Category Archives: writing

On Gabriel García Márquez (and Cien años de soledad)

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It wasn’t the first book I read in Spanish, but it was one of those experiences that completely changed my life. I was completely flummoxed by a book that started with the phrase, “many years later, while standing in front of a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Almost as good as Cervantes’ “In a place in La Mancha whose name I don’t care to remember.” You remember the books that change your life. There is a before and an after. I can still see Ursula trying to keep here crazy, scheming husband from melting down their life savings. Or Remedios, la bella, whose smell drove mean crazy. Or the seventeen Aureliano’s. Or the parchments. Or the birth of a baby with the curly pig’s tail. Or the storm which sweeps it all away as the ancient alchemist stands by watching. You cannot read this book and be indifferent about the passion of human relations. Without doing much (or any) literary analysis, I’d say that Macondo, as is the case with lots of imaginary places, is the town where you live, maybe the town you grew up in regardless of your specific geography. Towns evolve, people grow up and change, have families, and the Buendía family no different than my family or yours. What is very interesting about the Buendía family is our opportunity to witness their history, warts and all, floods, disasters, tragedies, triumphs, and the simple day-to-day things that happen in all of our lives that no one ever sees or cares about. Is magical realism real? Who knows, but then again, how many weird things have happened in your own life that seem magical but aren’t? So I read this book in Spanish over a long weekend of about three days. I couldn’t stop. The prose, as Mohammad Ali might have said, “Floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee.” This is one of the few times I feel sorry for non-spanish speakers–you can’t enjoy the original–it doesn’t speak to you. Today, I also write as a tribute to the man who created that wonderful novel. So the author has gone, but not gone, really. The Buendía family is now immortal, as is the coronel, and the patriarch, and Santiago Nasar, and the very old man with enormous wings.

On Gabriel García Márquez (and Cien años de soledad)

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It wasn’t the first book I read in Spanish, but it was one of those experiences that completely changed my life. I was completely flummoxed by a book that started with the phrase, “many years later, while standing in front of a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Almost as good as Cervantes’ “In a place in La Mancha whose name I don’t care to remember.” You remember the books that change your life. There is a before and an after. I can still see Ursula trying to keep here crazy, scheming husband from melting down their life savings. Or Remedios, la bella, whose smell drove mean crazy. Or the seventeen Aureliano’s. Or the parchments. Or the birth of a baby with the curly pig’s tail. Or the storm which sweeps it all away as the ancient alchemist stands by watching. You cannot read this book and be indifferent about the passion of human relations. Without doing much (or any) literary analysis, I’d say that Macondo, as is the case with lots of imaginary places, is the town where you live, maybe the town you grew up in regardless of your specific geography. Towns evolve, people grow up and change, have families, and the Buendía family no different than my family or yours. What is very interesting about the Buendía family is our opportunity to witness their history, warts and all, floods, disasters, tragedies, triumphs, and the simple day-to-day things that happen in all of our lives that no one ever sees or cares about. Is magical realism real? Who knows, but then again, how many weird things have happened in your own life that seem magical but aren’t? So I read this book in Spanish over a long weekend of about three days. I couldn’t stop. The prose, as Mohammad Ali might have said, “Floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee.” This is one of the few times I feel sorry for non-spanish speakers–you can’t enjoy the original–it doesn’t speak to you. Today, I also write as a tribute to the man who created that wonderful novel. So the author has gone, but not gone, really. The Buendía family is now immortal, as is the coronel, and the patriarch, and Santiago Nasar, and the very old man with enormous wings.

On false starts

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Ever start a project only to find out you were doing everything wrong and you need to start over from scratch. Some times writing projects are like that–you write a page before you realize that you were on the wrong track, that you were in left-field, that you were lost. There are nights when no matter what you write, you aren’t going to like it, and it turns into a false start that you mercifully throw away the next day. False starts are strange mirages that seem real enough, but then they quickly turn to sand and flow away through your fingers. I can’t even count the times I’ve written four or five sentences, realized it wasn’t working, and thrown it away. The development of a real idea, something concrete that catches the imagination, is often a very fleeting moment, a bit of creative lightening that never strikes twice in the same spot. That lucid moment when you decide to write about love or death, war or peace, is not always or ever obvious. Often, the creative juices flow, but slowly, sometimes painfully, in the middle of the chaos of a regular day, hidden within the mundane noise of everyday routine. That one great idea–a mere fragment of an idea that pops up in a lecture, a reading, a song, a newspaper headline–does not announce itself as a great idea. I use my false starts to weed out the vegetable patch and find that one clear idea that is yearning to be developed into something elegant, more elaborate, more complex. But the false starts fall into the gutter like autumn leaves, brown and gray, having served a purpose, now discarded, turning slowly to dust.

