Drunken Boat II

(Best Garrison Keillor Voice)

It's the birthday of Gaullic assfucker Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud. Born somewhere in rural France, nobody really gave or gives a shit where (least of all him), he lived a life of putrid fakery until he began writing poems, at which point he realized that keeping this up would force people to forgive him everything. So he did, and they did, and the rest is history. Read his poems if you want to find out at exactly what it means to be an adolescent, because really, no one was more of one than him (hence his enduring appeal with adolescents, serial killers, and rock and roll singers). Imitate him if you want to die of leg cancer in your mother's barn.

Back when he was still writing things that looked like poems, he wrote a mini-epic called Le Bateau Ivre, which is always translated as The Drunken Boat, but which I like to call The Ship, Shitfaced. It starts like this. 

The Ship, Shitfaced

I was going down

river when suddenly I realized that everyone was dead! Redskins 

had stapled their pale faces to my boards, which were red too now. 

Yippee!

Then the suitors showed up: wogs with cotton 

and the butter-boxes. They 

wanted me, but I told them to fuck off: 

I had a man already. His name was River 

and he was a drunk. 

He called me kid-stuff because of the way my ass hugged

his peninsula. He lashed me so hard I screamed.

Tohu-Bohu!

We danced all night. Ten nights straight. By 

the time we made it to sea I knew 

I wasn't his first, but you better believe 

I didn't look back for a lighthouse. 

He tasted like apples. Kid-stuff! he cried. 

It didn't matter, 

he made me clean, 

no more wine and puke. Just green green apples. 

From then on I took a bath

every morning. I was milk and stars.

Sailors the color of old fish passed

us with electric blue smiles on their faces. I waved.

Then things went red. 

...And so on and so on, for 24 unbelievable stanzas. One of modern poetry's greatest monuments. After it, nothing was the same. Of the extant translations, I've found some accurate (Fowlie), beautiful (Schmidt), or confusing (Eshlemann). Probably my favorite is by early Nabokov, who turned it into Пяный Корфбль. 

Two Thoughts

1) The much-reported impossibility of translating the great 19th-century Russian poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, a bunch of wonderful writers who my under-read ass doesn't know) makes sense when you think of those poets as translators, and their untranslatable poems therefore as translations. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is my favorite book, presents a particularly striking example of this: translated into English (no matter how adeptly) it sounds unsurprising, like something we've read before. Il est plat, votre poet, as Flaubert told Turgenev. Which is perfectly understandable, since that's what EO is: a translation of Don Juan, not just into the language, but into the mood, place, spirit and character of Russia. In this way, it's closest analogue in English is probably something like the Rubiyat or Pound's Cathay or Logue's War Music: an original poem that gets its poetry from the fierce and loving annex of a foreign sensibility. Pushkin as master translator (better: genius as translator. Shakespeare, who dealt in Ovid, another perfect example. Or Chaucer, who is to my mind the closest English-language comparison to Pushkin).

2) For a long time, I thought it would be interesting to write about the problem of film adaptations (Lord of the Rings or Spider Man, or the forthcoming Lord of the Spider Ring Lantern Vampires), which seem to me to succeed or fail insofar as they have the balls and vision to depart creatively from their source material. But then I realized that movies, like plays, are themselves already adaptations of a pre-existing text. Interesting, no? So, if we agree that the problems of adaptation and the problems of translation can throw at least a little light on one another, we should therefore also admit that movies are particularly useful things for a translator to study. The need for more books or records that show us this process happening. Documentaries? X on X-type collections of interviews? 

