May 6, 2013 Arts & Culture Proust, Lost in Translation By Alexander Aciman The first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way was published almost exactly a hundred years ago. Its opening lines make one thing inescapably apparent: Proust’s style is inimitable; there is much more to it than long sentences, pauses for reminiscence and brittle cookie breaks, and whatever other tropes readers have associated with Proust. It is a style that tussles with our notion of literary temporality itself. Over the last century, countless translators have struggled with these famous opening lines: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: « Je m’endors. » Nobody seems to be able to agree whether to translate the verb of the principal clause as a conditional or a past participle, because while in French it is obviously the latter, it seems to act as the former. We’ve had various degrees of “went to bed early,” “used to go to bed early,” “would go to bed early,” each meaning more or less the same thing, but none hitting the nail directly on the head. Scholars have found these lines, at once, undeniably charming and a huge pain to work with. But in this seemingly untranslatable sentence, even among translators—whose very job it is to take troublesome idioms and phrases and grammatical twists and make them legible and appropriate, and to do so by imparting as much of Proust’s style and as little of their own as possible—there is so much variety that it raises another important question: How would this sentence have been handled by other writers? Read More
May 3, 2013 Windows on the World Andrea Hirata, Jakarta, Indonesia By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Since my childhood, I have rarely had the power to control where I can be. Life has not given me many choices. But after writing my first novel, I started thinking of leaving my place of employment, where I worked for almost twelve years. Though writing is a very risky way of making a living in Indonesia, I finally resigned from my job, and now I’ve got this strange feeling of relief. The decision to write full-time meant I couldn’t afford to buy a house. A friend kindly offered me the use of his apartment in a thirty-six–story building full of newlywed couples in the southern area of Jakarta. I didn’t like my working space at first, but the scenery and everything going on outside have worked their magic on me. From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance. —Andrea Hirata
May 1, 2013 Arts & Culture The World of Tomorrow By Sadie Stein On April 30, 1939, the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows. You’re probably familiar with the fair’s iconic deco aesthetic and modern marvels, but did you know there was poetry, too? The Academy of American Poets sponsored a contest to find the Official Poem of the New York World’s Fair, with contestants encouraged to write on the theme “The World of Tomorrow.” The prize was $1,000; the judges were poets William Rose Benét, Louis Untermeyer, and, oddly, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. The winner was Pearl Levison and “World of Tomorrow.” (Of the five runners-up, three are also called “The World of Tomorrow.” One is titled “Tomorrow, America,” while Rosalie Moore opted for the economical “Tomorrow.”) A New York Times article from May of 1939 describes Levison as “a 23-year-old poet who has lived all her life in this city,” while the Daily News specifies that the winner hails from “the arty precincts of MacDougal Alley” in Greenwich Village. The poem (which is ten pages long) may be found here. (And no, as close readers will have noticed, the woman pictured is not the poet but “showgirl” Lois De Fee, engaging in “a nudity display” of archery, wrestling, running, and boxing.)
April 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Business as Usual By Sadie Stein Well-known businesswoman Alice B. Toklas. Much has been made in recent days of Wikipedia’s decision to place certain authors under the rubric “American Women Novelists,” rather than merely “American Novelists”—the sort of thing which, in my retail days, I might have referred to as “a strong choice.” Perhaps less controversial, but I would argue just as peculiar, is their designation of a lady who would today have been 136. In the alphabetized list of notable birthdays for April 30 one may find the following: “Alice B. Toklas, American businesswoman.”
April 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Falling Men: On Don DeLillo and Terror By Chris Cumming Some terrorist attacks become cultural obsessions, while others are forgotten completely. There were three bombings in New York City in 1975, none of which I’ve ever heard talked about, each of which would probably shut down the city if it happened now. In January, Puerto Rican separatists set off dynamite in Fraunces Tavern in downtown Manhattan, killing four businessmen—the same number of fatalities, incidentally, that led us to close the airspace over Boston last week. In April, four separate bombs went off in midtown Manhattan on one afternoon, damaging a diner and the offices of several finance firms. The worst one came in late December, when a package of dynamite exploded in the baggage-claim area at LaGuardia Airport, killing eleven. These were underground disturbances, moments of disorder that helped warp the culture, even if they weren’t absorbed or even remembered. In 1975, Don DeLillo was thirty-nine, living in the city, possibly beginning work on Players, his fifth novel and his first about terrorism. Long before it became obvious, DeLillo argued that terrorists and gunmen have rearranged our sense of reality. He has become better appreciated as the world has come to resemble his work, incrementally, with every new telegenic catastrophe, every bombing and mass shooting. Throughout DeLillo’s work we encounter young men who plot violence to escape the plotlessness of their own lives. He has done more than any writer since Dostoevsky to explain them. Read More
April 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Remote Viewing in the Sooner State By James McGirk Assuming my issue of EYE SPY, a British glossy devoted to “The Covert World of Espionage,” can be trusted, between 1973 and 1995 the United States government (and its Chinese and Soviet rivals) spent millions hiring teams of personnel to scry photographs of enemy installations and describe their heretofore unknowable innards. A final report on the Stargate Project, a remote viewing project conducted during these years (preceded by Sunstreak, Dragon Absorb, Centerline, Grill Flame and Gondola Wish), acknowledged a “statistically observable effect,” albeit one producing information too “vague and ambiguous … to yield actionable intelligence.” A contemporary remote viewing conducted by Jeff Martin, fiction editor of This Land Press and (with C. Max Magee) The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, yielded far better results. Imaginary Oklahoma is an anthology of forty-six writers’ attempts to envision Oklahoma without ever having visited America’s forty-sixth state. Martin, in his introduction to the book, describes his inspiration for the project. He gives nods to Lydia Davis’s collection of super-short stories, with their ability to create “worlds in mere sentences” and “beautiful questions” from “simple narrative,” and Ed Ruscha’s 1990 painting No Man’s Land, which Martin describes as “The ghostly outline of the pan-shaped land. The shadowy question mark stretched across the canvas, almost menacing.” It was an excellent pairing of prompts. Imaginary Oklahoma manages to raise the stakes of the short-prose form. Read More