Wednesday poem

In loving memory of my father (9.11.1958 - 6.15.2012) and my grandfather (2.07.1934 - 12.11.2012).

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes, or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down on a couch or in a field,
drugged, perhaps, by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them

which makes them lift their oars, and fall silent,
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

Billy Collins

Pruning the classics

Here in the US, Russian writers seem to hold an undisputed pedestal among the ranks of world literary giants. But students in Russia would apparently beg to differ.  As experts in the country compile a list of the top 100 books that they consider required reading, the magazine Bolshoi Gorod ran an article where it polled 600 upperclassmen about their most unloved works of Russian literature. Stunned by the results--and by the audacity of the responses--I decided to post the poll's findings and translate the more memorable things that Russian students had to say about their supposed literary heroes.

Top Russian writers that students would exclude from the reading program


1. Leo Tolstoy

Main works: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

"They should exclude Leo Tolstoy with his novel War and Peace. His chauvinistic views are a serious cause for concern. The novel is simply saturated with condescension towards women. And the saddest part is that Tolstoy portrays it as the right attitude to have: like, yeah, I'm a patriarchal bore, but such is life, and women's fates are already determined."

"I would take out Leo Tolstoy because I didn't read his novel War and Peace, and reading it was really important in order to write a good essay on the Russian-language section of the EGE [Russian equivalent to the SAT]. No novel, no problem."

"I would gladly take out L.N. Tolstoy and all writers like him from the school program. It's like he did it on purpose: sat down and wrote a thousand pages just for his own pleasure, and for the pain of millions of today's students."


2. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Main works: Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; Demons; The Idiot.

"They need to take out the dreary Dostoevsky, because he's a completely unintelligible schizophrenic."

"I would exclude Dostoevsky, because he's depressive, maniacal and absolutely awful. When you're a teenager and everything already kind of sucks, and you get Dostoevsky in your reading program, it makes life miserable beyond belief."

"As wrong as this may sound, I would exclude Dostoevsky. I think his works are too heavy. People have to find their way to them on their own."


3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Main works: The Gulag Archipelago; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; The Cancer Ward.

"I'm voting to exclude Solzhenitsyn--he's a blue-collar writer, not an artist."

"He's whiny, tedious and boring. It's like he's asking people to feel sorry for him."

"I suggest we exclude Solzhenitsyn. He doesn't add any literary or artistic value. It's bad for you to read so many lies, especially when they're presented in such crude language."


4. Mikhail Sholokhov

Main works: And Quiet Flows the Don; The Fate of a Man.

"Reading Sholokhov is impossible."

"Sholokhov should be excluded. I can't think of a single person who managed to get through him. And Cossaks aren't Russians, so it's not interesting to read about them."

"They should take out Sholokhov. I really don't think his works have any artistic value, and his Nobel prize should have gone to Bulgakov."


5. Alexander Pushkin

Main works: Eugene Onegin; Boris Godunov; pretty much all of Russia's most famous poems, fairy tales and plays.

"After 11 years of schooling, everybody's had it with Pushkin. They should cut him down by about a factor of three. After such intensive studying, you don't even want to hold one of his books in your hands."

"Take out A.S. Pushkin. His works are considered classics of Russian literature because he wrote badly when those before him wrote even worse."

"Take Pushkin out of the program. His works no longer make sense to most representatives of contemporary youth."


6. Nikolai Gogol

 Main works: Dead Souls; The Government Inspector; "The Overcoat;" "The Nose."

"Dead Souls is like personal torture."

"The program should get rid of Gogol, because he despises Jews."

"Gogol. His delivery is too particular. Teachers who follow the syllabus and stick to the standards of teaching are like death for Gogol. And he didn't die in order to have to repeat himself every time."

______________________________________________________

For those not familiar with Russian literature, this list just about covered the country's most well-known writers. On the other hand, the students listed great Russian writers whom they would include in the reading program instead. These include the sci-fi Strugatsky brothers, along with Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Dovlatov--with the first being prominent Soviet-era dissidents, and the latter two emigrating from the Soviet Union altogether. Among foreign writers, Russian students preferred Dante, Ayn Rand, Chuck Palahniuk, Roberto Coelho, James Joyce and... J.K. Rowling. I guess some things are the same, no matter what country you're in.