Le Bateau Ivre 1

Rimbaud seems to be one of those super-translatable writers, a fact that I didn't understand until last night when, after reading Paul Schmidt's version of "The Drunken Boat" next to Wallace Fowlie's, I began to experience a strange, stereoscopic blurring. It was like I was trying to listen to two men tell me the story of a trip they'd taken. One of the men (Fowlie, who appeared before me in a pastel-blue vest), was bearded and dour and obsessed with telling me exactly what had happened; while the other (Schmidt, who was also wearing blue, but who looked like an older, somewhat-less-androgynous Stevie Nix with his ridiculous menagerie of scarves and bangles), was trying to entertain me. I listened to them both; but after a few minutes I realized that I wasn't really listening to either. The story itself faded into the background, transforming their flailings into a sort of dance, though one whose gestures served a purely decorative and abstract purpose. I watched it hypnotized - and then as I watched, I began to notice something moving behind these patterns: something coiled and mangy, like a sick zoo animal. The whiffs I caught of this strange beast were so pungent that I immediately focused on it exclusively, ignoring the dancing men despite the fact that they had redoubled their efforts in the face of my obvious boredom. Their arms whirled to the point that it became almost impossible  to see what they were hiding behind their backs. Or was it whom? At this point I couldn't be sure, though of course as soon as I realized that I couldn't be sure, I was. I was completely sure in fact, for I could see now that the flashes of snot covered-tunic I'd been glimpsing belonged to the man himself, or rather the Boy himself. I shoved the other two aside testily (a reader's work is never done!), and grabbed his arm. What happened, I asked him? His velveteen jacket had the disastrous heaviness that all fine fabric does when wet, but his candy-cane pantaloons were dry as bones. Holding my palms out, I could feel the heat radiating off them: an impossible heat, as if they'd just been taken out of his mother's machine. And now he was talking, too: automatically, like an athlete running an obstacle course that he's done so many times he dreams about it. I, I, I he said; but by this point, I wasn't listening to him anymore. I wasn't listening to any of them: I was sailing or floating, or anyway just sloshing side to side, like the inch of bug-juice and gasoline that floods every boat no matter how clean. And I was sailing too. I had cast off, or was cast off, to go looking for the poem I'd read. Did I think I would find it? Not really, no. Not at all, actually. But it didn't matter. I was gone like Cortez - almost exactly like him, in fact. Cortez, Cortez, I hummed, as the wind plucked vacantly at my rigging. As for my companions, I found out later that they'd been stapled to my masts like children's drawings on a refrigerator. What music they'd had was used up, and though they thought that they'd escape, they hadn't. It was a crying shame, really; at the same point it was my only hope - for in the pit of my heart, I knew that I knew something they didn't. I was safe, even in the storm's heart, for I had God's arms around me like a lifejacket of love. So I sailed on, pinned like Sebastian in my rigging - of happiness or sadness, I repeat, it didn't matter. I had everything I need, and I couldn't stop, so I didn't. Until suddenly, one blood-red morning, I did.

Walserology

Been reading a lot of Robert Walser these days and even writing a little about him (in this review of his Microscripts, for the Collagist, and a just-finished review of the Berlin Stories coming out in the next issue of the wonderfully-named The Literary Review). To my mind, two questions naturally follow from this: 1) Why Walser, and 2) Why reviews?

Let's start with Walser, a writer who I was initially excited about, then disappointed in, then gradually re-excited about. In this way, I think I'm like most people, who probably heard about his wacky life (last 25 years spent in a mental institution in the Swiss countryside) and bizarre literary output (a veritable ocean of unclassifiable story/essay/prose-poems, which grows significantly thicker and more gnarled during the sanitarium years, when Walser began writing exclusively in code, on the backs of beer coasters and envelopes, etc. These form the aforementioned Microscripts), and then read him, only to discover that his voice is insanely straightforward and therefore almost impossible to read. Children would probably get, and love Walser. Children and horses. For poor convoluted lit majors like myself, however, his little hymns are disconcertingly shiny. They lack the handholds I've been trained to expect in fiction: the puzzles and ambiguities that I expect to find under every book and usually do. So reading them is either like trying to walk on ice without my skates on (I slip all over the place), or wearing skates and trying to walk through a parking lot (I herk and jerk through the stories without any real fluidity). 

Nevertheless, being a true literary masochist, I persist. After reading pretty much all his books over the course of the last three months, (I think the only one I haven't opened is The Assistants, an early novel),  I'm getting the hang of it. I'm starting, not only to be fascinated by Walser, but to actually enjoy reading him. And of course, now that I can actually get something out of him, I've decided that he really is one of the great marginal authors: a mini-talent of epic proportions (everything in Walser is both mini and epic: he's like a Joseph Cornell box in this way, as many people have remarked, or like a Yuri Norstein film, as I believe no one has). 

