Tag: translation

Short stories are very good for you

I’m always drawn to a book of poems when I heard it has a great sestina. And Joyelle McSweeney’s experimental lament TOXICON AND ARACHNE delivers. The poems, including a cycle of sonnets, deal with bodily toxins as well as suffering and environmental destruction. Then the book finishes with poems about the death of the poet’s infant daughter.

Her work has a driving style that is driven by sound, similar to Michael Laly, while also engaging with the established lyrical forms and the proper literary field of allusions. The pieces are also topical.

The joystick’d boys sink arrows into the ozone.

If we can’t have bees we’ll have drones.

Sometimes a line is re-mixed by ear:

like fruit loops the beak of a toucan
or fish hooks the mutilated pelican

One of the two exceptional sestinas in this collection is about the disappeared Mexican students.

McSweeney’s poems also have an element of decay and decomposition, or a sense of leaving things to nature/chance/entropy, in the form of evocative pseudo-typos that almost approach flarf: “rainment,” “doggrowl,” “Like a dog returns to her thesis,” “urne-buriall.”

These poems go right into the muck at the same time as they evoke classical forms. The grief flows through, careful and multidimensional, and yet delivered in a jaunty rush of language. Achingly beautiful collection from this year.

I want to look so young it would be foolish to think about having kids after all, I have my whole life ahead of me! I could get an MFA!

I attend the MFA thesis reading as a faculty member (of course) and cheer on our small brigade. Afterwards I want to text my friend to come to the graveyard with me so she can watch my back while I press my face in the mud in front of my baby’s grave.

Stephen Dixon is a writer I’ve inexplicably delayed getting around to even though his work is right up my alley. The title story is outstanding: an attempted suicide on the 14th floor of a NY apartment building triggers 14 story lines, the paragraphs all running together whereas an author would typically use space breaks, with the characters ignorant of all the connections. And we delightfully note that this book holds 13 stories, and considering that sometimes a building will renumber the 13th floor to 14…

Ther other standout in the collection is the Pushcart-winning “Milk is Very Good For You,” a piece of erotica narrated by Richard Richardson, in which all the dirty words are systematically misspelled, and the hedonistic escapades of mom and dad and the babysitter are interrupted by the children’s wailing for more milk. Disturbingly pure.

His writing is clear and tight, transparent not only in terms of narrative but for all these underlying algorithms and chain stories–for situations that in some cases are truly horrible and morbid.

Another collection of urban stories, by a cosmopolitan author from Chile. Bolaño is too obvious a name to drop here, but I do think Ramón Ríos is interested in failed, disaffected people in similar ways. She is plugged into the political crises that are very specific to her generation of Chileans, after what Bolaño’s experienced. Both are masters of the story in which nothing happens yet everything culminates and vibrates with significance; you have to wonder how these pieces are holding themselves together. Most of them are very short, only the middle three stories are plied out. On the surface the action is simple, but the scenes are weighed down with memory.

As he descends the stairs, he’s met with the occupations his father used to threaten him with, like a line-up of ghosts: this-beggar reading tarot cards on a bench in the square. This-numbskull selling water bottles on the corner of Atlantic and Nostrand. This-busybody reading a book, sprawled out on the sidewalk, covered with that blanket that this-guy, this-animal, stepped on yesterday as he made his way home from work on East 11th. This-guy stumbling, feeling the city’s pavement under his back. Dirty streets scorching in the sun.

Ramón Ríos chooses amazing details that just plant you in a particular time and place, like upper Manhattan in the early 90s, in “The Object.” There’s a tension between realistic and fantastic modes of narrating the same content. That story moves from a tense and tirade-heavy event with Gordon Lish at Book Culture (the 80’s realism plus the cult of the sentence vibe) out of the bookstore to outside—”we can breathe.” Then we’re leaving Manhattan on a bus, the prose gets more fabulous and “magical realist”: 

Outside, space has twisted into folds, a spiral where our very breathing grants it those multiple universes. The city fades away with every block: the city of shortage, poverty, excess, the centripetal force of fantasy, the void where bombs and fish rain down.

“Invocation” is an ambitious and fascinating two-column story that runs like a libidinal interview between two artists with a past. (The only other two-channel prose piece I can think of is the one in DICTEE by Theresa Cha.) This long story has the best and worst elements of the book. There’s a generous quotation of and reference to critical theorists which I don’t like to come across in this way in fiction, though it is pretty seamless as far as that goes. At the same time there is amazing imagery and transformations in the narration—like if Djuna Barnes were in this trend of feminist theory-driven fiction. The entire “Obituaries” sequence is amazing, capped off by the punk rock lamentation “Dead Men Don’t Rape.” I also loved “Extermination,” which complements Sturgeon’s “It” and the swamp thing mythos, while also working as an allegory that happily and wonderfully marries politics and artmaking.

Business is blooming

FLOWERS OF MOLD
Ha Seong-nan, tr. Janet Hong
Open Letter, 2019

I enjoy short stories more than anything, but unfortunately the literary scene doesn’t care about them at the moment. We’re not in the golden age of magazines anymore. Writers these days need a book to be somebody, and it’s not like I’ve been amazed by the contemporary stories appearing in slick venues like Ploughshares or even Conjunctions.

