, not between the object and nature. (p 142)

Chrestomathy

2010-02-09T11:47:00.003Z

I can't believe I've never come across the word 'chrestomathy' before. According to the OED it's "a collection of choice passages from an author or authors, esp. one compiled to assist in the acquirement of a language", and the first use dates from 1832, although the adjective, 'chrestomathic', is first cited from 1819.

The term comes up in Edward Said's Orientalism, which I'm currently reading. When I looked at Said in MCT, I couldn't quite see what his discussion of a textual approach was about. A passage on p 127 - 129 makes it clearer. In this part of the book, Said is talking about the way orientalism began, and in particular the work of Silvestre de Sacy (1758 - 1838). He was part of Napoleon's Egyptian project, but more important, for the purpose of the book, as a scholar and teacher.

As a European he ransacked the Oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving France. What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them; then he annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them. In time, the Orient as such became less important that what the Orientalist made of it; thus, drawn by Sacy into the sealed discursive place of a pedagogical tableau, the Orientalist's Orient was thereafter reluctant to emerge into reality. (p 127 -128)

In that passage there's the good and bad of Said's work. The first half is straightforward, while the second unhelpfully gives "the Orientalist's Orient" a will of its own. You know what he means, but in a strange way he's crediting "the Orient" with an actuality that the whole purpose of the book is to deny.

But then this is right back on the button:

So if the Orientalist is necessary because he fishes some useful gems out of the distant Oriental deep, and since the Orient cannot be known without his mediation, it is also true that Oriental writing itself ought not to be taken in whole. This is Sacy's introduction to his theory of fragments, a common Romantic concern. [...] The Orientalist is required to present the Orient by a series of representative fragments, fragments republished, explicated, annotated, and surrounded with still more fragments. For such a presentation a special genre is required: the chrestomathy. (p 128)

This seems like a crucial point: isolating fragments serves several functions. It passes a judgement on the value of the works, but more importantly the selection of fragments of course (it hardly needs to be said) gives a direction of how they should be read.

Maybe that's inevitable, but the particular direction given is what Said is looking at. I'm less interested in the specific case here. What's interesting me more is how this can be seen an example of how comparative literature works, with obvious relation to translation theory.

MCT: Julia Kristeva

2010-02-02T10:00:00.000Z

I was talking about Tel Quel, n'est-ce pas, and Kristeva, it turns out, was part of that group. She was and apparently still is married to Philippe Sollers. The extract in MCT dates from 1974 and is called "Linguistics and Ethics", a misleading title, since the main drive of the piece is about the way non-semantic features of poetry clash with the meaning. She seems to argue that this clash has profound consequences, embodying a fight between centralism and subversiveness.

As I understand it, the argument is that linguistics can't easily have an ethical dimension, precisely because of the weaknesses that Derrida (though he's not mentioned) identified in structural systems. So she says that faute de mieux (although she doesn't use that phrase) you must look at the way poetry escapes the confines of the structural analysis of language. So, you could see this as an alternative answer to Culler's finding that linguistics can't provide a poetics. Kristeva seems to be talking about poetics that isn't structuralist (if it was, it would be as vitiated as any other structuralist analysis). She uses the term 'semiotic' unhelpfully, since (according to Wikipedia) she means something quite different from what we understood by it previously. This short extract doesn't give more details of that, but here's an example of her using the term.

It follows that formulating the problem of linguistic ethics means, above all. compelling linguistics to change its object of study. The speech practice that should be its object is one in which signified structure (sign, syntax, signification) is defined with boundaries that can be shifted by the advent of a semiotic rhythm that no system of linguistic communication has yet been able to assimilate. (p 350, emphasis added)

She talks about how poetry uses features that differ from normal language. Taking as an example Mayakosky's poetry read by Roman Jakobson, she says his reading:

imitating their voices, with the lively, rhythmic accents, thrust out throat and filly militant tone of [Mayakovsky]; and the softly whispered words, sustained swishing and whistling sounds [of Khlebnikov]. (p 352)

It's a fairly passionate response, expressing some frustration at linguists' inability to share that passion, but I don't think anything else in the piece offers a real alternative. She discusses Mayakovsky further, identifying a theme of "the struggle between poet and sun", and seems to see his poetry as exemplifying the way that poetic semiotic is disruptive and subversive. I think there's a risk that her theory, so far as there is one, is too intimately tied to a specific historical period.

MCT: Wolfgang Iser

2010-01-28T11:38:00.001Z

Iser is introduced as one of the best-known exponents of reception theory (Rezeption-aesthetik), which may be related to reader response theory. According to the introduction it's a less theoretical development of post-structuralism. According to me it's a rip-off of the ideas I expressed a while ago. But Iser wrote it in 1972.

The essay is called "The reading process: a phenomenological approach" and although it includes quite a few big words, some of them in German, it reads pretty easily.

The introductory section of the essay quotes Sterne's joke that in Tristram Shandy he has kindly left a lot of work to the reader's imagination. Iser says that all literature does that. It's not a new observation; even Virginia Woolf saw it at work in Jane Austen. But the Virginia Woolf quotation is somehow unsatisfying. In the remaining sections, Iser goes into more detail of how the reader's imagination interacts with the text.

Part II of the essay talks of how the reader works through the text, building and modifying beliefs and expectations. He uses one of those long German terms intentionale Satzkorrelate (coined by Ingarden), which literally means 'intentional sentence correlatives', a translation it was hardly worth making. What's striking about this section is the element of chronology: the reading develops in time; it's essentially seen as a linear process. So this may be more applicable to the novel than to lyric verse for example. Iser talks about how the text has to maintain the balance between variety and implausibility. He discusses 'blockages' - twists that force the reader to change their reading, sometimes radically. Modern texts can have so many such blockages that this can be difficult.

In the short Part III Iser talks of visualisation, without really getting into detail. The point is that readers form images of what characters look like, even if not explicitly. It's an example of the input made by readers.

Part IV goes into more detail of how a text can be (in Culler's terms) recuperated. In general terms it's similar to the earlier discussion of vraisemblance: partly by reference to social codes, etc, the reader constructs a coherent and valid view of the text.

Without the formation of illusions, the unfamiliar world of the text would remain unfamiliar; through the illusions, the experience offered by the text becomes accessible to us, for it is only the illusion, on it different levels of consistency, that makes the experience 'readable'.

(It's interesting there that 'readable' is more or less equivalent to Barthes' 'scriptible'.)

Part V begins with useful thoughts that reading changes the reader. It approaches a recommendation of reading precisely because of that effect. I'm less impressed by the turn it then takes. Quoting from Poulet he first notes that the ideas created in a reader's mind are not the reader's ideas, so whose are they? The author's. But apparently Poulet says that for this to happen:

the life story of the author must be shut out of the work, and the individual disposition of the reader must be shut out of the act of reading. Only then can the thoughts of the author take place subjectively in the reader, who thinks what he is not.

Iser doesn't entirely buy this (and neither do I) but says there are points that "should be developed along somewhat different lines".

I feel uneasy in that I find so much to agree with in this essay. It's an introduction of course, and the detailed explanation of the theory may be more difficult to follow or agree with. It may also cover the gap I think there is here in that it doesn't deal with non-linear reading. (Actually, I realise that Stanley Fish's reading of Milton is largely based on a linear reading. It has limitations.)

I suppose the other main concern with the approach as laid out in this essay is that it's so anti-theoretical. The danger is that an absence of theory may hide an unquestioned ideology. I'm sure that attack has been made by others and I'll encounter it at some time.

Structuralist Poetics (6 - suite et fin)

2010-01-25T15:11:00.000Z

Part 3 of the book, "Perspectives", consists of two short chapters.

The first deals with the objections that the "Tel Quel" school might raise. I remember Tel Quel. It seems to have faded away but in Culler's description it seems basically to be be post-structuralism. Derrida and Kristeva are mentioned, and the assumed attack is made on the basis that Culler's theory of literary competence can only be valid if there is one privileged reading, whereas Derrida has shown that there is an infinite play of readings. Culler's reply seems to be that in practice, some readings are evidently better than others. He also amusingly deals with Saussure's theory of anagrams. He believed that Latin poets regularly hid proper names in their texts by way of anagrams. Kristeva appears to have given this notion serious thought.

The second and final chapter is by way of summing up. Culler stresses again that his project is for an analysis of how readers create their reading, but that the poetics must not be based on linguistics.

My final comments: I remain doubtful that it is possible or sensible to develop a full structuralist poetics. Structuralism itself seems badly damaged by the post-structuralist attacks, which have, however, not provided an alternative. But the attempt is valuable. It's interesting that despite all the reservations Culler expresses, Barthes is really the hero of the book. As Susan Sontag realised, his literary competence was unrivalled.

Structuralist Poetics (5)

2010-01-25T13:37:00.000Z

Chapter 9, the longest in the book, is "Poetics of the Novel". As Culler says, structuralists have given more attention to novels than to poetry, in particular to the nouveau roman, which has forced a challenge to traditional ways of reading.

