Monthly Archives: May 2009

regard sur japon

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My Tokyo days may be at an end, for now (as geoecopolitical events shift my personal Asian correspondent from Tokyo to Hong Kong), but I've still got my eye on Japan, the country I love to hate.  It's so damn beautiful–
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But I'm sorry, I can't live in a country where this is breakfast:
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It is, however, a country that I (along with Roland Barthes) find fascinating from a textual perspective.

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The acclaimed, beloved Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has a new book coming out tomorrow. Nobody knows what it's about, except that it's titled 1Q84.  Nevertheless, according to the Christian Science Monitor, advance orders have cause his publisher to increase the  initial print run from 380,000 to 480,000. No word on when an English translation will be available.

Rumor has it "1Q84" is a reference to George Orwell's 1984, which wouldn't surprise me, but which makes sense– "Q" is how you say "9" in Japanese. (That is, Kyu.) But this seems a rather English-centric explanation, since not all of us look at "Q" and think Kyu. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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The new issue of the Quarterly Conversation is up, and includes a review of Amélie Nothomb's Tokyo Fiancée (a much better title than the original French one. Ni d'Eve ni d'Adam). I swallowed this book in a day before I went to Tokyo in April and found it highly readable, very enjoyable, though finally, nothing special. But sometimes that's ok. We can't read special books every day of the year.  The best parts of the book involve eating (okonomiyaki– which I had for the first time last month, oh deliciousness) and a hike up Mt Fuji.

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Words Without Borders has a special Japan issue up on their site.  Michael Emmerich has this particularly good essay on translation– he tells us that the word "translation" has no direct, well, translation, in Japanese.

Setting these unusual usages aside, the most obvious Japanese translation of the English word "translation" would be 翻訳 hon'yaku.
But the obviousness of this translation is misleading: it comes to mind
first, I would suggest, not because it is a general category like
"translation" within which other types of translation are included, but
because it is the most nondescript, or the least specific in a series
of terms denoting various sorts of translation. "Translation" in
English is an overarching category that includes all sorts of
translations, the act as well as the product of the act; hon'yaku
can be used in a way that makes it seem like an overarching term—it can
refer both to translation as an act and to a translation of a book, and
is used to translate the "translation" in "translation studies"—but it
isn't exactly, at least not in the way that "translation" is. This is
evident, for instance, in the fact that 現代語訳 gendaigoyaku
(the rendering of a work in a pre-modern form of Japanese into a modern
form of Japanese, which is unquestionably a form of "translation") is
not generally considered a subset of hon'yaku. Hon'yaku also
has considerably less of the ambiguously theoretical or metaphorical
flexibility of the English term: one might classify transliteration as
a subset of translation (indeed, Jerome J. McGann uses the term
"type-translation" to refer to transliteration), but in Japanese one
would simply be using the wrong word for the activity variously known
as 翻刻 honkoku, 翻字 honji, or 翻印 hon'in. Hon'yaku
refers specifically to translation from foreign (non-Japanese)
languages into Japanese (or vice versa), sometimes more specifically
still to translations from Europe or the United States, and its
usefulness as a general term is thus limited. Those like myself who
attempt to translate "translation" with the word hon'yaku are, in other words, subtly carrying out the type of translation (if it is a type of translation) known in Japanese as 誤訳 goyaku, or "mistranslation."

We also learn that when particularly bad books are translated into Japanese, there is a special term for that as well:

Translations are given different names depending on the approach they take to the original: they can be 直訳 chokuyaku (literally "direct translation"), 逐語訳 chikugoyaku ("word for word translation"), 意訳 iyakutaiyaku
("translation presented with the original text on facing pages"), or in
the case of translations of works by Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel,
John Grisham, and other popular American writers, 超訳 chōyaku ("translations that are even better than the originals," an invention and registered trademark of the Academy Press).

NPR’s Top 100? Please excuse me while I rant

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Heard about this last week but didn't get a chance to comment until today. At NPR, Dick Meyer summons his chutzpah and posts his list of the best 100 novels of the last 100 years.  Says he:

I am not a learned or prolific reader of novels. My taste is
probably medium-brow, male and parochial in many ways. Tough. It's my
list. I included two books that probably aren't novels: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Fabulous Small Jews. Lots of innovative, modern stuff didn't make it because I am not good at reading it.

My
criteria were essentially how much the book hit me, moved me, made me
see — and how it stuck with me. The books are all English-language
novels written after 1900.

