Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
When I visit Brooklyn, there is Brooklyn, and then there is the idea of Brooklyn I have before I visit Brooklyn, and then there is the idea of Brooklyn the people I’m visiting in Brooklyn have of Brooklyn, and then there is the idea of Brooklyn the people I tell I’m visiting Brooklyn have of Brooklyn, and there are the Brooklyn streets and the Brooklyn people and the Brooklyn buildings, and Manhattan is across the river, and there is the idea of Brooklyn as part of New York City, and there is the idea that Brooklyn isn’t a part of New York City, because New York City is Manhattan, and when I read Edward Falco I visit a Williamsburg where it is not safe to walk the streets, and when I visit Williamsburg it is very safe to walk the streets, even alone at night, and when I walk through a neighborhood full of Hasidic Jews walking on a Saturday, the people I’m with tell me how it is to live in a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews walking on a Saturday, but I don’t know anything about what it’s like to be a Hasidic Jew walking on a Saturday, and when I’m with people who like to talk about literature, Brooklyn is a place where everyone talks about literature, but when I’m not with people who like to talk about literature, no one in Brooklyn is talking about literature, and when I read about Brooklyn in newspapers I hear stories about Brooklyn trends, such as it’s cool to have a potbelly, but when I’ve been in Brooklyn, I’ve never met anyone who believes it’s cool to have a potbelly, and what I’m wondering is: What is Brooklyn?, and: What does a person mean when a person is saying Brooklyn to me?, and: If I only visit Brooklyn but never live in Brooklyn, do I know very much about what Brooklyn is?, and: If I lived in Brooklyn but never visited other places, how would I have any idea of what Brooklyn might be without having other places against which to compare Brooklyn?, and: If I grew up in Brooklyn, would Brooklyn be Brooklyn now or the Brooklyn I knew then or both or neither, and: If I didn’t grow up in Brooklyn but I lived in Brooklyn, would Brooklyn be Brooklyn now or the Brooklyn I imagine from then or both or neither, and: If I’ve never lived in Brooklyn, but I frequently visit Brooklyn, is Brooklyn the Brooklyn I visit or the Brooklyn I imagine Brooklyn to be when I’m not there or the Brooklyn I imagine Brooklyn used to be or the thing I think Brooklyn can do for me or the thing I think Brooklyn is doing for other people or none of these things or all of these things?, and: Why is it always I’m wanting to think about my idea of Brooklyn and never I’m thinking about my idea of the place I really live, which seems too out-of-the-way and inconsequential to mean anything to anyone, or even to mention to anyone I meet in Brooklyn, and what does that say about my idea of Brooklyn?
Elizabeth Harris
A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Harris contributed a brief comment to one of Lily Hoang’s posts. Her name was familiar to me because I had been reading Dalkey Archive Press’s Best European Fiction 2010, for which she contributed a translation of Giulio Mozzi’s “Carlo Doesn’t Know How to Read.” I hoped for once not to miss the opportunity to engage an interesting visitor in a conversation that might be interesting to HTMLGiant readers. She graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her work as a literary translator, and about the broader culture of literary translation in the United States.
Harris teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. She has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern and Fabio Stassi, and she is currently translating Giulio Mozzi’s story collection, Questo e’ il giardino (This is the Garden) and Marco Candida’s novel, Il diario dei sogni (Dream Diary). Her translations appear or are forthcoming in various journals, like Words Without Borders, The Literary Review, Agni Magazine, The Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. Her translation of Candida appears in Best European Fiction 2011.
How did you get involved in literary translation?
I slipped into translation accidently. I studied Italian in college and loved it and kept studying it after I finished college and was working as a cook in St. Paul. I just kept taking classes in Italian. Then, I was preparing to go to Johns Hopkins for creative writing and everyone had to take a language exam; I translated Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo all summer long, got very distracted/excited by it and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could find a place to study THIS?” READ MORE >
I admire the way the stories in Matt Bell’s How They Were Found tackle so many forms. Here is a list of those forms, superficially described:
“The Cartographer’s Girl” — a cartographer’s map key as prompt for story fragments
“The Receiving Tower” — nineteen-part structure, which ascends like the tower at the story’s center
“His Last Great Gift” — two-hundred “revealments,” some of which are given directly
“Her Ennead” — nine reflections on the repetition “her baby”
“Hold on to Your Vacuum” –nine chronologically linear “turns” (the one variation is a “not turn”)
“Dredge” — twenty-five chronologically linear crots in close third person on a single character (this is the most “conventional” story in the book, and also perhaps the most emotionally impactful)
“Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy” — ten scenes from a movie called Mercy READ MORE >
1. The book is all there is, and it doesn’t matter who wrote the book. The text is the text and has no relationship to anything outside the text. What’s outside the text doesn’t matter. All that matters is what’s inside the text.
and/or:
2. This book is so interesting that I have come to believe that the writer of the book is very interesting. I want to read the writer’s other books, and I want to know about the writer and read interviews with the writers and find out what the writer has said about herself.