Inevitably, S/Z features strongly in the opening remarks. Culler goes on, in the section headed "Narrative contracts" to look at ways in which readers try to naturalise or recuperate the role of the narrator. Part of reading a traditional novel consists in constructing a narrator, and this is equally true whether there is an explicitly postulated narrator (eg in first person narrations) or not (eg in Balzac). He suggests that Benveniste's view of histoire and discours doesn't entirely match the situation, and that things are only complicated by Barthes inclusion (and perversion) of this idea. He looks at what happens when it's difficult to construct a narrator: who do readers then naturalise the novel? He rejects the idea of limited point of view as an explanation; within and among the individual points of view, there is a selection process taking place. In extreme cases, where it is impossible to construct a coherent narrator, we can assume the narrator is deranged in some way; but do we really gain anything from doing so? Closing remark in this section: "The identification of narrators is an important interpretive strategy, but it cannot itself take one very far".

The next section, "Codes", essentially focuses on Barthes' five codes in S/Z, which Culler finds inadequate. In particular, he says that there is inadequate attention to any narrative code, so he moves on to study of plot structure.

In the section simply headed "Plot", Culler looks at various attempts to develop a theory of plot construction. It's clearly very difficult, and there are twin dangers of being over-reductive (reducing all stories to a small number of plots) and over-descriptive (when you're halfway to retelling the story). Vladimir Propp comes out of the discussion pretty well. In his analysis of folk-tales Propp identified certain key functions rather than actions. So running is an action, but running away is part of a function, which might be described as flight, in which the means of flight is in plot terms irrelevant.

Using Barthes, Culler shows that the reader's construction of a plot is provisional and deferred: we don't know what function an action embodies until later, possibly not until the end of the text. In fact, Culler's argument is that understanding of how plots work must focus on the reader's experience. He doesn't argue, but I will, that this means anything with a plot is likely to scriptible; it would be a very dull story that explained the significance of every action.

This is a good section, although a lot of it is spent in discussing and refuting theories of plot. The next one is headed "Theme and symbol". This is about the way a story expresses a wider, deeper, more basic, more generalised meaning. (I'm using lots of adjectives because they are all problematic.) The main suggestion is that the symbolic meaning is expressed by means of contrasts and oppositions. Back with S/Z, there's the contrast between the heat of the salon and the cold of the garden. The discussion is fine as far as it goes but it's hard to resolve: how do we know when we've found the right level of meaning. (If we conclude from Sarrasine that it's more pleasant to be warm than to be cold, we've gone too far.) And why do we apparently need to find a thematic meaning anyway? (Personally I'm less inclined this way than many readers. It's possibly a slightly autistic trait. Asked what a novel's "about", I'm more likely to talk about the plot and the characters, rather than thematic concerns.)

And the section ends with two classes of work that escape these considerations: allegory, where there is probably one true reading of the theme, and works like Finnegans Wake, which seem to deny the possibility of carrying this kind of meaning.

The last section of this chapter is on "Character", which has been underexamined by structuralists, who have doubts about the concept itself. The introductory comments suggest that the concept of character in pre-20th century novels (many of which are still being written!) doesn't work with pre-novel works or with the nouveau roman. The major part of the discussion is about how people in novels relate to underlying roles - as in Propp again. Without coming to any conclusion, the idea is that readers naturalise fiction by assigning pre-defined roles to the characters. The discussion seems to recognise its own inadquacy, and the chapter (at last!) ends with an acceptance that structuralism "does not offer a full-fledged model of a literary system". I'm beginning to think that it never will, and I think that may be what Culler thinks to. Ostensibly he's suggesting that other theorists can develop such a model, but ...

Pedro Salinas

2010-01-25T09:47:00.003Z

Here's a nice way to start the week. Spanish Byki tweeted me a link to this poem.

Posesión de tu nombre,
sola que tú permites,
felicidad, alma sin cuerpo.
Dentro de mí te llevo
porque digo tu nombre,
felicidad, dentro del pecho.
«Ven»: y tú llegas quedo;
«vete»: y rápida huyes.
Tu presencia y tu ausencia
sombra son una de otra,
sombras me dan y quitan.
(¡Y mis brazos abiertos!)
Pero tu cuerpo nunca,
pero tus labios nunca,
felicidad, alma sin cuerpo, sombra pura.

That's really lovely, I think. It's by Pedro Salinas, dated 1923. I realise I know very little Spanish poetry, and I haven't even heard of Salinas. Here's his wikipedia entry, having read which I still don't know much about him.

This poem is clearly modernist, however, and uses, like Pessoa sometimes does, a slackness of word order that's much more achievable in a Latin-like language. Here's a fairly literal translation.

Possession of your name
only this you allow
happiness, soul without body.
Inside me I hold you
because I say your name,
happiness, within the heart.
"Come": and you come I stay;
"go": and you rapid flee.
Your presence and your absence
shadow are one of the other,
shadows they give me and leave.
(And my arms outstretched!)
But your body never,
but your lips never,
happiness, soul without body, pure shadow.

More by Salinas here.

Structuralist Poetics (4)

2010-01-22T10:55:00.005Z

To make a start, then, on chapter 8, "Poetics of the Lyric". I think this is a difficult chapter, not because the ideas are hard to understand, but, as I've suggested earlier, they don't seem to me to add up to a thought-out poetics, and certainly not a structuralist one.

What I would have expected, in outline, is something that classifies the formal, rhetorical effects used in poetry, and assigns them each a function in creating an effect in the reader's understanding. But even as I type that, it sounds pretty dreadful, if not impossible. Maybe the point is that the aim is unachievable: poetry can't be understood as a semantic superstructure. Throughout the chapter, Culler refers to 'traditional' critics such as Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, and to classical rhetorical theory and terms.

The chapter starts with a dodgy bit of translation. Taking from Genette a piece of journalism set out as if poetry, Culler shows that presentation as a poem alters the way we approach it (there's a quotation from Robert Graves to the same effect).

(The bad translation? The journalism refers to an accident on the 'Nationale 7', which becomes the A7. I know, I know, I shouldn't let things like this bother me.)

Culler then identifies three features of poetry: 'distance and deixis', 'organic wholes' and 'theme and epiphany'

I had to look up deixis. In poetry it brings a lack of immediate explanation of what is going on. I particularly enjoyed finding out about deictic articles. The example is from Yeats:

A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, the thighs caressed
By the dark webs ...

It's in the nature of poetry to have that suspension of understanding. And here comes John Ashbery!

They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
'This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat.'

Here 'they' is a deictic pronoun (we don't know who they are), and I suppose you could call the quotation marks deictic too (we don't know who's talking).

'Organic wholes' heads the section that says we expect totality or coherence in the lyric. A fairly simple, but unresolved issue, in that fragments (real or pretend) may make us "assume a totality and then to make sense of gaps".

The third 'convention or expectation governing the lyric' is 'theme and epiphany'. Again, the brief discussion suggests that this may be achieved in various ways.

The final part of the chapter is headed 'Resistance and recuperation', and looks at the techniques reader can use to overcome Wallace Stevens' observation that "The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully". So, recuperation here is similar in meaning to vraisemblance - but here it's likely to involve playing with various metaphorical understandings to achieve a meaning that is coherent with itself and the poem. This is where Empson makes a significant appearance.

In the end, this chapter is not a poetics of the lyric; it's a sketch of the factors such a poetic would have to take into account.

It indicates what problems require further work if we are to reach an understanding of the conventions of poetry. (p 188)

Structuralist Poetics (3)

2010-01-21T16:48:00.002Z

So, on to Chapter 7, "Convention and Naturalization", which may be the most useful of the lot. Mainly the chapter is about vraisemblance, which is the term Culler settles on out of a number of choices. It refers to the way in which literary texts convince the reader of their reality. Here's the core:

One might distinguish five levels of vraisemblance, five ways in which a text may be brought into contact with and defined in relation to another text which helps to make it intelligible. First there is the socially given text, that which is taken as the 'real world'. Second, but in some cases difficult to distinguish from the first, is a general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of 'nature'. Third, there are the texts or conventions of a genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance. Fourth comes what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the third kind so as to reinforce its own authority. And finally, there is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities, where one work takes another as its basis or point of departure and must be assimilated in relation to it. At each level there are ways in which the artifice of forms is motivated or justified by being given a meaning. (p 140)

Phew! That was a lot of typing, but it seems to me its the most explicit statement of the underlying approach (we'll see in a moment what happens when Culler tries to develop a poetics of the lyric). Let's look at each level in turn, as Culler does.

1. The first level is simply that the text has an apparent reality. So this is statements of fact: John sat at the table. In fact, Culler distances this a bit, saying that the text refers to the generally socially defined text. I'm not entirely happy about using the word 'text' so widely. There's also room for debate about whether any grammatical sentence has vraisemblance simply by virtue of being grammatical. The example here is the sentence 'John cut off his thought and fastened it to his tibia'. Because it's grammatically well-formed, it has a relation to socially accepted statements, but in a different way, surely, from one that is both well-formed and meaningful.

2. Cultural vraisemblance operates on the level of shared beliefs about people and things. Balzac is quoted a lot here. I suppose his notation of Nucingen's speech is an example; Balzac's audience shared the view that's how Germans speak. It's a huge concern in S/Z of course, and one of my concerns about that essay was that Barthes assumed agreement by his readers on several cultural beliefs - eg the Freudian view of castration.