In other words, the man has absolutely no qualifications to make such a list, which in our bizarre (post-?)post-modern world apparently makes him the perfect candidate to do it. 

Of course such lists are by nature subjective and silly and change radically depending on who you ask. Probably no one would argue with The Great Gatsby or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; some would argue with Lolita but for the wrong reasons.  But there are only seven books on there by women, and one of them is the atrocious A History of Love. (As one commenter put it: "Seven women and one of them is Nicole Krauss? What a joke.")

But it's not the numbers that get me. It's the pride in mediocrity and ignorance.  It's the unabashed "I really don't know the first thing about novels, but I'm going to make a list of the best ones anyway." It's the chin-jutting "My taste is probably medium-brow, male and parochial in many ways. Tough." His taste is thoroughly middlebrow and outrageously male. And though he's encountered some criticism for this, the fact is Dick Meyer is right there on NPR being accorded the right to be parochial and male, and getting away with calling his list the best novels of the last century.  Can you imagine had they asked a woman to make a list like this and it was full of female writers with only 7 male writers (one of whom was Herman Wouk?)? The list would be categorized "feminist" and therefore marginalized. But a parochial male view is lauded as the centrist point of view, not a list of the best male novels, but a list of the best novels. Simone de Beauvoir called her study The Second Sex because, then as now, men were where it was at. Women were an after-thought, a modification. There was the universal male, and then there was the feminine.

I mean, ugh. Ugh. Herman Wouk has two books on the list but Virginia Woolf is only represented by To the Lighthouse? You really want to imply that The Caine Mutiny is a better novel than Mrs Dalloway just because you liked it better? Dick Meyer, you're embarrassing yourself. Go read your boy books.

City Lit Paris

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City lit  To follow up on Tuesday's post regarding literary tourism, I wanted to mention another literary Paris book that was sent to me not long ago– City Lit Paris, a copious selection of short excerpts from some of the best (and less best) writing on Paris, edited by Heather Reyes and with an introduction by Stephen Clarke (of A Year in the Merde fame). It's part of a series of travel books, published by Oxygen– the other cities on their list are London, Dublin, Amsterdam, and Berlin. They also have a blog.

Collecting fiction and non-fiction, from the sanisettes Decaux to Bouvard and Pécuchet, from the Gare du Nord to Montparnasse, and from Balzac to Beauvoir, without missing Nemirovsky, Proust, and Aragon, making room for Julian Green, Cara Black and Edmund White (and most unexpectedly, Alex Kapranos of the band Franz Ferdinand), City Lit Paris sketches out a kaleidoscope of the city, inside and out, upscale and down.  The selections are classified by theme: Le Menu, Sex in the City, Location, Parisians, and so forth.  Each excerpt is contextualized and, I rejoiced to find, properly cited (as an academic I am a stickler for proper citation, though I am aware this is a pedantic tic). It's a great companion to the city, whether you're in town for a week, here for life, or home in Duluth.

(And if you have your own narrative to tell about Paris, you can submit it to Hitotoki.)

on literary tourism

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Awhile back I groaned at the rap-ification of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud" in order to promote tourism (but what sort of tourist would be attracted by such a thing?) to the Lake District. In the Chronicle Review, Randy Malamud takes a closer look at the commodification of literary works and sites.  It's not a recent phenomenon, born of an obsession with existentialism and code-breaking, but something that began to occur a couple of centuries back:

In the 18th century, travelers began visiting the graves, birthplaces,
and preserved homes of dead literary figures, Watson writes, which led
eventually to "reinventing whole regions of the national map as
'Shakespeare Country,' 'Wordsworth's Lake District,' … 'Dickens's
London,' 'Hardy's Wessex,' and so on." 

But some academics say it is a means of interacting with literature which curtails the power of literature itself–snidely suggesting it's a pastime for amateurs: 

Watson calls literary tourism "a deeply counterintuitive response to
the pleasures and possibilities of imaginative reading." She describes
"the embarrassment palpable among professional literary scholars over
the practice of literary pilgrimage" because, in the age of Barthes and
Foucault, "only the amateur, only the naïve reader, could suppose that
there was anything more … to be found on the spot marked X." Using a
phrase from Jacques Derrida, she calls the landscape sought by literary
tourists a "dangerously supplementary" text.

