Isaac Bashevis Singer on Translation
The fact that I don’t have as many readers in Yiddish as I would have liked to have bothers me. It’s not good that a language is going downhill instead of up. I would like Yiddish to bloom and flower just as the Yiddishists say it does bloom and flower. But as far as translation is concerned, naturally every writer loses in translation, particularly poets and humorists. Also writers whose writing is tightly connected to folklore are heavy losers. In my own case, I think I am a heavy loser. But then lately I have assisted in the translating of my works, and knowing the problem, I take care that I don’t lose too much. The problem is that it’s very hard to find a perfect equivalent for an idiom in another language. But then it’s also a fact that we all learned our literature through translation. Most people have studied the Bible only in translation, have read Homer in translation, and all the classics. Translation, although it does do damage to an author, it cannot kill him: if he’s really good, he will come out even in translation. And I have seen it in my own case. Also, translation helps me in a way. Because I go through my writings again and again while I edit the translation and work with the translator, and while I am doing this I see all the defects of my writing. Translation has helped me avoid pitfalls which I might not have avoided if I had written the work in Yiddish and published it and not been forced because of the translation to read it again.
Diner Interview with Mary Miller
Enormous snowflakes stirred, shifting the Wednesday reek. A lumpy yellow package arrived at my door. Inside were a flask and a one short story, “Diner” by Mary Miller. I dabbed at the folded pages. An enormous fox squirrel appeared at the window and whined. I filled the flask and finished the story and opened the oven door and dumped in tortillas from the pantry and sat back down again and hit the flask and emailed Mary Miller with some questions:
(Exciting spoiler! This interview debuts an awful Mary Miller poem.)
1. Diners fascinate. They seem archetypal to me. I think of Hopper’s Nighthawks or Hemingway’s “The Killers” and naturally Hollywood’s many diners. It is your title and setting. Could you knock around this idea of the diner?
The Kenneth Patchen Award is back!
After a hiatus, the Kenneth Patchen Award for writing is being revived. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2011, the Award will be reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and will honor the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.
Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.
Claymation Wins Again
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in clay) from Bullhead Entertainment:
Hotness: Here’s a toast to the douchebags! Here’s a toast to the vain!
Last night, as I walking home in -9 without wind chill temperatures (Celsius) and foot upon feet of snow, I heard the most fantastic (ironic) thing. Granted, I was mad at the weather, and because my anger would be futile against snow and cold, I steered my aggression onto three darling little assholes.
Here is the conversation I overheard:
Guy 1: You know, dudes, I only have one problem.
Guy 2: Not enough pussy?
Guy 1: Yeah.
Guy 3: (With a hint of jealousy and maybe irony) Fuck you.
Guy 1: Nah, really, dudes, my only problem is that I fucking hate fat. Like I can’t stand it if a girl’s fat.
Guy 3: Fuck, dude, like who likes fat chicks?
Then, they turned onto Princess street (our main “drag”) and I had to turn a different way to go home. Needless to say, I wanted to hear more! But given only the brief bit of friendly banter I witnessed, I dedicate this to them:
Reading as a Comfort
The suicides and untimely deaths of friends and family have been piling up the last ten years. I had a close friend when I lived in Florida who was a city utilities worker. He was into kung fu movies and karate and beach volleyball and very unlucky with women. He met a woman after he was diagnosed with leukemia, and they married, but it must have been hard to be married to a terminally ill person, and she left him in the end, but before the end. It seemed unexcusable to me that she left him before the end, but then she was the one who was changing the bedsheets and holding his head over the toilet and watching him turn skeletal and lose teeth. READ MORE >
Over at CNN they are publishing the poetry of the Arizona shooter. Here is the first poem, titled “Meat Head.”
the taking and passing along 11
11. For all you punk-asses that need writing prompts, there is a weird little flash contest coming up over at Flash Fiction Chronicles.
5. Oh, flash fiction is:
“…a place for writers to talk ABOUT fiction, and its feats in that weird mysterious way that fiction talks beyond the story on the page.”
Deb Olin Unferth
Take that, you flash-bastards. You’re the same people that don’t like olives, microchips, inward blushes, hall mirrors, and other small things.
1. Rock and Roll is finally dead.
99.
7. Back when a professor visited my MFA university and taught one class, a class about HER. She made us buy and read all of HER books. WTF? I thought divas were for music and acting. Memo to writers: No one gives a damn. Well…Nother time a reader visited and insisted we bring her ribs. She was all, “I’m in Alabama, you WILL feed me ribs.” A graduate student had to drive his turd-colored Ford Escort all night. There’s no rib place open way late in sleep-ass little Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Ends up they gave her Chili’s ribs, not ribs at all, unless you enjoy pale under-belly of cardboard. Diva behavior from writers? From writers! Do tell:
A Conversation with Andrew Ervin, author of Extraordinary Renditions
MINOR: Extraordinary Renditions does a thing that some say fiction ought not do — it assumes the points of view of characters from different cultures than the writer’s. Writers used to do this all the time, but it seemed to get controversial around the time of the civil rights movement — the furor in some quarters over Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, to give one example, and the subsequent defense by James Baldwin on the grounds that Styron was doing a thing fiction writers have an obligation to do, by putting himself “in the skin of Nat Turner.”
ERVIN: It was never a question to me if I had the right to write from different cultural perspectives. As a writer of immense privilege, I felt it was my responsibility to do so. Not that I was trying to make some sort of grand, dogmatic political statement; there were simply some stories that for various reasons I felt needed telling. Yes, the second of these three novellas, “Brooking the Devil,” uses many of the tropes of the captivity narrative. The relatively new genre of the neo-slave narrative—begun in large part by Styron—is the single most important tradition in contemporary American letters. Where would we be without Beloved and The Wind Done Gone and Flight to Canada? For a white writer like myself to ignore race, and our nation’s racist history (and present) would be unconscionable. READ MORE >
What Do You Mean When You Say “Brooklyn”?
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?