3. The use of a particular genre enables the third level. Actually, the concept is wider than simply genre, and includes, for example, works by the same writer. An example here is the behaviour of Corneille's characters. They would never say "I'm fed up with all these problems and shall go and be a silversmith in a provincial town." (p145)

I'll add a thought here, that cultural vraisemblance can become genre-based. In Jane Austen's time, it was a culturally shared fact that Anne Elliot, for example, would not decide to get a job and support herself. Now, most readers accept it as one of the conventions of the genre, without having to understand the social constraints. (And here 'genre' might mean 'novels of Jane Austen', or 'early nineteenth century fiction' etc.)

4. The 'conventionally natural' is interesting, and I'm not sure how common. It occurs when the work foregrounds its own artificiality to gain authenticity. Examples are needed and given, but sticking with Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey this kind of thing is going on all the time, with Austen pointing out how unlike a gothic novel her story is.

5. Culler simplifies this to 'Parody and irony', which might be an over-simplification. He also says it may be seen as "a local and specialized variant of the fourth [level]" (p152). In fact he develops the discussion so that irony, for example, can apply to any of the previous levels. In the discussion of Madame Bovary the point is made that Emma Bovary's thoughts and actions are ironised relentlessly. The discussion also argues that in irony you have to be able to hold both views in mind at the same time. I'll quote the example, in Culler's own translation:

[Emma] wanted to become a saint. She bought rosaries; she wore amulets; she wanted to have in her room, at the head of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds, in order to kiss it every evening. (p 156)

You have to be able to sympathise with Emma's wish, while understand the ridiculous in it.

The chapter ends with a kind of apology, that this concentration on vraisemblance (also known as 'motivation', 'naturalization', 'recuperation' and maybe more) isn't popular with structuralists. Indeed, as Culler sets it out, it doesn't seem structural in the same way that theories of language are. In the next chapter, "Poetics of the Lyric", my initial view was that there actually isn't a structuralist poetics defined or described. But I'll read it again before I comment here.

Structuralist Poetics (2)

2010-01-18T13:19:00.001Z

After rebutting Jakobson's attempt to encompass poetics in linguistics, Culler moves on, in chapter 4, to "Greimas and Structural Semantics". Greimas, whose work I don't know at all, apparently tried to account for poetic effects by the organisation of semantic elements within a work. The difficulty in this seems to me to be very much the same as in computer translation: semantic units aren't as neatly fixed as would be necessary to make this possible. One example is the word "colourful", which means something quite different when applied to a painting and to a person. Even if you add a note to your dictionary that gives a different meaning in different semantic contexts (eg colourful: when describing a painting, bright, using many colours; when describing a person, lively, eccentric) you still can't account for all usages. (What if we said, for example, that "The Mona Lisa has a colourful background"?) The situation is worse in literary language, where metaphors continually develop.

Also, in jokes for example, the same semantic features are repeated but with different meanings, so how can we know what element is important?

The chapter ends with this thought:

linguistic analysis [...] does not in itself serve as a method of literary analysis. The reason is simply that both author and reader bring to the text more than a knowledge of language, and this additional experience - expectations about the forms of literary organization, implicit models of literary structures, practice in forming and testing hypotheses about literary works - is what guides one in the the perception and construction of relevant patterns. (p 95)

Chapter 5, "Linguistic Metaphors in Criticism", is the last of the part of the book dealing with the background. In it, Culler looks at two other approaches. The first, typified by Barthes' Sur Racine takes a set of works and attempts to identify a structuralist code of meaning. In Racine, this means that there is, for example, a contrast between three spatial areas: the chamber, the anti-chamber, and the world outside. I found Sur Racine a fantastically useful work in appreciating Racine, but Culler argues that it falls short of actually getting to grips with the plays themselves. His argument isn't wholly spelled out; I think he also recognises the brilliance of the book.

The second approach takes the "work itself as the investigation of a semiological system and attempts to formulate more explicitly the insights it provides" (p 103 - 4). Barthes is again an example: his work on Loyola is concerned with showing Loyola as explaining the semiology of devotion. Similarly, Deleuze and Genette read Proust as a kind of dictionary of social intercourse. A refinement of the second approach is to see works as a commentary on language itself, and Stephen Heath's work of Finnegans Wake is the example.

Culler ends this chapter similarly to the previous one:

Linguistics does not [...] provide a method for the interpretation of literary works. (p109)

In Chapter 6, "Literary Competence", Culler begins the reply, proposing a theory of poetics, which while structural in form is concerned with literary effects. This first chapter says that accomplished readers of literary texts bring to their reader a skill in identifying literary structures and patterns. At its simplest, this would include knowing that Blake's Sunflower is not just about a flower in a garden in Lambeth. Going on, the competence would include an awareness that it's significant that three lines out of eight begin with the word "Where". This must imply that there are some kind of poetic signifiers, and I presume the rest of the book will deal with this. What's already clear, though, is that the method focuses on the reader: readers have more scope than writers to examine the implicit side of what they are doing; and the aim of the endeavour of this book is to bring some of those implicit activities into the foreground.

Structuralist Poetics

2010-01-15T10:54:00.001Z

Another book I picked up years ago, Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics, published in 1975 is still apparently worth reading. It's a bit of a snapshot I suppose, but from what I've read so far it does a decent job of summarising some of the theories and criticising them quite assertively. So I'll write it up here as I go through it, which means I have a bit of catching up to do.

The first chapter, "The Linguistic Foundation", is about the development of structuralism in linguistics, referencing Saussure of course, and the others who developed the system of signs. Culler is quite clear that structuralism and semiotics are the same thing. I don't think I've seen that identification made so baldly. He makes more reference to Chomsky than is usual. I think the point is to stress that linguistics and poetics (in a wide sense) aren't coterminous: there is an overlap but each activity has its own area of speciality.

This leads to the second chapter, "The Development of a Method: Two Examples", which looks in turn at Barthes' Systeme de la Mode and Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques as attempts to apply a linguistic model to the understand of fashion any mythology respectively.

In Systeme de la Mode Barthes analyses a year's fashion press, trying to create from the captions of photos the code of what different types of clothes signify. For Culler, the big weakness is that the analysis is synchronic - ie it is based on only one year's fashion, whereas fashion is inherently diachronic; you can't ignore the difference between this year and previous years, which largely defines fashion.

With Levi-Strauss there's a different problem. He sought to identify certain features in world mythology that crop up across different cultures, but which have the same meaning. But the analysis doesn't have anything of the exactness of language.

The discussion of 'sun' and 'moon' is a case in point. Lévi-Strauss sees this opposition as a powerful mythological operator with great semantic potential: 'so long as it remains an opposition, the contrast between the sun and the moon can signify almost anything'.

So it is necessary to know something more than the structure to understand the myths. The chapter concludes that both these attempts have failed, but asks if literature might be more amenable to linguistic-based analysis, and so we move on to Roman "Jakobson's Poetic Analyses".

When I wrote about Jakobson earlier, I had doubts. Culler takes these further (showing why he's a professor and I'm not). He closely examines Jakobson's analysis of one of Baudelaire's "Spleen" poems. Jakobson tried to demonstrate the structure of the poem by looking for particular linguistic features, and showing that they formed a symmetry around the central stanza. Culler argues that by choosing different linguistic features you can show entirely different structures. It seems to me a complete demolition, not only of this analysis of this poem, but of this method of analysis entirely. The choice of linguistic features is arbitrary, with Jakobson's choice having no greater inherent worth than anyone else's. This seems close to Derrida's attack on Levi-Strauss: because the structuralist analysis doesn't have - can't have - a "centre" where the structure and the object of analysis coincide, any assumed starting point is as good as any other.

That might be the end of the book. Of course it isn't, and Culler suggests that Jakobson was looking for the wrong thing. Linguistic analysis precisely does not tell us what sentences mean - we already know that.

If one assumes that linguistics provides a method for the discovery of poetic patterns, then one is likely to blind oneself to the ways in which grammatical patterns actually operate in poetic texts, for the simple reason that poems contain, by virtue of the fact that they are read as poems, structures other than the grammatical, and the resulting interplay may give the grammatical structures a function which is not at all what the linguist expected. (p 73)

More to come.

Ashbery/Moore

2010-01-13T15:24:00.001Z

I've got a copy of John Ashbery's Selected Prose for my birthday - thanks, Marion - which had been on my wishlist for a while. Ashbery, as I've written before, fascinates me; his poetry seems to me to require a new way of reading, and maybe his writing about others will elucidate it.

Sadly not, on the basis of the few pieces I've read so far. His criticism is warm and heart-felt, but unspecific. There's little examination of how his favoured poets achieve their effects.

His taste is very good (by which I mean it coincides with mine in many respects), and there are essays here on Jacques Rivette, Michel Butor and lots of other writers I really don't know. But I want to take as an example his writing about Marianne Moore in a review from 1967 of her Complete Poems.