The urge to interact with a book in a way that goes beyond just reading it is one I think about a lot– for example, I think it's what drives some of us to be literary critics.  (It is also the drive behind fan fiction.) But for those souls too sane to write fan fiction (or literary criticism), taking a trip to the place the book was written, or the place the book is set, can allow them to become some ideal version of themselves inspired by the book. It's the closest they can come to inhabiting the book itself.

A cottage industry aimed at these people has built up in books about literary Paris, but most of them just repeat the same things over and over again– Writers in Paris being an exception, along with The Select Crowd, not to mention the incontournable Thirza Vallois. 

Living in Paris, I often come across these traveling readers. 
Sometimes they're legitimately seeking a deeper connection to the works
they love, and sometimes they're just a little borderline.  Remember
that scene in Julie Delpy's film "Two Days in Paris" where Adam
Goldberg's character sends the Bush-loving Da Vinci Code-cracking
tourists in search of the Louvre into the rough neighborhoods around
the Gare du Nord? Priceless.

A little romantic imagining from time to time is the best thing to spur creativity and wistful contentment. I mean, just last week, walking down the stairs to the bathroom at Le Select, I took a moment to wonder about all the writers who have descended those same stairs to take a leak after drinking too much Pernod, and felt united with them, if not in talent, at least in our common need to pee.

Obviously I'm exaggerating here. (Or am I?) Malamud concludes that before we get sanctimonious about literary tourism, we should consider our own traveling habits.

In fact, I flatter myself that I've invented the perfect mode of literary tourism. When I travel, I always read in situ: Dracula among the ruins of Whitby Abbey, overlooking the River Esk; A Confederacy of Dunces in New Orleans; The French Lieutenant's Woman
in Lyme Regis; "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" on the D Train; "Paul
Revere's Ride" outside the Old North Church. It's the best of both
worlds, making me a tourist and a reader at the same time. Cheap and
easy, no commercial or hermeneutic qualms whatsoever: I recommend it
highly.

Meanwhile, I'll get to work on my Beauvoir rap, just in case Paris tourism ever needs a lift. I guess it'll go something like this– "A woman ain't born, she's made, yo/boyeee better be afraid/cause this Second Sex is killah, huh/and this two volume book ain't fillah, whut."

Or not.

Le plaisir du texte

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Virginia Woolf on "The Pleasure of Reading":

‘Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap
books in paper – one stops sometimes before them and asks in a
transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create,
from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print?
Reading is a very complex art – the hastiest examination of our
sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as
readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first
duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one
were writing it . . . – we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex
pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from
book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so
great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far
different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed
the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes
therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to
learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our
caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked
and given to the poor and helped the sick – the reason why we have made
shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of
the jungle is simply this – we have loved reading.’

via Jeanette Winterson

around the internet on a tuesday

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Well, I'm back in Paris after a prolonged stay in Tokyo, and my, oh my, am I glad to be back.  There are all kinds of people in the world, my friends, and there are people who love Tokyo, and there are people who love Paris, and I belong to the second camp.

Also, I missed my dog.

And the internet has been busy while I was gone! Lots to report.  First of all, Wyatt Mason is no longer going to be blogging at Sentences.  Wyatt: we hardly knew ye. A year may seem like a decade in the blogosphere, but it's not really that long, and your dispatches will be missed.  Luckily I subscribe to Harper's, but there's something about a blog post that print book reviews and essays can't touch.  The sketch-like quality, the half-formed thought, the gesture toward one's interlocutor to further the idea… it's valuable not only for the blogger but for the reader.  This post, for example, in which Mason throws out some ideas on Beckett and translation, got me thinking, and may turn into a longer project.  So, thanks.

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Last month the Oulipians gathered in New York. Artforum gives us the play by play.  Stephen Mitchelmore has an excerpt from Jacques Roubaud's The Loop, published in English last month by Dalkey Archive Press. And for those of you in Paris wanting a little action from the OUvroir de la LIttérature POtentielle, they'll be doing their thing Thursday May 14th at 7 pm at the BNF.  The theme of the evening will be "Proses liquides."

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Feneon
If you liked Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, which came out last year from NYRB, you will love Joanna Neborsky's illustrated version of Fénéon's texts.

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I was thrilled to find, via The Valve, that this intrepid soul is (re)reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle backwards. Oh! how I long for the time to do the same. There is nothing better than curling up with a chunky Folio paperback and losing yourself in the minutiae of Second Empire France.  Sigh. 