Some tools for access that have been useful for me, and which I offer to the aspiring Walser reader (in no particular order):

1. Proximity. More than any other author I've ever encountered (except maybe Bachelard), Walser benefits, or suffers, from the actual physical distance between his books and the reader's face. I know this sounds goofy, but I swear it helps. You cannot read Walser standing up, or at a desk, or at arms' length: like an optical illusion, he seems to snap into place somewhere around four to six inches from the nose. Ideally, I think he needs to be read with your cheek on the opposite page, so that the letters begin to stand up off the page like tiny trees. In this way you immediately get the strange balloonist's intimacy-with-distance thing, which is one of Walser's most beautiful effects. 

2. Speed. Walser should be read in third gear. Any faster, and you'll just glide down the page; any slower, and you'll start sinking through it. Above all, don't savor his metaphors: their doors don't open, they're like model train sets. They run and look beautiful, but don't really benefit from exploration or pressure. In this way, they are the exact opposite of Gogol's tiny animals, which they superficially resemble. 

3. Ballooning. I touched on this before (and in the Collagist article), but Walser is a balloonist. He's also a walker - except that, somehow, he turns walking into a sort of human-sized ballooning, as if his head were the pilot and his body the jumble of air and strings. I like to think that anyone who has ever been in a hot air balloon (I have not) will get a physical sense-memory reading him.

4. The English Romantics. In the Literary Review review, I compare Walser to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both were depressives, walkers, and attentive noters, and in both cases, this combination of emotional instability and the very crafty use of vocal instability as a styistic tactic can be both confusing and illuminating. We want to say that Walser wrote to be happy, and that when he stopped being able to write, he became insane - and I think, in an interesting way, that this is both true and not true at the same time. Like Coleridge, Walser was (sometimes dismally, sometimes ecstatically) aware that his true subject was himself, and that use could and should be made even of his difficulties.

5. Flaneurie/The Dandy. Readers of Beaudelaire, Walter Benjamin (especially in One-Way Street and the Arcades Project), Ammons, Thoreau, Will Schofield, or any of the other great literary dandies will recognize immediately what he's up to. Basically, the trick is to put down your book, or pipe, or Wii and go outside. After that, the world begins coming to you, and if it doesn't, you're still fine, since the lack of inspiration is one of the central tropes of late dandyism. 

6. The Prose Poem. Walser's works make this category pointless. 

7. Diaries. Unlike Kafka, Walser didn't keep one. 

8. No irony. There isn't any in Walser. This is maybe the hardest thing a prospective modern reader has to get over. 

Silly and juvenile as he occasionally sounds, Walser is a sharp, sometimes frightening author. The Berlin Stories can sound like Triste Tropiques occasionally - there's this feeling that the narrator is standing in the middle of a crowded street, not alienated at all but rather completely immersed: dreaming the same dream as everyone else. In this way, he shows just how much of an outsider he is. 

Anyway, a wonderful, pantheon-level writer, and one that I'd recommend. Start with the early stories, either in the Berlin Stories or elsewhere. One of the other unique things about Walser is that he appears to have been translated solely by translators of genius, particularly Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. I haven't found a bad edition of his work in English. 

I think on second thought I'll save reviewing for next time. 

(Drawings both by Guy Davenport, who wrote the greatest single piece of criticism about Walser, which is actually a story)

The Worrier

Worry and stories: the pit and meat of a fruit that I've been gnawing my entire life.

I have no idea when it started. Young. Self-mytholigization (which I practice constantly) is great for braids but tricky about origins, since who can really tell where things start. On the one hand, there are the obvious culprits. I'm an oldest child, which means that I saw my place as the center of my parents' universe be completely disrupted when my brother came along. When I was six, my family moved from small town Vermont to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where we lived for the next four years of my life. I did not see this coming. After PNG, we moved to Lusaka, Zambia for three years; then I went to boarding school in Connecticut; then to college. At this point in my life, I'm 31 years old and have never lived anywhere consecutively for more than four years. Anywhere but Vermont, that is, for those first six. 