He adores her work: "I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet". Why? He begins by stating that there is a purported message of restraint underlying the work, and wondering whether restraint has ever been a characteristic of memorable poetry. But he shrinks back from recognising ambiguity in a curious, and curiously long-winded, hesitation:

Without, however, suggesting that there is in Miss Moore's work a strain counter to the sentiments she seems to be expressing here (and of course, we should not assume that they are hers merely because she uses the form of direct address), that the swarming details, each one crystal clear, often add up not merely to complexity but to a "darkness" which gives contours to her "truth" - without going this far, one can still note that all here is not so modest, cheerful and brightly lit as the lines I have quoted seem to imply.

There's a strange contamination there of presumed authorial intention, which leads Ashbery halfway to criticising Moore for losing control of what she's trying to express. This seems to be why he won't completely acknowledge the complexity of meaning, while to me that kind of complexity is exactly what makes the poetry interesting.

He goes on:

When we explore any of the poems that comprise the Moore canon [...] we are brought up against a mastery which defies attempts to analyze it, an intelligence which plays just beyond our reach.

Which is really not good enough. But Ashbery is a better poet than he is a critic, and he notes that "though Marianne Moore's mind moves in a straight line, it does so over a terrain that is far from level". That's a sharp image, and unsurprisingly it yielded the title of the review, "Straight Lines over Rough Terrain".

I'm sure the general argument of the article is correct: Moore's work gains its strength from the contrast between the strict forms she uses and the richness of allusion she employs (Ashbery refers to her translations of La Fontaine - works I don't know - where there's an additional formal restriction). But he doesn't look at how that happens. Surprising, perhaps, that a poet should not look more closely into the detailed craft of another.

The concluding paragraph begins "In short, one can never be sure precisely what she is up to" and the review doesn't really go beyond an account of Ashbery's reasons for liking the poems so much, which is based at the level of meaning rather than method.

In Ashbery's preface to the collection he quite wittily says that the Poets on Poetry series in which this collection was first published

is aimed at readers who like poetry, want to learn more about the poets in question, and think that prose is usually easier to understand than poetry. Mary McCarthy once complimented me on my art criticism and was about to add something like, "Why can't your poetry be like that?" but stopped herself at the last minute.

We could analyse infinitely the play of vanity and self-deprecation in that quotation, but let's just note how it dodges the question of whether poetry and prose are "understood" in different ways. Ashbery's own poetry refuses to be understood in any simple sense; but he doesn't seem to apply that paradigm to other writers' work.

Lacan (2)

2010-01-08T12:30:00.000Z

I've brought my copy of Écrits 1 down from my "library" (spare room), and my first happy discovery was a bookmark at page 112. Did I really read that far? Probably not, since that is the second page of an essay called "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage", which is doubtless the first essay I would have tried to read. I used to be able to explain the difference between mot, parole, langue and langage.

Second discovery is that Lacan was let down by his translator. His French has a lightness about it that the translation (in MCT) doesn't attempt to capture. Here's an example.

Nous ne nous fierons quant a nous qu'aux seules prémisses, qui ont vu se confirmer leur prix de ce que le langage y a effectivement conquis dans l'expérience son statut d'objet scientifique.

As for us, we shall have faith only in those assumptions which have already proven their value by virtue of the fact that language through them has attained the status of an object of scientific investigation.

It's not easy in either language, of course. I suppose the translator has been at pains to be as literal as possible, but there's a slight difference between prix and value, and the connotations of conquis has disappeared. Expérience has gone completely, or maybe it's there in investigation. So you can't blame the clumsiness on literalness. Better to paraphrase, surely, than to translate like this.

I've also seen that the first essay in the collection is on Poe's story "The Purloined Letter". How the French seemed to have loved Poe! Barthes used another story of his as a mini-version of S/Z. I haven't read the essay yet, but have read the story. You can understand why it would appeal to (post)-structuralists: the form of the story is of three repetitions of a similar action. One of these actions is related as taking place before the story-time; the second takes place during the story-time (but again, before the narration begins), and the third is imagined in the story-time's future (no doubt it has happened by now!).

But there's an obvious danger in building a literary theory around one type of writing. I've been reading about the development of New Historicism, which came from renaissance studies. Although it later broadened its scope, who knows what kinds of adjustments and trimmings had to be made? Not me, not yet.

MCT: Lacan (and how not to do it)

2010-01-06T12:17:00.001Z

Somewhere in this house there is a copy of Écrits by Jacques Lacan - yes, in French. I must have been feeling ever so clever and optimistic to buy it and needless to say I've scarcely opened it. Lacan, like Derrida, is often considered to be the point at which French critical theory went bonkers. He was a Freudian psychotherapist, and applied some of Jakobson's thinking (on metaphor and metonymy) to the analysis of the unconscious.

The essay in MCT, "On the insistence of the letter in the unconscious", begins with a gentle refutation of Saussure's description of the relationship of the signifier to the signified. Reasonably, he says that meaning can't exist only in that relationship. It also lives in the surrounding signs (horizontally) and (vertically) in the alternatives that aren't used.

So at some point he says that symptoms are metaphors. I understand that bit, but not much else. It is, above all, an essay on psychology, on psychoanalytic theory, and although I've read loads of Freud in the past, this is very post-Freudian. (Lacan was kicked out by orthodox Freudians, although he clearly thinks he is preserving the true Freud in his writing.) Almost certainly what happened is that bits of his thinking were appropriated into criticism, and may have been misunderstood in the process. It's not just the background that makes it difficult: he writes in a discursive, sorry to say donnish, style, and the translation often seems clumsy (I've a feeling en effet is often translated as in fact or in effect, which are often false friends.)

And as for how not to do it? In the editor's introduction, the editor says "the present editor certainly does not claim fully to understand everything in this essay". That's comforting, but it's a contorted avoidance of a "split infinitive". But it's not as bad as the example from Dickens.

In Bleak House the guiding principle of the Circumlocution Office is to work out "how not to do it". In modern English most people would read this, on its own, as meaning "how to do it wrong". Dickens intended, and presumably his readers would have taken to mean "how to avoid doing it". Maybe we do need to have some idea of the author's intention, or maybe Steiner was right, and we need to be sure we know what contemporary readers would have understood.

MCT: Roman Jakobson

2009-12-31T10:11:00.002Z

Jakobson (wikipedia) is honoured with two extracts in MCT: "Linguistics and Poetics" and "The metaphoric and metonymic poles". Both illustrate his structuralist approach to literature: he is attempting to explain the mechanism of, in particular, poetry, showing how it differs from 'normal' writing.

The first essay identifies common features in poetry taken from a wide range of cultures. Principally, the view is that poetry is structured around repetition and variation, whether this be of sounds (rhymes) or rhythm (metre). He takes a long time to say this, and I can't honestly that the argument is developed. Rather, it is re-inforced by a succession of evidence. The range of evidence is impressive but this man was a linguist ...

The second essay covers the two options of metonymy and metaphor. Apparently, aphasic people fall into two groups: those who misspeak by way of metonymy (contiguity), and those who misspeak by way of metaphor (similarity). Someone in the first group might mistake his wife for a hat; in the second group, he might inappropriately use the word 'bride'. OK, that's what it's about. The point is that different writers, and different schools of writing, tend towards one or the other. So, in art, the cubists used metonymy, while the surrealists tended to metaphor.

Both essays, I suppose, contribute to a framework for understanding how literature achieves its effects. But they are exercises in linguistics. Indeed Jakobson explicitly claims that the study of poetics is part of linguistics. He wants a scientific approach:

Unfortunately the terminological confusion of 'literary studies' with 'criticism' tempts the student of literature to replace the description of the intrinsic values of a literary work by a subjective, censorious verdict.(p142)

Obvious problems there, above all the view that a work has 'intrinsic values', and the rest of the essays suggest that the linguistic analysis of the work will reveal them. Of course analysis of language has be to linguistic; in some sense it can't be anything else. But it really feels like something is missing here. Another book I've been reading quotes Stephen Sondheim's lines:

What's the muddle
in the middle?
That's the puddle where the poodle
did the piddle.

and says there's nothing in Jakobson to explain why that's rubbish. Exactly. I suspect it's the lack of connection to real and important subject matter, which suggests that literary analysis can't ignore the world outside the text.

(Reference is to Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: the basics p39).

Comparative literature

2009-12-29T13:09:00.005Z

When I tell people I'm hoping to do an MA in comparative literature, they usually ask what's that? and I usually can't answer. Someone answered the question for herself though; she said so, it's like saying, this book's bigger than that book, right?. Funny, and it seems not that far off certain approaches. I've been given Susan Bassnett's book Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction for Christmas (it was either that or Katie Price's latest autobiography), and I realise the question is one that has been around a long time, and one that doesn't have an easy answer.

One answer has always been that comparative literature is there to demonstrate that our literature is bigger and better than theirs. Here's a table showing some of the us and them alignments:

England	v	Wales, Scotland, Ireland
Europe	v	The Orient
Europe	v	The Americas
Africa	v	The rest of the World

Comparative literature, in other words, has been used as a political tool. The literature of, say, the Middle East is used to demonstrate and maintain prejudices about the nature of its people and society (eg Kinglake and Burton), while the sagas of Iceland were adopted by a ragbag of people, including Nazis, as the exemplary development of male aryanism.

