Filed under: Israel, Just stuff., Poetry, Travel literature | Tags: concepts, ideas, Israel, Israeli, Jewish, photos, Tel Aviv, words
WordPress has this really cute new photoblog theme, so dammit, I’ve made a shiny new photoblog here. It’s fresh out of its wrappings and smells like new shoes. It’s going to have images and words about Tel Aviv, the white city of memory and forgetting, as it approaches its 100th year on earth.
Filed under: I stole my title from Baudrillard, Is this culture?, Israel, Just stuff., Plastic surgery, Why?, Women's magazines
In common with most Israelis, I am a news addict. But being someone who loves books and print, I enjoy reading actual newspapers rather than just the online editions. A couple of months ago, I thought I would treat myself and, in addition to my usual Trib/ Jerusalem Post, I bought the April edition of Elle.
When I got home, I realised I’d got the American edition. Shame.
The first half of the magazine is pure advertising, sullied only homoeopathically by the occasional brief letter from the editor or contents page, and a “guide to April”, which includes happenings such as Barney The Big Purple Dinosaur’s 15th birthday (that was on 6th April, in case you failed to join the rest of the world in celebrating this momentous occasion). The first actual article starts on around page 94. (more…)
Filed under: Biography, Books, Lawrence Durrell, Literature, Poetry, Travel literature
Since my aliyah to Israel, travel literature – the documentation of personal journeys and experience in countries and cultures foreign to one’s own – has grown in interest for me. Never much interested in viewing other people’s holiday snaps or reading others’ blogs detailing daily lives in foreign climes (there are lots of these), I do enjoy reading well-written accounts of others’ travels, even if these describe places I have never visited or do not plan to visit.
Although I still haven’t managed to get hold of a copy of Prospero’s Cell (Lawrence Durrell’s memoir of his years on Corfu), a trip to Halper’s second-hand bookstore on Allenby did result in an elderly Faber & Faber edition of Bitter Lemons, Durrell’s memoir of his 1953-1956 residence in Cyprus. (more…)
I recently picked up a copy of Azar Nafisi’s autobiographical work Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which the author describes how she and a select group of students – almost all women – would meet, at no small personal risk, and discuss banned works of Western literature. Through their discussions about literature, they were able to formulate a sort of understanding about their own lives; by exploring Nabokov’s novel about the terrible abuse and captivity of a young girl, Nafisi and her students can, obliquely, discuss their own experiences of life under the Iranian regime.
This use of literary figures as oblique references to permit expression about a repressive contemporary world reminded me sharply of the poetry of Russian writers under the Communist regime. The tradition of speaking obliquely about injustice and oppression is probably as old as the Russian language itself. In the Soviet era, it became one of the only ways to speak. In Russian, it is called тайнопись (tainopis‘) or ’secret writing’. Anna Akhmatova, in her beautiful 1924 poem Lot’s Wife, uses a nameless Biblical figure to enable her to express her feelings about the loss of the world and the life that she knew: in 1922, Akhmatova had been branded a “bourgeois element”, and from 1925 to 1952 she would be effectively silenced, unable to publish and barely able to survive.
Here’s the poem in it’s entirety – first in the original Russian and then in English translation (the only English translations I could find were not particularly faithful to the original, and in some cases frankly misleading – so I’ve translated it again myself, as closely as possible to the Russian. Now, I’m not a translator, so whilst it doesn’t read as beautifully as the translations I found, it does reproduce the meaning of the original poem, without adding words that are not in the Russian!)
Лотова жена
И праведник шел за посланником Бога,
Огромный и светлый, по черной горе.
Но громко жене говорила тревога:
Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть
На красные башни родного Содома,
На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла,
На окна пустые высокого дома,
Где милому мужу детей родила.
Взглянула, и, скованы смертною болью,
Глаза ее больше смотреть не могли;
И сделалось тело прозрачною солью,
И быстрые ноги к земле приросли.
Кто женщину эту оплакивать будет,
Не меньшей ли мнится она из утрат?
Лишь сердце мое никогда не забудет
Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд.
Lot’s Wife
And the righteous man walked behind the emissary of God,
Huge and shining, on the black mountain.
But anxiety spoke loudly to the wife:
It’s not too late, you can still look,
At the red towers of your native Sodom,
At the square where you sang, at the yard where you span,
At the empty windows of the tall house,
Where you bore your dear husband’s children.
She glanced back, and felt a deathly pain,
Her eyes could no longer see,
And her body became transparent salt,
And her quick feet were rooted to the earth.
Who will weep for this woman,
Is she not too insignificant?
But my heart will never forget
The life that was given for a single glance.
