radfrac_archive_full (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2007-08-07 06:48 pm
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2007-08-07 06:48 pm
bookery
I've added more podcasts to my alertness arsenal. "Bookworm" is very good. The host sounds like Mr. Badger just woken from his winter doze, all pleased and snuffly. Like he's digging for insight around the bumptious roots of the vast trunk of Literature. He has the best interview subjects.
That particular podcast is always exactly twenty-six miuntes and forty-eight seconds long, and has a short instrumental interlude in its middle, on which evidence I assume it is taken from broadcast, and usually observes a newsbreak.
One of the archived Bookworm podcasts was a discussion with the translators of two new volumes of Pierre Reverdy. What they read out sounded extraordinary -- that distinctive voice of surrealism, deadpan, bizarre, abrupt, childish.
It would be asking a great deal to find much material from a second-tier French poet in the local public library, but I did discover Modern French Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Its superior side-by-side format (the only really good way to read translations) and its eight poems of Reverdy's, translated by Patricia Terry, have allowed me to embark on another bout of one of my favorite amateur passions -- translation. As with all true amateurs, my utter unsuitability for this task is what makes it uniquely mine.
I read recently (in the New Yorker) that the fashion in repairing rare books has changed. Instead of trying to make mends invisible, tears aer fixed with bright white paper, the better to see your interventions by, my dear.
There must be similar fashions in translation, if I only knew enough translators to cite them. Along the two axes, of fidelity in meaning and fidelity in form and sound, the counters must slide and click and occasionally collide, depending on the intellectual values of the day. If I were to hazard, and it would be hap-, I'd guess that in 1975, the year of Modern French Poetry, meaning was in ascendancy over form. The translations seem close in direct sense, but not very evocative. The new ones, of course, are too new to be got, so I am stuck fiddling with the old, like trying to re-solve someone else's sudoku puzzle. Except that instead of one there are myriad solutions, most of them bad. (What would the universe be like if mathematics worked that way?)
* * * * * *
I was going to offer, if you came up with a really good title for the previous-post-mentioned review blog (it need not be a literal reference to reading, reviewing, or trains*) to let you choose the book (or restaurant or movie, etc.) that I began with -- stipulating right of refusal if I just couldn't bear it. Does that make it more, or less, appealing?
{rf}
*For example, you could suggest "The train runs backward" or you could as easily suggest "Pink mushrooms fall from the sky". I will consider all.
That particular podcast is always exactly twenty-six miuntes and forty-eight seconds long, and has a short instrumental interlude in its middle, on which evidence I assume it is taken from broadcast, and usually observes a newsbreak.
One of the archived Bookworm podcasts was a discussion with the translators of two new volumes of Pierre Reverdy. What they read out sounded extraordinary -- that distinctive voice of surrealism, deadpan, bizarre, abrupt, childish.
It would be asking a great deal to find much material from a second-tier French poet in the local public library, but I did discover Modern French Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Its superior side-by-side format (the only really good way to read translations) and its eight poems of Reverdy's, translated by Patricia Terry, have allowed me to embark on another bout of one of my favorite amateur passions -- translation. As with all true amateurs, my utter unsuitability for this task is what makes it uniquely mine.
I read recently (in the New Yorker) that the fashion in repairing rare books has changed. Instead of trying to make mends invisible, tears aer fixed with bright white paper, the better to see your interventions by, my dear.
There must be similar fashions in translation, if I only knew enough translators to cite them. Along the two axes, of fidelity in meaning and fidelity in form and sound, the counters must slide and click and occasionally collide, depending on the intellectual values of the day. If I were to hazard, and it would be hap-, I'd guess that in 1975, the year of Modern French Poetry, meaning was in ascendancy over form. The translations seem close in direct sense, but not very evocative. The new ones, of course, are too new to be got, so I am stuck fiddling with the old, like trying to re-solve someone else's sudoku puzzle. Except that instead of one there are myriad solutions, most of them bad. (What would the universe be like if mathematics worked that way?)
* * * * * *
I was going to offer, if you came up with a really good title for the previous-post-mentioned review blog (it need not be a literal reference to reading, reviewing, or trains*) to let you choose the book (or restaurant or movie, etc.) that I began with -- stipulating right of refusal if I just couldn't bear it. Does that make it more, or less, appealing?
{rf}
*For example, you could suggest "The train runs backward" or you could as easily suggest "Pink mushrooms fall from the sky". I will consider all.
no subject
no subject
Pun on "perennial"?
{rf}
found u
(Anonymous) 2007-08-13 03:06 am (UTC)(link)radiant,
wehhee i found you and have been marvelling at your literary insights
xoxo
zoe
hmmm- signing off i think i need another name too
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Re: found u
{rf}