Being an expat teaches you two great lessons: gluttony, and the importance of stories. The first of these is more fun, but leads to terrible habits. In Zambia, for example, we had three household gods: light, water, and the telephone. Capricious and playful, they ruled over our lives with high-handed glee, frustrating our efforts at stability and sending my mother into fits of rage so terrible that the rest of us huddled for mercy, waiting for the thunderbolt. Stop, shhh, don't anger them, we whispered at her from under the kitchen table. But mom didn't care. A major deity in her own right, she envied these third-world interlopers their freedom. When the power returned to our house after three days of absence, she sniffed slightly before returning, unimpressed, to her Laurens Van Der Post. She wanted to convey a sense of our dignity as human beings to these despots; but as usual, she was thwarted in this by the rest of us, who were not as strong. We whooped with joy the minute the first flicker caused our massive refrigerator to hum to life and continued celebrating throughout the night, cheered on by the happy mutter of whatever appliances we could find. My brother ran through the house turning on all the lights as my father thwacked the television, causing a dim, static-infused image to waver there. You could barely see anything of the picture itself - but then there, in the corner, the chubby little CNN logo stood unmistakably, along with the time and date - in New York city, of course. 

We had been there, allegedly. When school or the simple loneliness of being 12 got me down, I asked my brother, who my mother called a "pack rat", to get out the placemat he'd kept from one of our last MacDonald's visits. It was wrinkled slightly, but could still be counted on for a faint, ever-alluring whiff of grease. We examined it for hours, luxuriating not just in its word scrambles and mazes (which my brother traced out lovingly each time, despite the fact that we'd crayoned in the solutions long ago), but in the marginalia: the copyrights and directions and promotional codes. Though less immediately satisfying, these offered a subtle and completely thrilling reality that the more obvious material could not match. We poured over them like archaeologists, hypothesizing and explaining our way towards the fantastic civilization that they represented - that we ourselves would be a part of, some day!

When exactly that day would come was contested - but its existence was unshakable. My father and mother debated its precise date with the passion of medieval theologians debating the Apocalypse, while my brother and I listened quietly. We had our own theories, of course, which deviated from the family story in detail while following it in bulk. My brother thought we would return through Heathrow, I was sure it would be Charles De Gaulle. My sister, who had been born in Papua New Guinea, and whose status as a bonafide American we therefore maintained was suspect, wanted to know if Moses, our gardener, would come on the same airplane as us, and if she could carry our beloved family calico, Kitty Waddy Doo Doo, in her backpack. I told her that Moses hated snow, and that Kitty Waddy would suffocate in her backpack. As the oldest, it was my job to break the hard truths to my siblings, who I knew had absolutely no idea what was going on. 

In private, I had my doubts, which I brought to my mother. "My little worrier," she said, smiling - assuring me, as only she could, that everything was going to be alright. But my worrying was relentless: a force that I could neither control nor harness. A year earlier, when my family had travelled the remote Cook Islands (my dad was trying to decide between moving us there, or to Zambia), I'd spent a week's worth of nights camped outside my hotel door, waiting for my parents' feet to appear. They were in a different room from us - which fact had convinced me, or my Worry at least, that they were going to slip out one night and disappear, abandoning my siblings and me to this paradise. I still remember that feeling: the intense, overpowering physicality of it. Despite everything that my mind and heart knew to be true - despite all the evidence of twelve years of familial love  - I was convinced they would leave us. It was just a matter of time, before sleep-deprivation overcame the uncomfortableness of the hotel pillow, and I fell asleep at my watch, and then woke up (as one always wakes up, when Worrying) alone. 