On rhetoric

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I have no idea why certain words go in certain places, but if certain people do it just right, they make a little bit of literary magic, creating a new thing with meaning, persuasion, tropes, metaphors, and maybe clarity, but maybe not. Rhetoric may or may not be many things, but it is almost always a strategy for some kind of argument, even when the strategy is to make no argument at all. Good rhetoric never shows its hand, running in the background of the text like a silent partner in a big financial deal, and bad rhetoric clumsily runs roughshod over its subject, trampling reason, logic, and beauty, leaving the text full of bomb craters, burned jungle, and ruined temples. Some writers like to get to the point with topic sentences and/or a thesis, while others tend to circle around for a few paragraphs as if they were a hungry panther preparing to strike. The sure sin of bad rhetoric is to be both obvious and boring because if you are boring, then no one finishes reading what you have written. Rhetoric is essentially a mystery that has little to do with good writing, good argumentation, or good organization, although all of those elements might sometimes be a part of good rhetoric. Perhaps rhetoric is about balance, but balancing what? From what I can tell, good rhetoric seems to shun complexity and obscurantism, but simplicity is certainly not the key either. Brevity and clarity may be key elements to good rhetoric, but one doesn’t get anywhere unless they finish what they are saying. Perhaps the key is knowing when to quit.

On rhetoric

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I have no idea why certain words go in certain places, but if certain people do it just right, they make a little bit of literary magic, creating a new thing with meaning, persuasion, tropes, metaphors, and maybe clarity, but maybe not. Rhetoric may or may not be many things, but it is almost always a strategy for some kind of argument, even when the strategy is to make no argument at all. Good rhetoric never shows its hand, running in the background of the text like a silent partner in a big financial deal, and bad rhetoric clumsily runs roughshod over its subject, trampling reason, logic, and beauty, leaving the text full of bomb craters, burned jungle, and ruined temples. Some writers like to get to the point with topic sentences and/or a thesis, while others tend to circle around for a few paragraphs as if they were a hungry panther preparing to strike. The sure sin of bad rhetoric is to be both obvious and boring because if you are boring, then no one finishes reading what you have written. Rhetoric is essentially a mystery that has little to do with good writing, good argumentation, or good organization, although all of those elements might sometimes be a part of good rhetoric. Perhaps rhetoric is about balance, but balancing what? From what I can tell, good rhetoric seems to shun complexity and obscurantism, but simplicity is certainly not the key either. Brevity and clarity may be key elements to good rhetoric, but one doesn’t get anywhere unless they finish what they are saying. Perhaps the key is knowing when to quit.

