Random
14 crucifix clutching cocaines
5. The Bateau Press Boom Chapbook Contest is open for submissions until December 31, 2010. Fuck yes!
4. This woman is a fucking conceptual food artist and vegetable butcher.
11. Thing now is to drop F bombs at readings. Three readings, 9 readers, carpet F bombing. Even lamer is to prep the F bomb. “I know you’re college kids, but I’m about to say fuck so deal with it…” or “Hope you people can handle some fuck words. No babies in here, right?” Fuck on. Fuck off. People don’t seem as drunk as usual. Maybe the F bombs are Freudian life relief at reading sober. Fuck.
77. An interview with Luna Miguel by SJ Fowler. Thank you, 3:AM. You are a hitchhiker in my heart.
But if I think back to my youth, the truth of the matter is that I didn’t pay any attention to criticisms, reproaches, and suggestions either. So I have no authority to speak today.
Tags: bateau press, Calvino interview, chapbook contest, Luna Miguel, readings
Why the excitement about sending $12 to someone so they can read (or not read) your writing?
Fuck is the new groovy.
I’m excited because I love competition and chapbooks and giving money to presses. The fuck yes is a play off # 11.
Thanks for #14. I love this passage:
” Calvino’s English was more theoretical than idiomatic. He also had a way of falling in love with foreign words. With the Mr. Palomar translation he developed a crush on the word feedback. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like charisma and input and bottom line, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work.”
when i was younger i put a lot of “fucks” and “shits” into my poetry/fiction but now i omit in favor of words like “heck” and “dingus” because they are funnier and get a more varied reaction than your standard “fuck/shits”
dingus is worth four fucks, i agree
Jack, before I read the thread, I went to the interview link, and also copied out the sentence:
“I couldn’t make it clear to [Calvino] that, like charisma and input and bottom line, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work.”
This is the most illiterate thing I’ve heard a translator say in a month of Sundays. That it was William Weaver who said it . . . whoa.
Does any other male here find that photo distressing?
(I’m sorry, I had to say it.)
Yea what is that like 1.3 megapixels wtf
Yeah, it’s a weirdly sweeping statement. Tongue-in-cheek maybe? I’m sure there are plenty of writers who could make good use of feedback and all that other corporate-y language However, I think Weaver may have had a point with regard to Calvino’s work specifically!
Well, Weaver doesn’t say that “feedback” is the wrong translation for this or that particular Italian expression – he says, quite specifically, that it’s “not appropriate in an English-language literary work” – by which I figured, as I guess you did, that he meant that it’s never a “literary” word at all.
But it’s not – or not just – a mealy corporate word. It’s a physics word that makes for an elegant metaphor in plenty of cases!
I think you’re right, though, about Weaver poking an elbow in the ribs. It just stopped me to read such a busy, prestigious translator say, literally, that ‘this diction is off the table’ – words (charisma??) that a zillion literary writers wouldn’t hesitate to use as carefully as all their other non-automatic vocabulary (which, in literary fiction, better be almost all of it, eh?).
I also thought that the reason Calvino might have liked calling Weaver “Weaver”, in addition to however pleasing the word sounded to Calvino’s ear, might have been, not as it operated as a proper noun, but rather because of its meaning as the word weaver – a great metaphor for a translator/collaborator.