Writing this now, I'm not sure how to put it. I don't know if my mother stroked my hair like in a movie (I do remember her stroking my hair), or snapped at me (sometimes she snapped at me), or just stopped whatever she was doing and told me straight that nothing like that was going to happen. However she did it, I am sure I emerged from the kitchen, or bedroom, or wherever we were, refreshed: ready to spread the Good News. Anxious to, actually - for like all converts, I was insecure in my confidence and so desperate to hear it echoed by those around me. I told my brother and sister that it was true: we were going back, it was just a matter of time. A matter of months - weeks, even, which we could count on a calendar or make a snake of construction paper loops to measure, as my mother had advised. She believed in looking at one's fears directly, which is one of the reasons my shifty worries drove her so utterly crazy. But I dove to it, cutting and stapling a long chain that I drooped around my bedroom walls like the carcass of some gigantic beast that I had slain. It wilted in the intense moisture the sub-saharran rainy season until, a few weeks later, I threw it away. 

There was, however, another way: a spell so secret and unpredictable that I kept it from all of them, even my mother. I'd discovered it myself, on one of those long nights that I spent begging God to protect my family from harm. I pictured Him listening intently, with a the tricky smile of a Arabian Nights djinni. He would grant my wishes; but in order to prevent him from slanting them into horrible lessons, I had to be specific. I had to tell him, not just that I wanted my mother not to die, or to be seriously injured, but that I wanted her not to die the next day, in a car crash, caused by a careening truck like the one we'd passed earlier that day. The truck would not be blue, yellow, white, black or red. Or orange. It would not be driven by a man drinking a Coke, or smoking, or with a hat on. For each calamity that I named, four more seemed to appear - but I tracked them down ruthlessly, exhausting myself with disasters. By the time I fell asleep (almost always mid-prayer), I'd imagined everything: I'd seen my mother die horribly, crying, her heart crushed, her eyes raised in desperation. The word God, repeated incessantly at the beginning, had disappeared now, subsumed by the tide - but it didn't matter, for I wasn't talking to God anymore. I was chanting, talking my Worry into a words so terrible that I'm sure they would have caused the rest of my family to pale.

It worked, too. Like a pipsqueak Scheherazade, I turned my worries into stories, which, as all skeptics (whether adults or children) know, never come true. I saved my life for one more night - saved all their lives. After three years in Zambia, we went back. Our house was still there. I went to school, grew up. Then, in 2005, my mother died of brain cancer. Something none of us saw coming. 

Nature Writing

Another chapter of Eugene, OR. I'm letting them land pointillistically, which is a fancy way of saying cut me some slack for this having apparently nothing to do with the last one. The title has a "II" at the end of it because this is the second chapter of the novel "Nature Writing" (one of eight novels in the cycle). Don't worry: I am fairly certain that this will all make sense, at some point. Or worry. That would be refreshing. 

Nature Writing (II)

Then I made my body into a bear’s body – for her, I said. It happened after one of our terrible dreams. My wife was lying in bed thinking about the fight we’d had, about the silverware, which I could never get clean, and about the correct way to floss teeth. Her long thumbs made her a natural at the serial pick-and-slide; but the rabbit, who was also there, found faithfulness of any kind bourgeois. He believed that a true flosser – an artist in other words, displaying an artist’s playfulness with the limitations of his medium – would gravitate naturally towards risk. One of his more popular demonstrations of this hypothesis was to spool an entire box through his lower jaw and then jerk it out, like a magician removing a tablecloth. He called this trick “Tullaine”, after a lost love. But my wife was skeptical. “What does a rabbit know about flossing teeth?” she asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. 

That was the dream; but then later, while I was taking a shower, I noticed that my shoulders had developed two thin ridges of fur on them, right along the top. I knew I had to think fast; so I focused on my right arm, which is my brave arm. “Epaulettes!" I shouted at the showerhead, which in our apartment is even better than a tin can. Sure enough, in a few seconds my wife’s voice came trickling out of it. "Epaulettes?" "Epaulettes," I repeated. "I’m sorry about the silverware." “No you’re not," said my wife. "You just don’t want anyone to be mad at you." The dripped syllables sounded distant: as if she were stuck in the plumbing somewhere. I wanted to twist the shower-head off and shove my paw down it until I felt the soft water of her hair. But I was too big now to do something like that, which meant that all I could do was tell her to wait. "That's what I'm doing," she said. "I'd be down there now, but bears hate water," I said. "Cat's hate water. Bears love water." "I'm changing," I said. "Well then turn the water on," she said. So I did. It rushed over me like an embrace, and I howled for my life; but this, as my wife explained in a letter she sent me after it was all over, only proved that she was right. I hadn't changed a bit. 