So, according to Bassnett (writing in 1993), the study of comparative literature has declined in Britain, presumably because of the obvious unloveliness of the discipline in this form.

But, she says, there has been a growth in interest in the subject in, for example, India. This has depended upon a revaluation of the local literature, which has put that at the heart of the subject. In India, historically, it may have been hard for local intellectuals to get free of colonial thoughts about the primacy of English literature, in which it is the benchmark against which other literatures are compared. This transformation is partly driven by post-colonial theory, but it means that comparative literature becomes a tool of post-colonialism, a complete reversal of its earlier role.

There's also a fascinating interplay between colonialism and sexuality, which I hadn't realised before. Bassnett clearly brings feminist theory into the subject, but when you realise how often colonisers talked about "virgin" territory, and orientalists speculated obsessively on the sexual secrets of the east, it's hard to deny it was always there.

So, interesting stuff, but I still don't have an easy definition of what comparative literature is. Probably it's too general a concept, and it should be renamed as "world literature". But if the music business is any precedent, "world literature", like "world music", would mean anything that's not from North America or some parts of Europe. So maybe it's just "literature". That can't be right - it's much too simple.

Strange languages

2009-12-26T22:47:00.001Z

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609
OK, it's not rigorously academic, but it's interesting. Does the existence of evidential language in Tuyuca mean that its speakers think differently? And how would you translate it?

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

MCT: Jacques Derrida

2009-12-23T15:34:00.000Z

Derrida is another of those "crazy frogs" who had a revolutionary but possibly already diminishing impact on critical theory. One thing I'm finding out is that in some cases, the impact was greater in America than in Britain, and it would be interesting to speculate why. I suspect the adoption of French theories may have remained "cool" in American intellectual circles longer. In Britain, it's now always America that's considered cool, and also maybe the practical criticism tradition is more robust. That's for another day. Today, I'm looking at Derrida's "Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences", taken from his book Writing and Difference.

Derrida starts from the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and finds that the aim of describing all anthropology in terms of structure is doomed to fail because the structures must have a reference point, which is not itself structural. Lévi-Strauss is said to have acknowledged this, but to have ignored it for the sake of the argument. Because Derrida is treating the question philosophically, rather than empirically, he can't be content with that. In fact, he suggests that this philosophical flaw causes the most obvious failing of Lévi-Strauss's view: the treatment of the incest taboo in the classification of natural v cultural. Lévi-Strauss says that we can consider as natural all behaviours which arise from human behaviour independently of laws or local norms; while cultural behaviours are those which result from social restrictions. But incest is a universal taboo in humanity (which makes it natural) but the restrictions that enforce the taboo are social (which makes it cultural).

One thing I want to say here is that I'd need to be convinced that the distinction between natural and cultural ever was solid. Another crazy frog - now hugely unfashionable - argued that it's impossible to think of a human outside of society: all our behaviour is social, therefore cultural. Never mind that, for now.

Derrida's view is that this weakness undermines any attempt to view human sciences structurally, and so, according to the editors' introduction, post-structuralism and deconstructionism were born. The fixed point, to which everything else relates, does not exist, so instead in a society or in a text there is choice of structures (I'd be inclined to call them networks) of which none has any special truth or value.

At least, that's how it's developed, and that's why it's been blamed for an absolutely relativistic approach to literature. I suspect it's an exaggeration and a misapplication of the original point. But this is a tough one, and I'll have to spend more time on Derrida and on those who developed (to put it neutrally) his insight.

MCT: E D Hirsch Jr

2009-12-17T15:20:00.001Z

The fact that Hirsch is "Jr" and that his essay is called "In defense of the author" reveal that he's American. This essay is from his book called Validity in Interpretation or Validity of Interpretation (it's referred to by both versions in the editors' introduction).

It's a defence against what Hirsch would consider the abuse of the "intentional fallacy" argument: the belief, which he traces back to Eliot, that an author's intention in writing something is no concern of ours in reading it. He refers to "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant". In fact, the whole argument is semantic (appropriately). He distinguishes between meaning and significance. He makes the case that an author must have had a meaning in mind while writing. A reading is better the closer it matches that meaning, and a work is better the more accurately it conveys that meaning.

I'm prepared to accept the view that of course an author had a meaning in mind, and his dismissal of the view that because we can't wholly know the author's meaning, we might as well not bother to try to understand it. I think I'd say, using his terms, that it is significance that is important. The problem with this, for Hirsch, is that there's no normative measure of value in an interpretation based on significance.

But, if we start from the view that the purpose of reading and interpretation is (i) to understand the author's meaning and (ii) to evaluate the work in terms of its success in transmitting that meaning, why would we bother? I don't care if an author wants to tell me that (say) war is a fearful but exciting thing; if a novel should demonstrate that, make me feel the fear and excitement, what does it matter what the author had in mind? There are ways of demonstrating that a reading is valid without reference to the author's meaning: simple things like evocative use of words and imagery. In fact, all the apparatus of practical criticism.

So I'm unconvinced. And I'm prepared to admit that this is partly due to Hirsch's appalling use of non-inclusive language. I mentioned this when I looked at George Steiner, and I know everyone used to do it and I suppose I should cut some slack for something written in 1967. But it's hard to overlook. It's an unconsidered reflex here to use generalising male pronouns: "Since we are all different from the author, we cannot reproduce his intended meaning in ourselves", and even worse: "It is proper to demand of authors that they show consideration for ... the generality of men" (p273). The generality of men? It sounds like a phrase he's invented deliberately to wind me up. But I shouldn't be guessing at his intentions! Just note that above I've managed to avoid using generalising masculine pronouns entirely.

MCT: Mikhail Bakhtin

2009-12-17T12:53:00.003Z

Mikhail Bakhtin (wikipedia entry) (1895 - 1975) was a Russian theorist whose work suffered under the Soviet state until near the end of his life, but is, apparently, growing in status now. The piece in MCT, "From the prehistory of novelistic discourse" is one of the longest in the book, but it seems generally easy to follow.

In the first part, he looks at extracts from Eugene Onegin to make the case that there is something different about the use of language in a novel. (He approaches the work as a novel, rather than a poem of any kind, which I'll accept for now, but might need more convincing that you can clearly separate it from the genre of epic poem, or that there are not shared features.)

Using close and sensitive analysis he suggests that the work brings together several languages, without even specifiying them as dialogue. So, passages about Lensky have a different style from passages about Onegin or Tatiana. This is detailed: he even compares usage of the Church Slavonic mladoj and the Russian metathesized form molodoj (which mean young - but the connotations of the two forms differ). He describes this as creating different "voice-zones", separated by "intonational quotation marks" (which is nicely put).

It's a similar process to parody, he says, in which not the character but the character's language is parodied. Similarly, mock-epics don't mock the hero (often Hercules) but mock the epic treatment.

While the novel form is fairly recent, Bakhtin says earlier forms provided much of the same interplay of languages.

He talks about the "fourth drama" or the "satyr play" which would customarily follow tragic trilogies in ancient Greek theatre; a parodic treatment of the subject matter would follow the production, providing an acknowledgement that the dramatic treatment itself cannot do justice to every aspect of the subject.

This continued in Roman culture:

The literary and artistic consciousness of the Romans could not imagine a serious form without its comic equivalent. (p246)

Parodies and travesties don't fit into the genre they refer to, and are too diverse to be a single genre of their own. But:

Each separate element in it - parodic dialogue, scenes from everyday life, bucolic humor, etc - is presented as if it were a fragment of some kind of unified whole. I imagine this whole to be something like an immense novel, multi-generic, multi-styled, mercilessly critical, soberly mocking, reflecting in all its fullness the heteroglossia and multiple voices to a given culture, people and epoch. (p247)

Apart from anything else, that's a fantastic love letter to the novel! But there's a potential weakness: he is holding up a predefined ideal of the novel, without checking whether this is what novels must be like. Anyway, this collection didn't become a novel. "The ancient world was apparently not going further than these."

Adam Thirlwell has obviously read this. Bakhtin quotes Wilamowitz-Moellendorff:: "Only knowledge of a language that possesses another mode of conceiving the world can lead to the appropriate knowledge of one's own language" (p248/9), which is similar to Thirlwell's remarks I quoted earlier. But here, he means the Romans, who at a literary level were bilingual: everything written in Latin was open to comparison with a real or imagined Greek equivalent. Romans were aware of style - a bit like knowledge of good and evil (my simile, not Bakhtin's). And this pattern is widespread. The Orient was already multilingual. The loss of monolingualism meant that the forms of epic, lyric and drama had to give way to a more prosaic, novelistic writing, as the national myth that sustains those forms becomes untenable.

Bakhtin says that heteroglossia exists within a single language: there is the official, literary language and all the variants. The novel thrives where these languages (dialects?) meet, but it is a richness that owes a lot to the polyglossia of the middle ages, to the realisation that one language isn't enough.

Part III of the essay takes up the story in the middle ages. Bakhtin says that parody was a way of life, actually part of the way modern languages developed. Which is why parody wilted: the new languages are the parodies (of Latin). I think one of his arguments may be contentious. He says that Virgilius Maro Grammaticus was writing parody in his detailed analysis of Latin grammar, and says other scholars are fools for not seeing this. Obviously, I don't know, but it does remind of C S Lewis's view of courtly love, where (I think) he missed the joke entirely.