On Walden Pond

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How often do I ask myself, “Why do you participate so willingly in the noisy rat race of humanity?” This is a difficult question when contemplated from the shores of Walden Pond, but my first response is easy–I don’t like being alone all the time and solitude is not all that it’s cracked up to be. At first the idea of being an independent being, completely removed from the frothing mass of humanity seems appealing, far from the maddening crowd. I mean, why should we put up with all the mediatic noise that contaminates our daily routine, the “circuses and bread” thrown to us by idiotic politicians and unthinking news sources that are only interested in defending their own interests and the truth be damned. On Walden Pond I can isolate myself from all of this noise, forget about the savage capitalistic consumerism of my neighbors, shut out the news media, turn a blind eye to the “entertainment” offered on the six hundred channels of cable, and listen to the birds chirp and the wind blow across the pond and through the trees who are my only neighbors. It is easier to live on Walden Pond than it is to tolerate the nonsense that invades my day via newspapers, radio, television, and the internet, but I can’t help but think that something is missing. Granted the noise of the daily grind is infuriating if not irritating, but is perpetual silence preferable? Am I shirking a moral responsibility to participate in the goings on that bother me, irk me, infuriate me? There have been others who have removed themselves from participation in daily life–hermits, anchorites, saints, castaways, the shipwrecked, and in all of those cases there seems to be a sacrifice which is made–the company of other human beings. After re-reading Robinson Crusoe again recently, I came to the conclusion that although Crusoe lived in isolation, he did everything he could to reproduce European society around himself, re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, so that he would feel less alone, and that is what I feel here–alone. Nevertheless, “aloneness” is not entirely a bad thing unless it also looks like a prison sentence that has no end. Perhaps this is why Cain and Abel were brothers, that one alone would have been a tragedy, but paradoxically, the two together was also a tragedy. So one must consider carefully the entire question of human existence in terms of this metaphor, the pair of brothers in which love turned to hate and finally to murder because they could not co-exist without the questions of greed, jealousy, and envy destroying their relationship. Yet, one alone would have also died of eternal melancholy brought on by the loneliness of one voice speaking in a vacuum with no one to hear of either his successes or failures. Is this the central metaphor of human existence? The water laps gently on the shore, the birds twitter and caw overhead, the gentle wind blows through the trees, and if I were to fall, no one would here my cries, no one would be there to help me. The central paradox of Walden Pond seems to be my inability to rid myself of my own humanity, my desire to speak with others, to interact even with those with whom I disagree. My own ideas are interesting but I cannot exist in a vacuum either. Perhaps we are all doomed by our own noise and our inability to separate ourselves from it. In the meantime, I look forward to examining this conundrum a bit further.

On Walden Pond

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How often do I ask myself, “Why do you participate so willingly in the noisy rat race of humanity?” This is a difficult question when contemplated from the shores of Walden Pond, but my first response is easy–I don’t like being alone all the time and solitude is not all that it’s cracked up to be. At first the idea of being an independent being, completely removed from the frothing mass of humanity seems appealing, far from the maddening crowd. I mean, why should we put up with all the mediatic noise that contaminates our daily routine, the “circuses and bread” thrown to us by idiotic politicians and unthinking news sources that are only interested in defending their own interests and the truth be damned. On Walden Pond I can isolate myself from all of this noise, forget about the savage capitalistic consumerism of my neighbors, shut out the news media, turn a blind eye to the “entertainment” offered on the six hundred channels of cable, and listen to the birds chirp and the wind blow across the pond and through the trees who are my only neighbors. It is easier to live on Walden Pond than it is to tolerate the nonsense that invades my day via newspapers, radio, television, and the internet, but I can’t help but think that something is missing. Granted the noise of the daily grind is infuriating if not irritating, but is perpetual silence preferable? Am I shirking a moral responsibility to participate in the goings on that bother me, irk me, infuriate me? There have been others who have removed themselves from participation in daily life–hermits, anchorites, saints, castaways, the shipwrecked, and in all of those cases there seems to be a sacrifice which is made–the company of other human beings. After re-reading Robinson Crusoe again recently, I came to the conclusion that although Crusoe lived in isolation, he did everything he could to reproduce European society around himself, re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, so that he would feel less alone, and that is what I feel here–alone. Nevertheless, “aloneness” is not entirely a bad thing unless it also looks like a prison sentence that has no end. Perhaps this is why Cain and Abel were brothers, that one alone would have been a tragedy, but paradoxically, the two together was also a tragedy. So one must consider carefully the entire question of human existence in terms of this metaphor, the pair of brothers in which love turned to hate and finally to murder because they could not co-exist without the questions of greed, jealousy, and envy destroying their relationship. Yet, one alone would have also died of eternal melancholy brought on by the loneliness of one voice speaking in a vacuum with no one to hear of either his successes or failures. Is this the central metaphor of human existence? The water laps gently on the shore, the birds twitter and caw overhead, the gentle wind blows through the trees, and if I were to fall, no one would here my cries, no one would be there to help me. The central paradox of Walden Pond seems to be my inability to rid myself of my own humanity, my desire to speak with others, to interact even with those with whom I disagree. My own ideas are interesting but I cannot exist in a vacuum either. Perhaps we are all doomed by our own noise and our inability to separate ourselves from it. In the meantime, I look forward to examining this conundrum a bit further.