Story time: David Sedaris reads Miranda July

One of my favorite podcasts is The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, a monthly gem in which a well-known writer reads a short piece by another, often lesser-known writer. In this month’s fiction podcast, David Sedaris reads “Roy Spivey,” by the writer and filmmaker Miranda July. You may have seen her in the film she wrote and starred in, "You and Me and Everyone we Know," or the more recent "The Future." She's also published multiple short story collections, produced music videos and staged performances, and curated exhibits of her own work at  the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. She even designed a set of pillowcases. And all this from someone who dropped out of college her sophomore year. Most people either worship or hate her, but the latter, as Sedaris says, are probably just jealous.

Miranda July: writer, filmmaker, performance artist.

I listened to this story during a leafy walk home from the grocery store. It made me smile to myself, causing passersby to give me curious looks. To quote the podcast website, "the story, which appeared in the The New Yorker in 2007, is about a young woman’s encounter with a famous actor aboard an airplane and the reverberations of their exchange throughout her life."

He slept for the first hour, and it was startling to see such a famous face look so vulnerable and empty. He had the window seat and I had the aisle, but I felt as though I were watching over him, protecting him from the bright lights and the paparazzi. Sleep, little spy, sleep. He was actually not little, but we're all children when we sleep. For this reason, I always let men see me asleep early on in the relationship. It makes them realize that even though I am 5 feet 11, I am fragile and need to be taken care of. A man who can see the weakness of a giant knows that he is a man indeed...

 This story is wonderfully written and wonderfully read. A meeting through words of two great contemporary American writers. Take a listen.

ALTA Conference: Part 2

Translating Murakami in Europe

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, originally written in Japanese, shown here in its English, Polish, Danish, and Russian translations.

Haruki Murakami is probably the most widely-known Japanese writer in the West. I was excited to see a panel on his work as I was currently reading his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and wanted to hear about the challenges of translating literature out of the Japanese. The panel turned out to be fascinating, led by three women translators who, bypassing English completely, translated Murakami from the Japanese directly into Danish, Polish and Norwegian. I found it uncanny their ability to master two languages from strikingly different language families. 

The most compelling points of the presentation dealt with the particularities of Murakami's style; in particular, his philosophical plays on the Japanese language and his deliberately inconsistent use of tense. In several novels, Murakami injects the present tense--a tense not commonly used in English narratives--to play with time, to blur the boundary between dream and reality, or to distinguish the voice of a particular character. To English readers, the present tense is unsettling (it is "the tense of fear," as one of the translators put it) and is generally disliked by English editors. The more familiar past tense, meanwhile, makes the reader's experience comfortable and safe. What Murakami himself said after one of the translators asked him about the subject suggests that the role of tense in a particular language is as much a product of that culture as its grammar, humor, and everything else:

"Western translators should translate into the tense that sounds the most natural to their readers. In Japanese, tense is much less essential to the work than the sound and weight of individual words."

Tense serves an additional purpose for Murakami: it allows him to take the reader on his philosophical wanderings through time. His latest novel, the sprawling IQ84, was purportedly inspired by Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. This seven-volume masterpiece was Proust's self-described attempt to write a "cathedral-novel" that would do narratively what a great cathedral does architecturally--to cut through centuries and space while enclosing within itself a a sacred, nearly static world. (I have only been able to get through the first volume of Lost Time, and while the language really is as breathtaking as a French cathedral, the centuries you spend reading the thing will eventually crumble your willpower).

I have since finished reading the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a dreamy Japanese take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and look forward to reading the new Murakami, in light of my new insights.

ALTA 2012

It's been two weeks since I returned from a spontaneous visit to Rochester, NY, to attend the 35th conference of the American Literary Translators Association. During the three-day-long event, I got to hear fascinating panel discussions about the craft and theory of translation, explore the quirky hangouts of Rochester, and meet wonderful translators from the US and abroad who made me realize that theirs is the kind of professional community I'd like to belong to. I'm particularly grateful to Chad Post and his crew at Open Letter Books, the publishing house where I might intern this spring, for showing me the town, taking me out for beer and darts, and treating me like part of the family.