But again he says that the object or target of parody is the language:

The sacred, authoritative, direct word in another's language - that was the hero of this entire grand parodic literature, primarily Latin, but in part macaronic. The word, its style, and the way it means, became an object of representation: both word and style were transformed into a bounded and ridiculous image. (p257)

In the renaissance, Latin became unsustainable as a living language, precisely because the classicists of that time found current Latin unbearably debased (another big assertion!) and so modern languages thrived, and with that came Cervantes and Rabelais, and the novel as we know it. In conclusion, Bakhtin says the prehistory of the novel is part of the history of language development in Europe, not merely a literary question.

This is a terrific piece to read. Bakhtin clearly was extraordinarily well-read, but displays his scholarship in relatively simple ways, not afraid to repeat points when necessary. He is prone to making large statements as if they were generally known and agreed, but that's actually quite refreshing. It's another essay that shows that translation theory isn't an added extra to literary theory; it's right at the heart of it.

Anthony Burgess, arse

2009-12-15T11:10:00.001Z

It almost stops me picking up the book, and certainly makes me wish I'd got it in another edition, this quote on the back of The Book of Disquiet:

It could not have been written in England: there is too much thought racing hopelessly around.

Anthony Burgess, there, someone who, as I recall, wrote books in England. Presumably, like everyone who says "Oh, the English are so shit at cooking/writing/sex/living ..." he wasn't including himself. "Oh, I don't count because I'm vaguely Irish/educated/Catholic/just, y'know, cleverer ..."

He goes on:

There is a distinguished mind at work beneath the totally acceptable dullness of clerking. The mind is that of Pessoa. We must be given the chance to learn more about him.

I bet when he first wrote this, vanity got the better of him and instead of Pessoa, he typed Burgess.

Borges

2009-12-12T12:56:00.000Z

I've now got hold of Labyrinths by Borges from the library, a fairly new copy (bought in 2008) of the Penguin Modern Classics collection. I've got it particularly to remind myself of what really happens in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".

First thing to strike me was how irritating the story is. Borges uses as a narrator an unnamed academic, who is commenting on the works of Pierre Menard and the criticism that has so far been made of him. There is a short list of Menard's published work and then the narrator discusses his work on rewriting Don Quixote. If this story were the work of an English writer, we'd describe it as "donnish". Borges clearly aims the work at people whose work involves textual and literary studies. Here's the best joke. One of the cited works is:

A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook's pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation.

Oh my sides.

In my memory, Menard had adopted the personality of Cervantes, by reading everything he had. But Borges is clear that he discarded this method. He wanted to remain Menard but still recreate the novel. The way he did so is unclear (deliberately - Borges' narrator makes it clear that there was no trace left of Menard's work in progress). The point is that if we assume that a 20th century writer had - somehow - written Don Quixote, it would be a much richer work, because it would have been written with all the knowledge of what has happened since.

And of course the real point is that when a 20th century reader reads Don Quixote, they are reading something different to what a 17th century reader would have read. A fair point, but I'm not sure we needed to endure all the donnish humour to get to it.

But let's apply these methods to the collection of stories etc we have in front of us. It was first published in 1964 by New Directions. The editors, Donald A Yates and James E Irby did an introduction and some of the translations. Other translations are taken from various magazines and journals. The preface is by André Maurois, and undated, but he died in 1967. So all of the translations and all of the editorial comment in the book are over forty years old. More than a lifetime in literary studies. And Maurois makes the same mistake I did: he states that Menard's method was to be Cervantes. Wrong! The fact that Maurois' mistake doesn't stop him from getting the point suggests to me that the story obscures a fairly simple idea by proposing an impossible scenario to (purportedly) embody it.

The editors' introduction then reports Borges' poor reputation in Argentina, blaming the fact that he was perceived as too European. That seems a fair accusation to me. They quote Ernesto Sábato: "if Borges were French or Czech, we would all be reading him enthusiastically in bad translations". I've a feeling that's what a reader of this book may be doing.

Even if these translations aren't "bad", they're old: new translations are needed, precisely because the Borges a translator reads now is very different from what these translators read 50 years ago. And a new introduction is needed: Borges' reputation has changed and his place in translation theory - a theory that has developed enormously in those 50 years - needs to be reviewed. The preface by Maurois is a historical document now. It might be worth keeping, but surely the opinions of someone who's been affected by magic realism, for example, would be more valuable to contemporary readers. Even the selection and arrangement of works is ripe for review.

I'm disappointed that Penguin is still publishing this sixties view of Borges. Ultimately, it makes it hard to know what Borges' quality and status is. Now.

(Edit. After writing this I've looked at the Wikipedia entry on Borges. It appears his estate is obstructive to publication of translations, in ways that aren't entirely clear. So I guess Penguin have little choice but to persist with this volume. Apologies to them.)

Alaa Al Aswany (2)

2009-12-10T12:29:00.001Z

Now that I've read the stories in the collection, it seems to me that they most resemble James Joyce's Dubliners. There's that same sense of injustice over the colonial past, with the same sense of despair at the inability of post-colonial politicians to do any better. Also the writing is simple, sometimes with a Flaubertian narrator, who genuinely reveals little about himself. It's a big difference from the only other Egyptian writer I've read, Naguib Mahfouz, whose writing is formal and ornate - presumably in accordance with a classical Arabic tradition.

Most of the time the stories are small-scale domestic, but one or two stories deal with the politics of Palestine or Egypt. And they tend (like the novella) to have a gap at their heart. To take one example, in the story "Kitchen Boy" a promising young surgeon finds his career progress stalled in a hospital where bullying and intimidation filter down from the head surgeon. One day the young surgeon has a meeting with him.

No one knows what passed between Hisham and Dr Bassiouni on that day, but equally no one ever forgot that meeting of theirs because it was the beginning of the transformation.

Hisham becomes Dr Bassiouni's favourite, and prospers. The narrator concludes:

Frequently we visit him at the surgery department, where we have a lovely time with him, chatting and recalling old memories, though sometimes, despite the cheerful welcome he gives us, and despite our affection for and pride in him, we feel that something about our old friend has changed. It is, however, a thought that we quickly expel from our minds.

You get the feeling that he doesn't need to say the unsayable, because everyone in Cairo will be able to guess what happened, and there's no need for anyone else to know.

The two stories that cover overtly political issues are "To the air conditioning attendant of the hall" and "Waiting for the leader". In the first, a public speaker tells the story of the Jenin attack in the six-day war of 1967, treating it as a story of betrayal by the Jordanian army. The second is about the former leader of the Wafd party, a movement destroyed by Abdel Nasser. In both, there's the sense that both governments and opposition forces let down their people.

Joyce described Ireland as the sow that eats her own farrow; I think Al Aswany sees Egypt the same way.

Alaa Al Aswany

2009-12-09T16:42:00.002Z

Another chance find in Catford library, Alaa Al Aswany is a contemporary Egyptian writer, known for two novels and the book I'm reading, Friendly Fire, a novella and some stories. All I've read so far is the novella "The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers". I'd never heard of this writer before, but so far I'm impressed.

It would be easy to take this book as a fertile example of post-colonial literature. The title of the collection, for example. I've no idea what the original Arabic title (Nīrān sadīqa, نيران صديقة)‎ means, but "friendly fire", I think, only came into common usage during the first Gulf war, and is associated with that conflict, with all the irony you wish to put into it.

Then there's a preface, in which Al Aswany is at pains to stress that the views of characters in a book are not necessarily those of the author. He tells of how his attempts to get these stories published - where all commercial publication is controlled by the state - ran up against refusal, leading to his decision to self-publish.

And then the novella itself shows why that could have happened. The leading character, a first-person narrator, tells the story of his life as the son of a moderately unsuccessful artist, and his growing view that he'd rather be anything than Egyptian. He grows infatuated with images of the West, and eventually has an encounter with a German woman, which causes the crisis that ends the story. In the meantime, he is quite shockingly at odds with his mother, who is suffering from cancer (and from being a fairly obvious symbol).

But it does effectively dramatise the dilemma of someone who sees the faults in his own society, but risks losing his own grounding. While I've no doubt Al Aswany doesn't necessarily share his character's views, his reaction to Mustafa Kamil's view that "If I weren't Egyptian, I would want to be Egyptian" is strong. These words

represent (assuming that the one who said them really meant them) the sort of stupid tribal loyalty that makes my blood boil every time I think of it. What if the good Mustafa Kamil had been born Chinese, for example, or Indian? Would he not have repeated the same phrase out of pride in his Chinese or Indian nationality? And can such pride have any value if it's the outcome of coincidence? (p1)

The character then goes to accuse the Egyptian character of actually being worse than most, and it may be there that Al Aswany distances himself. I suspect that artists, or writers at least, must always live in the land of "it isn't as simple as that" - a land that Daily Mail readers apparently don't believe in.