On translating

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Translating by definition is falsification and, ultimately, betrayal. Languages are not parallel so all translation is marked by what is lost, not by what is gained. All translators know this because it is their job to understand, interpret, and compromise as they switch a text or discourse from one language to another. There is no such thing as a literal translation, and all bilingual people understand this chasm between languages that cannot be bridged by translating. Translation is about changing a text is such a way that it might be understandable to people who don’t speak the original language. All translation is about loss. As I look at an English translation of Dante’s Inferno, I can only lament the loss of rhythm, sound, and rhyme. We get the “gist” of what Dante is saying about sin and shame, ego and pride, but his art as a poet is lost forever: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. Translating and translation are about the translator turning a blind eye to the myriad and multiple meanings that cling to the original words and sacrificing the author’s creativity and originality so that the text might be accessible to others who fall outside the circle of the author’s language. Yet, translators prevail, get hired, and they do their jobs with little shame or humility. Translations are as ubiquitous as taxes and death. Could it be, all along, that translation is the world’s oldest profession? The problem, of course, is not translation, but the multiple languages the people of the world speak, that Tower of Babel from which we are doomed to inhabit forever. Yet, I am not in favor of making one language a required, dogmatic official language. The more common norm is for people to live in multilingual societies. Even today there are many areas of the world where people speak two, three, or even four languages according to the demands of the social situation. Being multilingual does not solve the problem of translation but it does eliminate the need for translation. If a person speaks Italian, reads Italian, then anything they experience in that language is self-explanatory even if the person’s first language might be German or French. Translation only occurs if the original language is a barrier to understanding the text, or conversation, or song. The only way to approach translation is to assume failure before you even start, and by assuming failure, the translator can only produce a new text which was inspired by the original. In a sense all texts are failed translations of other texts, and there exists no ur-text or Q manuscript which might have been original. Misreading, misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, lacunae, accidents, double-entendre, obscurity, complexity, prejudice, bias, and misinterpretation all plague the translator who cannot avoid or evade his/her own human condition as imperfect translator. In the end, all translators must recognize their failure, ignore the imperfection of their work, and move forward to the next sentence with the understanding that failure is the best they can do. In a larger sense, this is the existential question of the human condition–translator as failure.

On translating

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Translating by definition is falsification and, ultimately, betrayal. Languages are not parallel so all translation is marked by what is lost, not by what is gained. All translators know this because it is their job to understand, interpret, and compromise as they switch a text or discourse from one language to another. There is no such thing as a literal translation, and all bilingual people understand this chasm between languages that cannot be bridged by translating. Translation is about changing a text is such a way that it might be understandable to people who don’t speak the original language. All translation is about loss. As I look at an English translation of Dante’s Inferno, I can only lament the loss of rhythm, sound, and rhyme. We get the “gist” of what Dante is saying about sin and shame, ego and pride, but his art as a poet is lost forever: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. Translating and translation are about the translator turning a blind eye to the myriad and multiple meanings that cling to the original words and sacrificing the author’s creativity and originality so that the text might be accessible to others who fall outside the circle of the author’s language. Yet, translators prevail, get hired, and they do their jobs with little shame or humility. Translations are as ubiquitous as taxes and death. Could it be, all along, that translation is the world’s oldest profession? The problem, of course, is not translation, but the multiple languages the people of the world speak, that Tower of Babel from which we are doomed to inhabit forever. Yet, I am not in favor of making one language a required, dogmatic official language. The more common norm is for people to live in multilingual societies. Even today there are many areas of the world where people speak two, three, or even four languages according to the demands of the social situation. Being multilingual does not solve the problem of translation but it does eliminate the need for translation. If a person speaks Italian, reads Italian, then anything they experience in that language is self-explanatory even if the person’s first language might be German or French. Translation only occurs if the original language is a barrier to understanding the text, or conversation, or song. The only way to approach translation is to assume failure before you even start, and by assuming failure, the translator can only produce a new text which was inspired by the original. In a sense all texts are failed translations of other texts, and there exists no ur-text or Q manuscript which might have been original. Misreading, misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, lacunae, accidents, double-entendre, obscurity, complexity, prejudice, bias, and misinterpretation all plague the translator who cannot avoid or evade his/her own human condition as imperfect translator. In the end, all translators must recognize their failure, ignore the imperfection of their work, and move forward to the next sentence with the understanding that failure is the best they can do. In a larger sense, this is the existential question of the human condition–translator as failure.