The conference was a feast of great thinking and debating about some of the most fundamental issues of literature in translation. By habit, I took a ridiculous amount of notes. Over the course of three blog posts, I plan to unload these notes in a more succinct (and more readable) form, so they may serve as future material for myself and as a potentially interesting read for other people.


ALTA Conference: Part 1

Translation Challenges in Modern Russian Prose 

Recent developments in the Russian literary and cultural landscape have posed challenges to translators who want to convey Russia's evolving humorous expressions, slang terms and contemporary ideas to the non-Russian reader. One way translators have sought to bridge the cultural gap is through the use of new media (from multimedia to online glossaries), popular reference sites (such as Lurkmore) and interactive, searchable texts. But during the very act of explaining modern cultural references within the text--by way of injections, footnotes and other well-meaning "interventions"-- translators run the risk of altering the effect of the original, and further distancing the reader from the work.

Translators of 20th-century Russian prose experienced this dilemma after the death of Stalin, when substandard country speech (aka "democratized speech") began to make its way into state-sanctioned literature. Writers like Vasily Shukshin, who wrote with warmth and humor about rural themes, used swearing and other "salty" language to break Soviet literature out of its rigid Stalinist style. Translators conveyed this new saltiness by using truncated words, deliberately bad grammar, and orthography that reflected common pronunciation.

Another way to assist the reader was through hypertextual translation: weaving the translator's own explanations, background information and definitions into the body of the text. Perhaps the godfather of hypertextual translation is Vladimir Nabokov, whose translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin included his own running commentary within the text itself on the joys and challenges he encountered during the course of his work. Most readers, however, stay away from enhanced texts in the same way that wholesome eaters shy away from fortified foods: they worry that they're not getting the real thing.

Alexander Pushkin (1799 - 1837) is regarded as Russia's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. To this day, Russian schoolchildren are required to learn his works by heart.

The main dilemma for translators is that readers want a monochrome text that reads as though it were not translated at all; against this expectation, one awkwardly translated word or phrase can taint the reader's entire experience. Readers want to feel as though they are reading in French, Japanese or Russian, despite their full awareness that they are processing the text in its English form.

The lessons to translators:

1. Don't tell something just because you know it. This includes the injection of biographical notes, scholarly explanations and various "fun" facts that you may find interesting, but which ultimately clog up the text.
2.  If you must explain something, do so in a footnote or in a note at the end of the book. This will function as an optional resource (as opposed to an intrusive one) for the curious reader, who will turn to the note as a kind of  pop-up picture of additional context.

crutch words

In school and at work, we gradually learn to eliminate unnecessary words from our written correspondence. But pruning one's speech of common verbal overgrowths is a much more challenging, and a much less often attempted task. While nerding around on thesaurus.com, I came across this handy overview of the top-8 "crutch words" that we often use to add bulk, but not substance, to our conversations.

I like this list for two reasons. First, it made me realize how much filler I actually use in my own speech. Second, it brought up the curious paradox that these simple, harmless words, which seem almost impossible to misuse, are in fact used incorrectly most of the time.

One of my favorite Regina Spektor songs sums up crutch words perfectly:

...they don't serve much use
no healthy calories,
nutrition values.

So here's to nutritious speech--and to delicious conversation.

1. Actually

   Crutch words are words that we slip into sentences in order to give ourselves more time to think, or to emphasize a statement. Over time, they become unconscious verbal tics. Most often, crutch words do not add meaning to a statement. Actually is the perfect example of a crutch word. It is meant to signify something that exists in reality, but it is more often used as a way to add punch to a statement (as in, "I actually have no idea")

2. Literally

   This adverb should be used to describe an action that occurs in a strict sense. Often, however, it is used inversely to emphasize a hyperbolic or figurative statement: "I literally ran 300 miles today."

3. Basically

   This phrase is used to signal truth, simplicity and confidence, like in "Basically, he made a bad decision." It should signify something that is fundamental or elementary, but too often this word is used in the context of things that are far from basic in order to create a sense of authority and finality.