So we could reduce the story to simple (yet ambivalent) post-colonial fable, but there's a level of detail that raises it above this. When Abd el-Ati's father receives a complimentary letter on his art, he reacts in a way that is entirely personal and biographical. And there's a subtle humour. After Abd el-Ati becomes infatuated with the West, he wants to meet some westerners, and so he goes where they will be: "their places - the Pyramids, the Egyptian Museum, Saladin's Citadel". (p68)

The ending of the novella suggests that Abd el-Ati's position - either personally or symbolically - isn't healthy, and I wonder if the other stories in the collection, or the novels, will move on from this.

National literatures

2009-12-04T13:45:00.000Z

I suppose this link is the first I've done that's related to the nebulous concept of comparative literature. Another entry in the sometimes dull, often provocative, Author, Author series in The Guardian Review, here Pankaj Mishra gives some of his experience as a judge on international literary awards.

The story is of how local literatures develop, sometimes in opposition to western norms, sometimes, though, in opposition to nationalist tendencies (eg Joyce & Beckett). He talks about how publication in the West (ie in translation) depends on whether the work meets the West's expectations; so Egyptian novels about the role of women are OK, while Cuban literary mystery novels which don't criticise the Castro state (Leonardo Padura) are not. We want sex and salsa and dissidence from Cuba.

It's a short but thought-provoking piece. I'm sure these are themes I'll come back to.

MCT: And so, Baudrillard

2009-12-03T10:06:00.000Z

I'm not sure which weakness is shown up here: either that of MCT's anthological approach, or that of Baudrillard's own view. The extract is from Simulacra and Simulations - the unnecessarily perverse re-titling of Simulation et Simulacres published in 1980, translated in 1983. Examining Disneyland and Watergate, Baudrillard says that these more or less obviously fantasy creations are a kind of mask, hiding the fact that there is no reality. There is a false contrast between their obvious fiction and the assumed, but false, reality of everything else. Watergate is "an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter". OK, I can see that there's hyperbole at work here, but it's unhelpful. You may wish to redefine reality, but surely a belief system that acknowledges nothing as reality - however ethereal the nature of that reality - just can't exist. Unfortunately, in this extract there is nothing to show how Baudrillard sustains this impossible act. Maybe it's elsewhere in his work.

What we do find here is more evidence of his jokey references to other concepts: "When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its true meaning". It's not a great joke, and I'd advise him not to try it at the Glasgow Empire, but suggests something lost in translation. However, I'm not tempted to read it in the original. I'd probably still miss the jokes, and a lot more.

In the extract, though, there are traces of a post-marxist-freudian basis for his view:

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against [its own break-up], is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.

And he even slips into italics: "Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism". Let's generously assume that "even" is a clumsy translation and that the French original is a sentence someone might possibly have written. The recourse to italics suggests a recourse to blind hope, or faith in historical inevitability, which 29 years later isn't looking too good.

But again, it's a stretch to link this social/economic analysis to literature. Near the start of the extract, Baudrillard covers some semiotic theory. The denial (by capital) of the non-existence of reality show itself in four successive "phases of the image":

(1) It is the reflection of a basic reality.
(2) It masks and perverts a basic reality.
(3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.
(4) It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

I'm not sure how this would help me understand what goes on when one reads The Cantos. And even here, the bedrock of the argument is an unargued assertion about the loss of reality.

Is it the fault of MCT's selection or of Baudrillard itself that this argument is unmade? I still can't say, but it's clearly a fault of the approach that I can't tell. The editors' introductions are impartial, correctly, but do refer to critical works, which are probably more useful. Surprisingly, then, my experience of MCT is making me think that it may be better to read secondary works, rather than the sources. And we're getting further away from the actual primary sources, our original concerns, the literature, than ever.

Sontag and Baudrillard

2009-11-30T15:13:00.005Z

You'll rarely find what you're looking for in Catford library but you'll sometimes find what you want. In this case, Susan Sontag's long essay Regarding the Pain of Others - a reflection on war photography. It covers questions including the meaning and purpose of war photography. Starting with Virginia Woolf's view, in Three Guineas, that the depiction of atrocities can act to turn people against war, Sontag moves through the fact that the photos always have some drive, and the means of their distribution even more so. The very example that Virgina Woolf uses - photographs from the Spanish Civil War - is a clear example. The photos were distributed by the Republican government to rally support against the Fascists. She move on to the use of photographs, and other memorabilia, as part of the remembering process needed by the victims. There's some astute analysis of how this interacts with political pressures: why is there a holocaust museum in Washington DC but no museum depicting the history and the evils of slavery? She could go further into the question of how much memory and how much forgetting are required, but that's beyond the scope of the book.

And so to Baudrillard. I'm delaying looking at Baudrillard, for no good reason. He's famous for the view that the Iraq war did not take place. I've no idea what the truth of this is. First, you have the hyperbole typical of French theory, which means you have to scale down what's said (like the death of the author). Second, I assume any statement in French would have been something like "La guerre d'Iraq n'eut pas lieu", which for any educated French reader would be a clear pun on "La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu" - the title of a play by Giraudoux, which I have read, long ago, and of which I remember nothing. Third, Anglophone (rosbif) critics of French theorists have a tradition of selecting the most provocative soundbites, to argue that the view is so patently silly, we needn't bother with the details. Essentially, what I'm saying is, I don't know.

Susan Sontag does, and I'm noting her view here for later reference.

According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a 'society of spectacle'. Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real - that is, interesting - to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.

Fancy rhetoric, this. And very persuasive to many ... It is common to say that war, like everything else that appears to be real, is médiatique

Although Sontag's writing is always simple, those short sentences betray her impatience rather well. She goes on to talk about "several distinguished French day-trippers to Sarajevo during the siege" who seemed to subscribe to the view that the siege would be won or lost on the media battlefield. But:

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment ..."

When I do get to Baudrillard - and I see his bit in MCT is quite short, so it may be soon - this accusation of neo-colonialism may be worth looking at.

(Quotations are from pp 97-98.)

MCT: Walter Benjamin

2009-11-24T14:45:00.000Z

The essay in MCT is “The task of the translator” - originally the introduction to Benjamin's own translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens. Benjamin wrote in German, but that doesn't excuse this sentence:

Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability.

In the English, at least, there's an unfunny pun on the meaning of essential, followed by an explanation that explains nothing. The whole piece is horribly written, with huge paragraphs, twisted syntax, and unhelpful similes and metaphors. A key metaphor is that of the 'life' of literary works. In fact, Benjamin is at pains to point out that he is not being metaphorical when he uses the term.

The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life.

Translation is a way in which the life of a work is continued; this is one of the reasons translations have to be renewed.

The bulk of the essay, though, is on the question of literalness v freedom in translation. Benjamin separates out meaning and 'the inessential'. In this passage, I think there's insufficient consideration of what those terms really mean. Benjamin show that a totally literal translation is impossible, so then goes on to say that translations serve language – both the source and the target. He refers to the Romanticists' views on translation – he's talking about Schlegel etc – and their view that translations should enrich the target language, bringing in new concepts and terms. I think I have the same trouble with this as I had with Schlegel in Venuti's book.

More worringly, he seems to believe in the idea of a pure language (I think – it really is hard to grasp what he's going on about), a language of forms, of which all real languages are a poor approximation.

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.

Honestly, at this point he seems to me to have crossed the line into the mystical. The wall/arcade metaphor sounds biblical, and the editor's note tells us that Benjamin at this time (1923) was studying Hebrew and considering taking a teaching post in Jerusalem. The text ends with some comments on 'Holy Writ':

in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation. Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to 'the true language' in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable.

One thing my readings of the extracts in MCT is showing me is that they are only a sketch of the writer's work, often a sketch of a relatively small part of it. I've read some Benjamin before – ages ago, the essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – too long ago to remember anything about it, except the sense that it raised exactly the questions that its title promises. The current essay is also about reproduction of a work, but exactly not in a mechanical way. I shouldn't discard Benjamin's work on the basis of this essay, but it really hasn't encouraged me to read any more.

Where is the text, and what do we call it?

2009-11-23T15:18:00.000Z

Time to start putting down some of my own thoughts on questions of criticism and translation. I fully expect that the points I'm raising here will have been dealt with by someone else already, but at least I'll know what I'm looking for.

I've mentioned earlier Susan Sontag's appeal to common sense: there is such a thing as an "original" text. Appeals to common sense always worry me. You've only got to look at McGann to see that Sontag's view is problematic at a very basic level. With long-lived poets, Wordsworth being the epitome, there may be several author-approved versions of a text - which one do you consider original? And then there is the question of assumed typos. With older poets, should you retain the old spellings and capitalisation? With Blake, don't many of the original texts lose something when the illlustrations are taken away? What about typesetting? Even bloggers agonise over the typeface used (obviously I've not agonised long or to any visible effect).

But, finally, after these arguments have been resolved - which I don't intend to try to do here in a general or specific way - the reader has something in front of them. It may be a short poem, a story, a collection or a novel. I think in each case the selection of form will be relevant to the understanding, and it's ok to defer the question of selection from this discussion. Although the reading will be conditioned by the process of pre-editing. Looking at one of the Cantos in isolation is quite different from seeing it in the physical body of the whole collection. Even if you scrupulously avoid looking at any other Canto, you are aware that they exist.