This second impulse is amplified when the book is confessional or obsessive or in some way different from other books you’ve read. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is all three of those things. It’s a hybrid of essay and prose poem which starts as a meditation on the color blue, but ends up being about almost everything. If you look at a thing to which you’re drawn closely enough, the book seems to be saying, all your other important attachments will rise alongside the meditation about the thing you’ve taken as your subject.
READ MORE >
There have been several mini-posts on this site about Thomas Bernhard this week. One of our readers, Jonathan Callahan, pointed me toward an essay he wrote in the Collagist about Bernhard, Kafka, what he calls phrase-level and sentence-level virtuosity, reading in translation, and more. It’s an essay in the active Montaignian sense rather than the write-to-thesis sense. Probably someone here has linked to it before, but even if so, it deserves another look. Here’s an excerpt:
Maybe it’s best to begin by considering what it actually means to achieve effects on the reader at either of these levels. “Phrase-level” effects, as I conceive of them, reflect the writer’s scrupulous attention to individual words and his meticulous shaping of these words into the little phrase sculptures we tend to associate with writing that’s lauded as anything from “lyric” or “beautiful,” to “startling” or “uncanny” (or maybe in some quarters dismissed as “opaque”). There are all kinds of phrasal effects available to the rigorous writer, of course, and writers variously adept at making use of them compose a long gamut that runs from, say, the saguaro-like jut of certain singular phrasings in the stories of Denis Johnson and Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz and early Sam Lipsyte, through the quilted prose-poems of Michael Ondaatje or Anne Carson, into Don DeLillo’s uncanny, disorienting hyper-precision, the entrancing syllabic cadences and capering puns to be found in Martin Amis (by way of Nabokov) or Donald Antrim’s alliterative, consonance-rich lilt, all the way through the lingual looking-glasses conjured in the works of Donald Barthelme and Ben Marcus—but the common element is a kind of lexicalmanipulation. This is where the writer rejects the easy, familiar, or prefabricated phrase, vigorously resists the stale and timeworn, dismantles easy idiom, dispenses altogether with overused figures of speech, and not infrequently is forced to discard reams of what he ultimately deems superfluous or weak.
Here’s the rest: “Some Thoughts that Begin with Kafka and Bernhard but Wind up Straying Pretty Far Afield” at The Collagist.
In the opening pages of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, the narrator says:
If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up the piano and I would have become a piano virtuoso and perhaps even one of the best piano virtuosos in the world, I thought in the inn. When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.
In this interview at KCRW Bookworm, W.G. Sebald confessed his longtime attachment to Thomas Bernhard as an influence, mentor, and model. He also confessed to a longtime reluctance to confess his attachment to Bernhard for fear of being labeled simply a Bernhard derivative by those for whom it is convenient to attach such a label and use it to diminish the individuality of the work of a writer who simply has a less likely influence than another writer. (We rarely use “Chekhovian” or “Joycian” or “Faulknerian” as a critical diminutive, perhaps because they have influenced such a broad swath of writers that their own initial singularity has been diminished by the breadth of their influence.) READ MORE >
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” – John Cage
If I were a person who coughed at such a performance, or held a screaming baby, or whose cell phone rang, or who owned the corporation that operated the train which whistled as it went past the concert hall, I’d probably be embarrassed. I noticed that between the movements, people coughed more than the whole room of people had probably coughed in the entire day, probably because all of them had been so intent on holding their bodies still and holding their coughs during the movements. But the coughs they coughed between movements and the laughter they laughed after they coughed certainly represented the most enjoyable part of the performance, other than perhaps the conductor’s ad lib between movements, when he theatrically took a rag and wiped his forehead as though he had been working up a sweat with his conducting. (Maybe he had, but not because of exertion, but rather because of the tension that attaches to publicly not doing anything, and that was part of the gag, too, when he wiped his forehead with the rag.) READ MORE >
The latest installment in the New York Public Library’s Three Faiths Exhibition (some of which is available online here) is a 106 minute lecture by Slavoj Zizek which is among the most plainspoken and accessible Slavoj Zizek lectures I’ve ever heard (click here for the lecture).
The St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York maintains (or at least used to maintain) the custom of inviting a stranger, often a non-Christian one, to deliver a sermon once each year. (The most famous of these sermons became the centerpiece of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday.) READ MORE >