4. Honestly

   This crutch word is used to assert authority or express incredulity, as in, "Honestly, I have no idea why he said that." However, it very rarely adds honesty to a statement.

5. Obviously

   This word should signify an action which is readily observable, recognized, or understood. Speakers tend to use it, however, to emphasize their point with regards to things that aren't necessarily obvious: "Obviously, he should have thrown the ball to first base."

6. Like

   The cardinal sinner of lazy words, like is interspersed in dialogue to give a speaker more time to think or because the speaker cannot shake the habit of using the word. Like should describe something of the same form, appearance, kind, character, or amount. But, very often, it is used involuntarily in conversation, just like um.

recent reads

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

by Maria Semple

Ice. It's trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue. (Snow is white; ice is blue. You'll know why, Bee, because you're knowledgeable about these things, but I had no idea.) It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidden black.

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is referred to in multiple reviews as an "epistolary novel"--a fancy way to describe the ultra-modern lack of narrative that makes this book feel as hip and unorthodox as its heroine, and the city she spends most of her time trying to flee. Stitched together from a trail of emails, police reports and handwritten notes, Bernadette tells the story of crumbling architect Bernadette Fox, a former MacArthur genius gone cuckoo amid the rain and riffraff of Seattle. After Bernadette gradually disconnects from her Microsoft-god husband and disappears without a trace, it falls on her clever daughter, Bee, to find her. Add to the mix a demonic blackberry bush, a swarm of private-school moms collectively known as "the gnats" and a virtual personal assistant named Manjula, and you're not even close to describing the mayhem that animates this unusual novel. It ends with a wild chase across Antarctica--bringing the story, and Bernadette, back to the city she might love after all. I normally wouldn't go for a TV-show type plot like this, but the book's style, in addition to my own love-hate relationship with Seattle, made me appreciate its caffeine-like jolt.

Death and the Penguin 

by Andrey Kurkov

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complimentary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than amity.

So much for disproving the cold-weather stereotypes: Death and the Penguin, originally written in Russian by dark humorist Andrey Kurkov, sets the reader in the middle of snowy, post-Soviet Ukraine, packing the place with copious deaths and, yes, even a penguin. The main protagonist is Viktor, a struggling writer getting by on writing advance obituaries for the targets of a local crime ring, who adopts a penguin named Misha, not realizing the pet will become his mute and melancholy alter-ego. Misha bears a touching resemblance to the disoriented post-Soviet man, spending most of his time half-asleep in the "hidey hole" behind the couch and emerging only to guzzle frozen herring and to get a sniff of his master's vodka. At times, the English translation--completed, fittingly, by one George Bird--reads with the unsteadiness of a penguin's waddle, but it's not the language that gives the book its charm. It's the combination of crime noir and communist-era humor, which, thankfully, didn't get lost in translation.

creature comforts

The process of becoming an "adult" and gradually taking on greater responsibility for my personal expenditures has meant that I am much less prone these days to spend money on sweet nothings. But since I was little, I've felt a magical pull toward certain objects that seem to have their own character or personality, particularly if these objects speak to my inner home body--like warm socks, wool sweaters, or well-worn books. It's these homey items that I can never resist taking home with me. And that's what happened when I found these little cuties in a little shoe store in Bethesda. They are made from soft leather and canvas, with apparent stitches. Their simple, unfinished appearance is friendly. And they are quiet.

These shoes are special because of what they evoke in me--a long-lost sense of childhood, with its cozy routines, its simple pleasures and tiny, everyday adventures. When the weather gets colder, I'm going to put on these shoes and go crunching around in the autumn leaves. New shoes for a new adventure, and for a big Olga who still wishes she were small.


 

translation takeoffs

The latest literary roundup from the Prague-based blog Literalab mentions my friend and mentor, Julia Sherwood, for her recent publication in Two Lines: Passageways, a literary translation journal produced by the Center for the Art of Translation. This past spring, during a cozy and gracious dinner with Julia and her husband, Peter Sherwood--a Hungarian translator and a fascinating man, who happened to be my professor that semester--I was introduced to the magical world of translation, and have been more or less stuck there, blissfully, ever since.

