January 29, 2015
January 29, 2015
Cold
Chen Jiagang
Ursula K. Le Guin
As things appear to be coming to some sort of climax, I have withdrawn to this place. It is cooler here, and nothing moves fast. On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart. She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together and, by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of her right foot, approached us shouting, "Well what's wrong with a person trying to express themselves?" The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy. "Great legs," the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. "My wife had great legs."via Biblioklept _______________________
A cat has arrived interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow tom with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers above their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. As he has gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed.
Where?
Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. ...(more)
Giorgio Agamben
2011
European Graduate School Video Lectures_______________________ european marks
Kirill Kobrin
Translated from Russian by Katya Luc
3am
We were driving from Kirkenes to the museum of Skolt Sami, which is situated near the Finnish border. There were three of us in the car, Andreas (German) was driving, I was sitting next to him in the passenger seat, and in the back sat Jasmina (Serbian). Andreas is the art director of the group of the curators “Pikene på Broen” and Jasmina is in charge of contemporary culture in the administration of the northern Norwegian town Tromsø . For me this was the third time I have come to Kirkenes in the last two years to try to understand the essence of this place, as it is situated between two borders, and in many ways becomes a border in itself. What a “border” constitutes is exactly what will be discussed here._______________________...(more)
Searching
Chen Jiagang
Herbert Lomas
books from Finland
(....)_______________________To translate is to put on a mask and to find a self you did not know you might have. It’s generally a pleasurable experience. You have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.
I first began to translate in a purely amateur way, for pleasure. I was intuitively reaching for the experiences I’ve just been describing – wanting to find my own Finnish personality, wanting to see what the Finnish author would be like if he were an Englishman or woman. Well – up to a point: what kind of a personality emerges in this exercise? Actually something quite new something that would otherwise not exist. In these solitary theatricals one actually does become creative: it’s not merely a job of transposition. It’s a job of invention: in each poem you have to invent a new personality.
(....)What I’m suggesting is that people read to experience themselves imaginatively: they want a new perspective on their own lives. People do not read translations to encourage minor literatures but to rediscover themselves in new imaginative adventures and revealing extensions of experience. If books from other cultures are to succeed in translation, it will not so much be because of their local colour, but because the problems and anxieties that the readers are experiencing in their own lives are illuminatingly developed in these translations too.
...(more)
A review of 'Description of the Lie' and 'Gravestones'
Jose-Luis Moctezuma
jacket2
Rust is the color of disappearance, the deintensification of metallic solidity. Seen in a different slant of light, rust produces a reintensification of color in the meeting of iron and oxygen, the proliferation of autumn in a congeries of breath, moisture, and steel. On the tongue rust acquires a taste: the bitterness of a disappearance, an evaporation that leaves behind the strange piquancy of material erosion. In Antonio Gamoneda’s Description of the Lie, rust invokes the beginning of a precipitous, painful knowledge, a forgetting that paradoxically initiates a splintering of presence into prismatic refractions that call attention to time’s invisible phenomena:Rust alighted on my tongue with the taste of a disappearance.Rust in this sense leaves a taste of forgetting, or the sight of “a calcified boat in a country from which the sea has receded,” leaving only the impossibility of a sea, a lost remembrance contained in the sight of cuttlefish bones and striated canyon walls, a place evidenced by an illegibility of ruins. To paraphrase a Deleuzian maxim, the pursuit of the impossible occasions a new set of possibles, new forms of description. Yet taste and sight do not predominate in Description of the Lie so much as does aurality. Absence, after all, is articulated by the optical “lack of many a thing … sought,” a remembrance of things past which, in Shakespeare’s original formulation, “drowns an eye” (in tears, but also in a cognitive blindness) and becomes absorbed in sonic traces at the “expense of many a vanished sight.” Gamoneda does not see (he cannot see what is no longer there), but he listens:
Forgetting penetrated my tongue and I had no recourse but to forget,
and I accepted no value other than impossibility.I listened to the surrendering of my bones being deposited in rest,...(more)
I listened to the flight of insects and the retraction of the shadow
on entering what was left of me;
I listened until truth ceased to exist in the space or in my spirit,
and I was unable to resist the perfection of silence.
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