Wait

The biggest feeling I get from not working on my novel is dread; ironically, this is almost exactly the same feeling I get from working on my novel. Still, this non-work dread seems slightly more dreadful than the working kind. It's like having a staff or seal of office taken away from me, so that suddenly there's no difference between me and the next guy. How strange! How deeply terrifying, to go overnight from an aspiring member of the elect to someone whose life is not in any way connected to a deeper narrative of work and progress! And is there a writing beyond this kind of narrative? Or am I "giving up", and betraying a dream I've had since I was a kid (though now that I think of it, my dream was initially to make video games, then role playing games, then poems, and finally, novels)...?

The question seems to turn around the word "patience", which Kafka called, not just a virtue, but the virtue. I agree with him; but I think that the real problem for the patient man comes a few steps earlier, when he has to decide whether or not a particular trial is worth being patient about. Let's take a hypothetical: a man is told that he'll inherit a million dollars if he can refrain from drinking alcohol for ten years. In this case, to me, "patience" seems like it would be one of the easiest things in the world to display. The reward is there, the time is definite. Beset though it may be by difficulties and hardships, success becomes essentially a matter of muscle. Will prevails over circumstance or doesn't.

But can we really call this patience? I don't think so - and I don't think Kafka would either. In Kafka's (deeply patient) universe the hypothetical runs more like this: a man is told that he must refrain from drinking alcohol. He is not told why, or for how long, or what the reward for his abstinence will be. Nevertheless, the messenger who tells him this assures him that his task is a matter of the greatest importance - that it is, in fact, the single event that his life has been building up to. He departs in a flurry of what could be wings, or a duck that he's hidden under his trench-coat. He does not pay for his beer.

Putting these two scenarios together, we get a sense of how difficult real patience is. It has nothing to do with willpower; if anything, it insists on the kind of anti-willpower displayed by stones and peasants in Italian movies. To talk about it "requiring" faith sounds wrong: it imposes faith, demands it, in many ways creates it, in reaction to the overwhelming miasma of doubt that it dumps over the patient man's head. In order to counter it, people evolve systems and stories; but this is a last-ditch and somewhat pathetic - if ubiquitous - response. For the world of patience, unlike Harry Potter, will always be there.

I think - and it's true, I could just be blowing smoke up my own ass here - that by putting the novel away after a solid year of hacking at it, I'm trying to exchange my will for a little patience. Does that make sense? I don't want to make it sound neat: it's not neat, or at least I don't think it is. I'm trying to burn my house down so that I can take it with me. My intuition/guess/wager is that the story I've been telling myself about what writing is has become so huge that I can't see whatever is, or isn't, behind it. And I don't think I can write if I can't see.

The next question is, who cares if I write or not? Do I? Or do I just want to be different from everybody else, in a way that my mind knows I've never been and never will be, but my stubborn and human and deeply juvenile heart insists is still possible? To be absolved, and the world alibi no matter where you look...

Li r e s Mut t

The history of literature is full of if onlys. Two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser. If only they'd been recognized in their own time, two lives of loneliness and mental illness might have been averted, and the histories of American and German and World literature invigorated a hundred years earlier. Plus, we would probably have the cure for cancer and a black president and new iphones....for everybody!

Thinking of this, we moan and weep about the waste that is human life...But what if, between Kleenexes as it were, we put the problem to ourselves in a completely opposite way, and say that Dickinson's and Walser's lives occurred exactly as they had to in order to produce the works that they did; and that therefore, the hypothetical "fulfillments" that we wish for them would actually have been disasters, which would have prevented these writers from creating the works they did?