I'm happy for Julia for the recognition of her latest work, a translated excerpt from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s novel, Seven Days to the Funeral (although I'd be even happier if it were available online!). And my mind is now abuzz with the idea of preparing one or two things of my own to submit to Two Lines, or polishing up some projects I've already started. Oh my goodness. As a favorite author wrote, my little cup brims with tiddles.

Literalab also notes the fantastic Russian poetry translations that made it into the annual Two Lines print publication. I'm sharing one of these poems, with its Russian original, here; a delicate piece by Arseny Tarkovsky, father of the legendary director.

The translators have taken liberty with some of the images and individuals phrases, but have preserved the overall wonder expressed in the poem, using nearly identical rhyme. But the Russian original is still more magical. In the last line, stars are falling onto the poet's sleeve.

Visit Two Lines Online for a treasure-trove of other recently published translations.

I learned the grass as I began to write . . .

By Arseny Tarkovsky

Translated by Philip Metres; Dimitri Psurtsev

I learned the grass as I began to write,
And the grass started whistling like a flute.
I gathered how color and sound could join
And when the dragonfly whirred up his hymn,
Passing through green frets like a comet, I knew
A tear was waiting in each drop of dew.
Knew that in each facet of the huge eye,
In each rainbow of brightly churring wings,
Dwells the burning word of the prophet—
By some miracle I found Adam’s secret.

I loved my tormenting task, this intricate
Placing of words, fastened by their light,
Riddle of vague feeling and a simple answer
To the mind. In “truth” I thought truth appeared.
My tongue was true, like a spectral analysis,
And words gathered around my feet to listen.

What’s more, my friend, you’re right to say
I heard one-quarter the noise, saw half the light,
But I did not debase the grasses, or family,
Or insult the ancestral earth by being blithe,
And as long as I worked on earth, accepted
A gift of coldest spring water and fragrant bread,
Above me unfathomable sky still stood,
And stars tumbled around my head.

_____________________________________

 Я учился траве, раскрывая тетрадь...

          Я учился траве, раскрывая тетрадь,
          И трава начинала, как флейта, звучать.
          Я ловил соответствие звука и цвета,
          И когда запевала свой гимн стрекоза,
          Меж зеленых ладов проходя, как комета,
          Я-то знал, что любая росинка - слеза.
          Знал, что в каждой фасетке огромного ока,
          В каждой радуге яркострекочущих крыл
          Обитает горящее слово пророка,
          И Адамову тайну я чудом открыл.

          Я любил свой мучительный труд, эту кладку
          Слов, скрепленных их собственным светом, загадку
          Смутных чувств и простую разгадку ума,
          В слове п р а в д а мне виделась правда сама,
          Был язык мой правдив, как спектральный анализ,
          А слова у меня под ногами валялись.

          И еще я скажу: собеседник мой прав,
          В четверть шума я слышал, в полсвета я видел,
          Но зато не унизив ни близких, ни трав,
          Равнодушием отчей земли не обидел,
          И пока на земле я работал, приняв
          Дар студеной воды и пахучего хлеба,
          Надо мною стояло бездонное небо,
          Звезды падали мне на рукав.
 

Sunday morning

Three months since my move to Washington, DC, I've decided to start a blog. Yes, it's about time.

Sunday mornings at the "U Street Mansion" mean classical music and languid sifting through the Sunday Post, signs of what we like to think is a refined household. My four housemates and I range from the artsy (graphic designer, swing dancer) to the athletic. Our collective resume includes positions at CNN, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Geophysical Union, the National Democratic Institute and the Department of Homeland Security.

We live in a brownstone Victorian home built in 1905, a three-story old beauty with narrow creaking stairs and a stubborn gas stove. Our porch opens up to a secret garden, a former cement lot transformed into a green haven by the initiative of our neighbors. I have come to love this home, and the people in it, dearly.

This music is playing as I type. Outside, a slow, gentle rain. The beginning of the end to another precious summer weekend.