So it’s lovely enough to read a collection like Ha’s published in English by Open Letter this year (the stories are from the late 90s) because they’re so refreshing, but I’ve also learned from them. The first story, “Waxen Wings,” is told in the second person, making me realize how information can be strategically hidden by the you pronoun until it discharges at the end—and this is a piece that feels like a buildup to the very last sentence.

Ha has a terse and focused voice that, yes, feels cinematic due to the use of present tense and grammatical agency. The opening passage from the story “Nightmare”:

The alarm didn’t go off this morning. She lay curled up like a millipede and heard the old grandfather clock strike six times in the downstairs living room. It was always five minutes slow. She woke from habit and the early light, not the few digital tones of “Animal Farm” that her alarm clock normally played on loop until she turned it off. Her fingers crept up to her bedside, but she couldn’t find the metal chill of the clock.

My favorite story of the ten in this book is “The Retreat,” a darkly funny thriller, similar to the movie PARASITE, but with an even more delicious irony at the center. The business owners of a run down building plot to kill their landlord at a scheduled team-building retreat. But in a second plotline that the tenants don’t know about, we see how this wastrel landlord has it coming.

Ha’s characters are not intelligent or terribly ambitious; they’re worn down by work: white collar drudgery, thankless domestic labor, filthy bars and restaurants. Capitalism in South Korea somehow seems especially fettered and hollow. The US makes its presence known through television programming.

When it feels hard to find new work that isn’t heavily committed either to unrelenting gritty violence on the one hand or milquetoast low stakes social customs narratives on the other, Ha’s collection shows the possibilities for sharply-written situations of small-time crime or just dreamlike anxiety.

Janet Hong has also translated the collection BLUEBEARD’S FIRST WIFE and a novel called A. I’d read Ha’s shopping list, although the title story’s inventories of other people’s trash is close to that.

Heroic crying

THE ODYSSEY
Tr. Emily Wilson
W. W. Norton & Co., 2018

Maybe one of the most significant reading experiences I’ve had in recent memory, at least since 2666.

I remember the hype for this translation being that formally it matched the original ancient Greek line for line, but in a condensed English iambic pentameter, and ideologically it was a satisfying alternative to the Lattimore and maybe especially the Fagles, which tend to slut shame Helen. That’s basically true, and the work also supports the reading of Homer by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in ALL THINGS SHINING, that the gods are externalized human emotions or drives, implying that the story can work at a blunt empirical level: yes, the suitors all missed their spears, and yes clear-eyed Athena was there, but it’s just as well that Odysseus and Telemachus exhibit the situational awareness and blind luck that are called for in moments of decisive violence.

The gods are only interested in civilized places, where folks own enough livestock to sacrifice more of it; they come into being in developed slave and feudalist social formations. They come and go depending on the moment, so Odysseus spends a lot of time crying, lamenting and rolling around in grief, until the time for it is over. At the risk of sounding like a mindfulness huckster, the pagans may have had a better way of possessing emotions than modern Christianity.

It was also excellent to read Wilson’s translation after a long reading of Brecht. Many of the basic principles of the epic were reaffirmed, like the sense of the whole story being known and contained in memory, the downplay of suspense; the “autonomization” or breakdown of scenes into smaller and smaller processes and actions, both a system of layered division and also a bewildering linear stream of action.

The blank verse has a clarity and hard-hitting character, the five-beat lines are actually very prominent, like a military beat. The descriptions have a nice rigor to them, like all the various formulations of Dawn being born, touching the sky with flowers. The epithets are well known from high school English, but in Wilson even a simple phrase seems to bear significance:

Meanwhile, outside Odysseus’ house,
the suitors relished games of darts and discus,
playing outside as usual, with no thought
of others. (Book 17, 167-70)

The suitors play with no thought of others, and having no thought of others is a typical image of what it means to play. Language and speech, the art of rhetoric, of giving and getting information or fabricating a cover story, are all part of Odysseus’s stratagems (Penelope is also noted for choosing her words carefully). But I was struck most of all by a line after Telemachus tells his mother to go to her room: “His flying words hit home.” The whole translation has this effect, despite its rhythm and rigor.

Telemachus took up his spear and marched
out through the hall, two swift dogs at his side.
Athena poured unearthly grace upon him.
Everyone was amazed to see him coming.
The suitors gathered round and spoke to him
in friendly tones; at heart, they meant him harm.
Keeping away from most of them, he joined
Mentor and Antiphus and Halitherses,
who were his father’s friends from long ago. (Book 17, 61-69)

Again, Athena has these machinations (though they don’t exactly add up), and “pours unearthly grace” to amplify the son’s entrance. But it’s also that Telemachus is just a really confident and charismatic figure right now, that he emanates an aura that captivates everyone else in the room. His epithet in the early books is “godlike” when he’s covering ground and sea, believing in himself, and all the rest of it.

Apparently William H. Gass taught Edwin Arlington Robinson’s MERLIN in his creative writing classes. Wilson’s ODYSSEY suggests all the ways verse clarifies narrative action and makes it more engaging.