(Did I just out myself as the biggest dork in the land?)

On a related note, Scott Esposito asks, and I echo: what's your favorite Zola novel?

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ReadySteadyBook has a review of J-M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star.

It feels like now, in the aftermath of Israel/Hamas war, might be the saddest of times to be reading J.M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star.
Yet I couldn’t help feeling, too, that this novel was confirming,
affirming. The simple fable-like quality of the prose offered up a
place where I found shelter from all the shouts — the noisy rhetoric
and rigid absolutes which seem to be filling up the media pages about
Israel and the Arab World. Le Clézio has achieved a revisiting of
modernist sensibilities which serve to place the subjective "I" into
the center of our reader’s mind. This voice is a singular, isolated
voice who is more witness than victim, and more reliable as the teller
of historical truths than all the objective reportage we have come to
rely on and believe in. Paradoxically, then, a literature based on
subjective sensibilities serves to become one of our most objective
looks into the Israel/Palestine conflict. Unlike the many "embedded
journalists" (a term I always found sort of funny, imagining these
Western newspaper guys stuck in sand dunes or ensconced inside rocky
limestone caverns) this fiction reaffirms and redefines the possibility
of the novel. Again, the novel can exist as a history-bearing fruit,
immerse us inside a forgotten and buried world history. When the very
writing of a novel asks the question: "can a novel be useful?" then,
for me, the novel is once again operating at the top of one of its most
exciting peaks.

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And if you're still on a Japanese kick, Marie Mockett has a piece up at Maud Newton's blog. 

Pachinko

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High point of my time in Tokyo: tonight I'm having dinner with the wonderful, the fabulous, the talented, Min Jin Lee. I think it was Lauren Cerand who called Min Jin a unicorn.  (Or maybe it was Min Jin who called Lauren a unicorn.  In any case, they're both rare breeds and I feel lucky to know them.) Min Jin is the author of the novel Free Food for Millionaires, and her second novel, Pachinko, is about ethnic Koreans living in Tokyo.  It goes a little something like this:

Two years after the divorce, when Hana was eleven, she'd asked if they could
talk to each other like peers, and Etsuko had agreed because she was grateful
that her daughter continued to talk to her at all. Also, she agreed because
when she'd been a girl she had lied to her mother and father about everything.
But Etsuko found that being detached as a mother had its own burdens. She wasn't
allowed to ask any prying questions, and if she sounded too concerned (something
Hana hated), her daughter hung up the phone and didn't call for weeks.

Etsuko had many regrets about her life in Nagano, but what she was most sorry
about was what her reputation had done to her children. Her grown sons still
refused to talk to her unless it was absolutely necessary. And she had only
worsened things by continuing to see Moses Choi, an ethnic Korean who owned
pachinko parlors. Her sister Mari and her mother urged her to end it; they believed
that his pinball business, however lucrative, was not respectable. But she couldn't.
He had been a good friend to her; he had changed her life. And he was the only
man she had never cheated on-something Etsuko had never believed could be possible
for herself.

The spring before her thirty-sixth birthday, when she was still married and
living in Nagano, Etsuko had seduced another one of her high school boyfriends.
She had been having a series of affairs for almost three years with various
men from her adolescence. What amazed her was how difficult it was the first
time but how effortless it was to have all the others that followed. Married
men wanted invitations from married women. It was no trouble to phone a man
she had slept with twenty years ago and invite him to her house for lunch when
her children were at school.

That spring, she began sleeping with an old boyfriend from her freshman year
in high school. He'd grown up into a handsome, married playboy who still had
the tendency to talk too much. One afternoon in her tiny Nagano living room,
as the playboy was getting dressed to return to his office, he bemoaned the
fact that she wouldn't leave her dull husband, who preferred the company of
his work colleagues to hers. He laid his head between her small breasts and
said, "But I can leave her. Tell me to do it." To this, she said nothing.
Etsuko had no intention of leaving Nori and the children. Her complaint about
her husband was not that he was boring or that he wasn't home enough. Nori was
not a bad person. It was just that she didn't feel like she knew him in any
clear sense after nineteen years of marriage, and she doubted that she ever
would. Her husband didn't seem to need her except to be a wife in name and a
mother to his children. For Nori, this was enough.

I can't wait to read the rest of it.  Read the full excerpt here.