Viewing a writer's life this way - that is, as less a success and more a complicated, elaborate mistake - is itself problematic, since it takes the capacity to write out of the creator's hand and diffuses it into that strange and unreliable god Circumstance. But then isn't every writer simultaneously an autonomous creator AND a sort of conduit to his/her times? And following this, aren't the snakes that the world puts between a writer and his/her goal at least as important as the ladders, since they force him/her beyond a willful expression of intention and into the strange, dangerous, quasi-improvisational space that is creative reaction? 

In order to get a picture of this, close your eyes and imagine you're an aspiring writer (if you're already an aspiring writer, don't bother to close your eyes). As an AW, you've grown up reading or hearing or seeing works of art that you admire, and this admiration leads you to want to create works of art of your own. Naturally, your first attempts at this are imitations of those works that you admire - imitations that succeed or fail to a varying degree (both in your own eyes, and in the eyes of others). With every success, you gain confidence and ambition; with every failure, discouragement, and an appreciation for the successful works that others have pulled off. Eventually, you get to a point where you are either succeeding more than you're failing, or failing more than you're succeeding. Both of these possibilities have their own satisfactions and problems - but it is only in the latter's case that you are gradually pushed towards a difficult question. The question is, very simply, Are you ever going to stop failing and succeed at this? A Yes to this question means back to the drawing board for more work; but what does a No mean? Does it mean Stop writing? Or does it mean, perhaps more strangely, Stop writing these things that you've been trying to write, that you love, and that have for so long been associated in your mind and heart with any future you might have as a writer?

Putting it this way, I want to suggest that the urge to write, to create, is less an aspiration (with its airy connotations of rising) and more a drag, a sinking towards oneself, so that certain writers' "careers" can resemble the movement of spilled water towards the edge of a table. Along these lines, inherited conceptions of what successful writing would look like can act like cards or hands placed in the path of the water, causing a build-up of mass that may at first seem like a failure to move but is in fact nothing more than the accumulation of potential movement that will express itself, and in gushes, the minute said conception disappears. 

In other words, by failing to write like Faulkner, Welty learns to write like Welty. By failing to write like Browning, Pound learns to write like Pound. The writer shoots for something that he loves and falls short, and again and again, until eventually he falls so short that he relinquishes his goal - at which point his idol cracks and he sees what he's been missing this whole time, which is not just his own possibilities, but the real object of study, life. 

Seen this way, failure is a key mechanism of an artist's development - maybe the key mechanism. So we might profitably bogue a page from David Foster Wallace's essay Authority and American Usage, in which he suggests that SNOOTlets (DFW's neologism for budding grammar nazis) develop their hypertrophic linguistic abilities due to an inability to mimic other kids: 

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT - in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for 'peer rapport'..." (Consider the Lobster, p. 103)

Culture here reminds me of biology: adaptations evolve due to a weakness in the organism with respect to the pressures of its surrounding environment. Ergo, if you adapt perfectly, there's no need for the claw or tail or eyespots to be called from the depths of their cells.

So far so good... But what about that second group we mentioned above, the Successes, who set out to imitate, and do? To those of us getting spat on, their lot seems pretty sweet. But I wonder if there isn't more to it, at least in some cases. To adapt is one thing, but to be born into a world that seems to have adapted itself to you, before you even got there? 

The self-mutilation that this fit might demand returns us to that old saw, the Prodigal Son. His story was a favorite of Walser, who also achieved a fair amount of success as a young man. His first essay-stories and novels floated into the world to critical acclaim and then disappeared, as he eventually did, to a Swiss sanitarium. The rest of his career can be seen as a series of increasingly-drastic obstructions, both literal (the sanitarium, an aggressive abhorrence of self-promotion) and literary. Of these latter, the most famous is Walser's habit - adopted around the time he entered the sanitarium where he would spend the last two decades of his life - of writing his stories out in stenographers' shorthand on whatever scraps of paper came his way. These included beer coasters, bills, envelopes, postcards. Sometimes the story filled the frame, sometimes it didn't. 