This is Akhmatova’s interpretation of the story of Lot’s nameless wife, who, fleeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. In Akhmatova’s poem, Lot’s wife looks back to catch a glimpse of what was dear to her – the red towers of her native city, the home where she sang and bore her children. In 1924, when Akhmatova wrote the poem, so many of the things that she had taken for granted about her old life in Russia had been destroyed, gone forever and replaced by the harsh new Soviet reality. Akhmatova’s interpretation of the story of the nameless, insignificant woman, tells us that huge, world-changing events affect small individuals, and these personal stories are overlooked in the fever of momentous change. Lives are given for one single glance.
One of my favourite “comfort books” – books I read again and again whenever I’m in need of cheering up – is Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy, in particular My Family and Other Animals. I was very young when I first read Durrell’s autobiographical account of the 5 years he spent on Corfu as a young boy, with his mother and three siblings. I discovered the book after watching the 1987 BBC television series. I found the book far superior – it’s richness of description, humour, warmth and sense of childhood wonder and discovery radiate out from every page.
Apart from the Corfu Trilogy, I haven’t read anything else by Gerald Durrell, and know little about him apart from the general knowledge that he was a very well-known naturalist and the brother of the more famous Lawrence Durrell. (more…)
Filed under: Literature
I have been re-reading one of my favourite novels – Dostoevsky’s Besy, translated into English as The Devils in my translation by David Magarshack, but also well-known in its Constance Garnett incarnation as The Possessed. Whilst Magarshack’s translation reads well, and smoothly, I am continually struck, and frustrated, by the way in which the translator has rendered certain things from the original Russian into English.
Perhaps the first, and most obvious, problem with this translation is the choice of English for the title. There is clearly a major difference between Garnett’s choice of The Possessed and Magarshack’s choice of The Devils. The original Russian title, Besy, refers to the author’s (and the narrator, Mr G-v’s) choice of inscription, the passage from Luke’s Gospel describing the Gadarene swine, which, possessed by demons, rush over a precipice to their deaths; Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, one of the novel’s main protagonists and a liberal thinker of the old school, compares the possessing demons to the revolutionaries and nihilists (amongst them himself and his son) who infect others with ideas, causing them to run blindly to their deaths. A bes is a demon, the creature doing the possessing. “Devil” might probably more accurately translated as черт (chert) or дьявол (d’iavol).
There are other problems with the translation. One of the biggest difficulties in translating literature is what to do about culturally specific notions: is it best to stay as close to the original as possible (and include explanations for the reader), or should the translator resort to the use of a similar notion from the target culture? The Magarshack translation chooses the first option. I prefer the second – if only because when I read a good novel from a different culture, I want to know as much as possible about that culture, and so I am quite happy to read explanatory notes, and conversely feel short-changed if I think the translator has made significant changes to the original text. Of course, this is barely noticeable if I’m reading a work by an author whose original language or culture I know nothing about. Because I know Russian, I want the translation to feel Russian too. (Picky?)
Here’s an example from Magarshack’s translation, which might sound superficial but which I think isn’t: the Anglicisation of personal names. Making Russian names sound more English may make the novel superficially easier to read for the English speaker who neither knows or cares to learn anything about how Russian names work, but in my opinion, it detracts from the “feel” of Dostoevsky’s original work, and it also detracts from understanding certain aspects of the milieu of the novel. Russian personal names and the conventions around them differ from their English counterparts. Russians have a first name and a patronymic (which would be used in more formal settings), there are also many diminutives of first names, the various use of which indicates a great deal about the relationship between the namer and the named. In Dostoevsky’s work, what people are called and how they refer to each other is indicative of the relationship between them, both in terms of social class (which has a lot of meaning in a work about revolutionaries and the radical changes taking place in society) and in terms of personal relationships. The use of French and the Frenchification of Russian names is also important in Dostoevsky’s creation of character and plot.
Anyone who has read any piece of literature translated from a foreign language is bound to wonder to what extent the piece that they are reading accurately reflects the original. Nuances of culture, plays on words, and the whole richness and unique texture of an artist’s work in a particular language are easily lost in translation, leaving the reader with a mere reflection of a reflection of the original work of art.
This is my new home on the web. Once I get all settled in to my new home, I’m going to write about books. I might also write some stuff about my life here as well, because, you know. I’ve started reading some really good blogs about literature lately, and have been inspired by them.This is a work in progress, hampered by the heat: we are in the midst of a sharav, or hamsin and it’s difficult to move, let alone type, or think. According to the weather forecast, the “feels like” temperature is around 39 degrees. Add to that the humidity, and what you get is a feeling of being in a sauna, but with no way out. Particularly, if, like me, you don’t have an air conditioner. At night, when things only cool down by a few degrees and the humidity doesn’t go away, it’s more like being in a gigantic tureen of soup. Mosquito soup. The cat spends the day lying fully stretched out on the ceramic floor, too dazed to move. It’s probably the most sensible option.