The other Cantos are functionally similar to many other things you know exist. It's impossible to read anything without a context. That context is inevitably different for different people. The Cantos are an acute example of this. Those who know their Homer will get a different experience from those who don't.

George Steiner proposed an ideal of the reader knowing everything about the meaning and associations of the words in a text. It's similar to the Pierre Menard story. But I can't remember if that proposed preparation for an ideal reading included forgetting everything that happened since the object text was written. The context in which we read Shakespeare now is different from what it was even ten years ago. We can't become a contemporary reader. The context has included later works of literature, of course, but also facts of history and science. To take the most facile example, we surely can't read The Merchant of Venice the same way after the holocaust.

So the reading of an object text will change from person to person and from age to age. I would postulate that the reading, as I'm calling it, creates a new object in the mind of the reader. The task of criticism is to record, explain and transmit that reading, so that reading is a new text, new each time. The task of translation is to translate that new text, or a frozen image of it. I think this is why each age needs new translations of the classics. It means that translation can't in any direct way serve the 'original' text.

So: terminology. I've slipped into using the term 'object text' to denote the arrangement of words on paper (or on screen, or on a recording - but let's keep it simple) that is presented to the reader. It's not perfect, but I'll stick with it for now. I should also note that the process of establishing the object text is part of the context. I could go into the extent of context further, but I think I've got enough for now. Then, by applying the context to the object text, the reader obtains what I've called a reading, and I really think I need a better term for that. To call it generated text risks confusion, and so do a lot of other words I could borrow from everyday language. Let's call it the intext then, to recognise the inwardness of it, and to happily accept the associations with intense and somewhat less happily intent. (This is all provisional anyway.)

This is all provisional and I can't believe these considerations haven't been run through the mill already. It stil leaves much of the ground to cover. How would I apply this terminology to questions of lisble v scriptible? I seem to be saying every thing is scriptible, requires the active input of the reader. Is that true? And what I've said seems to make more sense of Zukofsky's Catullus; a modern translation has to acknowledge all the later influences on the translator's reading: the intext includes traces of Shakespeare, Wodehouse and Blyton, though the object text naturally doesn't. Is that right? To be continued.

MCT: Tzvetan Todorov

2009-11-18T16:27:00.001Z

A short piece, "The typology of detective fiction", is included in MCT as an example of structuralist analysis. As the editors' introduction says, it is a "cool, lucid and economical expository style - qualities not frequently encountered in structuralist criticism".

It analyses the different types of detective novels, from the whodunnits, at their peak between the wars, to suspense novels and thrillers. It traces the different ways in which the story of the crime, and the story of the solution are mixed up, or not. In classic Christie, for example, the crime is discovered, not narrated; the narration of the event is implied in the narration of the detective's solution. Also the role of the detective changes: Poirot has an immunity from threat, while Philip Marlowe "gets beaten up, badly hurt, constantly risks his life". Finally, a third type is of the suspect as detective: the central character is wrongly suspected of the crime and must solve it to save himself.

It gets interesting when novels break these structures. Todorov comments on The Talented Mr Ripley that although other books have a similar structure, they are "too few to be considered a separate genre". That may have changed since 1966, the date of the essay. And the initial comments on genre fiction as a concept suggests that you might consider defining genre fiction as novels that fit within a genre. It's circular, yes, but it means that all non-genre novels are individually sui generis.

MCT: Jerome McGann

2009-11-18T14:10:00.000Z

Another extract from MCT, “The textual condition” is McGann’s address to the Society for Textual Scholarship in 1985. I’m not particularly interested in textual scholarship, so won’t stay here long, but it concerns the question of how you know you are dealing with a reliable text; in fact it (disappointingly for me) suggests that you can’t ignore questions of how the text was produced when you are trying to understand it. This has always been clear with Shakespeare, for example, where the Arden editions refer to the various available readings and suggested errors and corrections. But even with later writers, it’s suggested, the process by which a printed text comes into being is significant and can’t be simply left to the drudges of textual scholarship (as I’d see them – obv McGann doesn’t).

The essay closes by looking at the distinction between scholarship and hermeneutics: traditionally scholarship is seen as the drudge work, which provides a basis for ‘proper’ examination of the significance of the text. There’s a reference to ‘copy-text editing’ – a theory in which text editors should separate out accidentals and substantives. Accidentals includes spelling and punctuation, while substantives include the line of thought expressed. The theory says that editors should, by and large, refer to the writer’s manuscript for accidentals, and to later printed editions for substantives. The obvious argument is that this distinction is too simplistic, and that textual scholars ought to be the last people to be taken in by it.

In the middle of the article, though, there’s a reference to Robert Pinsky’s Mindwheel, evidently some kind of interactive text, described as “an electronic novel – the first ever published, I understand. It will not be the last.” Perhaps not the last, but the form can’t be said to have caught on since 1985. Obviously such a book would raise questions about the respective roles of reader and writer, where scriptibility is open. But perhaps the fact that such works haven’t proliferated suggests something about the limits of the pluriel. Electronic publication (and of course since 1985 this has come to mean the internet, with even more possibilities than an electronic book on a disk) has provided the perfect medium for such interactivity, but very few people have taken it up. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to me to be doing this, but is maybe the closest. Even in fan fiction, which is probably massively bigger than most people know, the model is of single authors producing, as far as they can, a finished work.

I have spent longer on this than I meant to. I think this may mean that electronic publication is an area I should give some time to.

MCT: Stephen Greenblatt

2009-11-17T16:23:00.002Z

Another chapter from Modern Criticism and Theory, I've turned to this one after a reference in Frank Kermode's Pleasing Myself to 'New Historicism', a largely American tendency to treat literature (and everything else) as a pattern of 'ceaseless interreletions or "negotiations" between all manner of contemporary social and cultural practices'. His essay ("On a New Way of Doing History") is about a book by Richard Helgerson and is generally scathing, but Kermode refers to Greenblatt as the 'chef d'école'. The weakness Kermode sees in the approach is that:

since all discourses interract equally you can talk, as for example Greenblatt does, about the relation between the Elizabethan practice of exorcism and Shakespeare's King Lear without assuming that the play is somehow more valuable than Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.

[Actually, in that discussion, why would you need to compare the value of the play and the declaration?]

Kermode's concern, I think, is that this kind of approach undervalues texts, and that if it is applied to the study of literature, rather than of society or culture more generally, the relativism makes it impossible to recognise the greatest works.

The extract from Greenblatt in MCT is the opening chapter of his book Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), "The circulation of social energy". Greenblatt talks of his initial view that it was necessary to understand the text as fully as possible, and of how that view changed, to accept that the plays are not isolated items, but the work of a whole culture. He gives a lot of time to the structure of theatre as an example of how social energy is created and exchanged. For example, the theatre uses elements of real life either freely (in appropriation) or in real or symbolic trading relationships. So religious beliefs and practices can be simulated on stage, but no-one believes a real religious activity is taking place.

But an introduction is an introduction. The full details of how this approach is applied is no doubt obvious in the four chapters of the book, each of which covers a (loosely defined) genre of Shakespeare's plays. It's clear that Greenblatt, however, somehow is able to say that the plays are exceptional in their power to move and inspire, and his effort is to understand why. I don't think there's any doubt that he appreciates the plays' qualities.

Susan Sontag

2009-11-16T13:54:00.002Z

First, a thought about the crazy economics of book publishing. Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag is a collection of essays and speeches from the last 20 or so years of her life. As I've noted earlier, it's a beautiful looking book, and the production inside is just as clean and stylish as the cover. But at about 350 pages, and with no new content, the cover price of £12 is ridiculous. Waterstone's has it in stock at full price, and not included in any 3 for 2 offer. Amazon has it for £8.60, which is more like it, but I bought it from a dealer in Amazon's marketplace for just £3.84 (plus p&p). To make any profit, the dealer must have got it for around £3.50. This is surely a mad, unsustainable business model.

Anyway, I bought the book largely because there's an essay on Roland Barthes. It praises him very highly, but largely despite his theoretical views. Earlier in this blog I looked at S/Z, where you can see Barthes succumbing to a classic narration, despite its lisibility. Sontag more or less argues that he was like that throughout his career; he was an old-fashioned practical criticismist in modernist clothing. I think there may be something in this. As with Stanley Fish, Barthes's analysis depends on many of the skills that people like Richards and Empson valued and developed.

A later piece, "On Being Translated", shows that Sontag doesn't hold with modernist denials of the primacy of the text. In a parenthesis she says:

You will have already noted that I am assuming that there is such a thing as an "original" text. Perhaps only now, when ideas utterly devoid of common sense or respect for the practice of writing have great currency in the academy, would this seem to need saying.

This is from a speech given at a conference on translation. It refers to Sontag's time in Sarajevo, working on a production of Waiting for Godot during the siege. Production was threatened because some people wanted a new translation of the play into Bosnian, to replace the existing Serbo-Croat one. But Bosnian is to all intents and purposes exactly the same language as Serbo-Croat. The call for a new translation was political.

The speech also covers some general points about translations. Unsurprisingly, given the above quotation, Sontag says the translation must serve the original text, but accepts the spread of means in which this can be attempted.