Sonnets From a Vague Suburb
The Sonnets
by Jorge Luis Borges
edited by Stephen Kessler
Penguin Books, 2010
336 pages / $18 Buy from Penguin Books, Buy from Amazon
Although justly famous in this country for his short fiction, Borges the poet remains largely unknown to American readers. This dual-language collection of his sonnets can go a long way towards remedying that deficiency. From his early atmospheric verse in Fervor de Buenos Aires, to his late poems of aging, nostalgia and death, written in the penumbra of near total blindness, Borges left behind a remarkable body of poetic work. We are still waiting for the complete works of Borges to be translated into English, but meanwhile, translator and editor, Stephen Kessler, has collected all of Borges’ sonnets into a single volume. Most of these were written when Borges was on his way to total blindness. The sonnet as a form called out to him in its succinctness and melody. Like oral poets of old, he found formal devices aided his memory, and so he composed sonnets in his head. The content of the poems is eminently recognizable to readers of his prose: the evocativeness of run-down suburbs, dusk, the gaucho, the warrior, the labyrinths of reason, the mysteries of time, identity, and mirrors.
1 Comment
November 14th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
November 14th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
English to English Translation
Slate has this sick new tool called Plain English which NPR used to translate the Fed’s legalesed-up statement (re: their $600B inflation experiment) into something those of us without a law degree can wrap our heads around.
Phone is ringing, oh my gawd, it’s a giveaway
Telephone is a new journal. Here’s their introduction:
The first issue features poems by Uljana Wolf which are translated by Mary Jo Bang, Christian Hawkey, Susan Bernofsky and more (a damn impressive list; that “more” doesn’t mean “friends of the publisher”). They all translate the same poems, so you can contrast and compare (samples here).
Paul Legault and the editorial crew of Telephone are offering 5 copies of this first issue to htmlgiant readers with a contest. Here’s the game, according to Paul:
I think it would be a good idea to get people to mis/un/dis-translate Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone message:
“Watson, come here! I want to see you!”
And give 5 books to the best five, as judged by the editors.
I take that to mean: translate Bell’s first message any way you want. Do it in Spanish or Klingon or English or whatever. Translation is hip, as Lord Buckley showed Groucho Marx. **UPDATE: Entries must be posted by 12pm Eastern on Friday the 17th.**
And set your cell to vibrate this Friday at their release party:
Time: September 17 · 7:30pm
Place: 177 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
Freaking NYC man. This looks like a great reading.
Matthew Simmons—
“Published in the future.” (“A screaming comes across the sky,” translated 56 times. Here.) Also, hey. I’m reading Against the Day.
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Listening In
iphone Denver by poet Rick Bursky
-There’s a piece called “How to Unfeel the Dead” by Lance Olsen in Artifice that knocked my socks off.
-A review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Howard summarizes Grossman’s thesis:
In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.
-I was tired this year at the AWP Conference. I couldn’t sleep past 5am, and my head swam in treacherous waters all day. New CollAge magazine had a table—we sold about 2.5 copies—at which I sat for 15-20 minute intervals before getting the jitters and flying the coop. Lots of wandering around the Denver Convention Center, admiring the big blue looming bear, sneaking peaks at the car show, listening in:
IN THE HALLS
I can’t just get drunk and flirt with all the students—
Jesus wouldn’t come down and have sex with me like that.
I feel like my arms look like big white baby harp seals.
I’m glad nobody got raped.
I got my MFA in deleting words. I don’t know anything
about throwing babies.
20 Important Books in Other Languages; or, “a list always growing longer”
A post re:– neither repost nor riposte–Blake’s wichtige Liste and (only at first) about Infinite Jest in German. Maybe a chair is a good metaphor for who gets translated. Have you been translated? Have the Important Writers on Blake’s list? And not 25 because Saramago, Ouredník, and Zizek are already others, Ben Lerner’s a poet, Aase Berg’s both, and I’ll write about poets in translation and translation in poets at an other time.
Not sure if anyone went there during all the well DFW grammar talk (thanks, Amy), but imagine translating, say, Oblivion. Good that one of Wallace’s German translators, Ulrich Blumenbach, did just that, presumably (it first appeared in 2006), while whittling away at Infinite Jest, which took him six years and has had, as Unendlicher Spass (literally, the less Shakespearean Unending Fun), endless success: ten times the expected five grand copies have been sold since it appeared at the end of August, on the heels of Infinite Summer, which the publisher, KiWi, has translated too, as 100 Days of Infinite Jest (in German–it ended on 12-1).
In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blumenbach (pictured–in German) regrets that the author never answered his many questions, “a list always growing longer”: it seems Wallace had grown weary of taking translator’s queries, and, according to The Complete Review’s useful paraphrase of a slippery summary (still looking for the original source), considered the Spanish La broma infinita (tr. Calvo and Covian | Mondadori, 2002) and the Italian Infinite Jest (Nesi w/ Villoresi and Giua | Einaudi, 2006) and apparently other attempts (anyone know more?) to have “all failed, more or less.”
In a warm war, France is responding with (900 pp. of) Vollmann’s Rising (not translated by the great Claro, see below, who did six previous tomes, but by one Jean-Paul Mourlon, translator, it seems, of Jimmy Carter and Hilary Clinton). There’s also German Vollmann (3 titles), Spanish Vollmann (3 more), Japanese Vollmann (2), Greek Vollmann (2), and Czech Vollmann, all (not counting the French) with only one title (Butterfly Stories) repeated.
American Genius is only a Great American Novel for now (does it even have a British publisher?), despite Tillman’s first book of stories, Tagebuch einer Masochisten, having appeared in Germany in 1986, four years before her first collection in English, READ MORE >