Fans of the Microscripts (as these collected stories are called in English) usually praise the product, while lamenting the (diagnosed) schizophrenia that caused Walser's life to be so strangely, severely mangled. Rightly so... But behind these lamentations is the question of whether the Microscripts could exist without the weird panoply of obstructions that their author adopted, or felt the need to adopt, in order to call them into existence. The question, difficult and unsolvable, turns around our conception of happiness. What is it? And what about those strange individuals who seem to run, not to it, but away from it - as if in terror of the nightmare of perfect adaptation? 

The story of the prodigal son contains a great mystery, which is why someone with a happy life would decide one day and seemingly out of the blue, to exchange that life for wandering and unhappiness. Why would anyone do that, we wonder? And yet, we exchange our happiness for unhappiness everyday and in a hundred different ways. Walser and Dickinson write in ways that they "shouldn't", live in ways whose invisible logic we describe as tragic and impossible - as if it weren't logic at all but a sort of super-human, sub-human force, like gravity. 

Literature as Self Mutilation

The history of literature is full of if onlys. Two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser. If only they'd been recognized in their own time, two lives of loneliness and mental illness might have been averted, and the histories of American and German and World literature invigorated a hundred years earlier. Plus, we would probably have the cure for cancer and a black president and new iphones....for everybody!

Thinking of this, we moan and weep about the waste that is human life...But what if, between Kleenexes as it were, we put the problem to ourselves in a completely opposite way, and say that Dickinson's and Walser's lives occurred exactly as they had to in order to produce the works that they did; and that therefore, the hypothetical "fulfillments" that we wish for them would actually have been disasters, which would have prevented these writers from creating the works they did?

Viewing a writer's life this way - that is, as less a success and more a complicated, elaborate mistake - is itself problematic, since it takes the capacity to write out of the creator's hand and diffuses it into that strange and unreliable god Circumstance. But then isn't every writer simultaneously an autonomous creator AND a sort of conduit to his/her times? And following this, aren't the snakes that the world puts between a writer and his/her goal at least as important as the ladders, since they force him/her beyond a willful expression of intention and into the strange, dangerous, quasi-improvisational space that is creative reaction? 

In order to get a picture of this, close your eyes and imagine you're an aspiring writer (if you're already an aspiring writer, don't bother to close your eyes). As an AW, you've grown up reading or hearing or seeing works of art that you admire, and this admiration leads you to want to create works of art of your own. Naturally, your first attempts at this are imitations of those works that you admire - imitations that succeed or fail to a varying degree (both in your own eyes, and in the eyes of others). With every success, you gain confidence and ambition; with every failure, discouragement, and an appreciation for the successful works that others have pulled off. Eventually, you get to a point where you are either succeeding more than you're failing, or failing more than you're succeeding. Both of these possibilities have their own satisfactions and problems - but it is only in the latter's case that you are gradually pushed towards a difficult question. The question is, very simply, Are you ever going to stop failing and succeed at this? A Yes to this question means back to the drawing board for more work; but what does a No mean? Does it mean Stop writing? Or does it mean, perhaps more strangely, Stop writing these things that you've been trying to write, that you love, and that have for so long been associated in your mind and heart with any future you might have as a writer?

Putting it this way, I want to suggest that the urge to write, to create, is less an aspiration (with its airy connotations of rising) and more a drag, a sinking towards oneself, so that certain writers' "careers" can resemble the movement of spilled water towards the edge of a table. Along these lines, inherited conceptions of what successful writing would look like can act like cards or hands placed in the path of the water, causing a build-up of mass that may at first seem like a failure to move but is in fact nothing more than the accumulation of potential movement that will express itself, and in gushes, the minute said conception disappears. 

In other words, by failing to write like Faulkner, Welty learns to write like Welty. By failing to write like Browning, Pound learns to write like Pound. The writer shoots for something that he loves and falls short, and again and again, until eventually he falls so short that he relinquishes his goal - at which point his idol cracks and he sees what he's been missing this whole time, which is not just his own possibilities, but the real object of study, life. 

Seen this way, failure is a key mechanism of an artist's development - maybe the key mechanism. So we might profitably bogue a page from David Foster Wallace's essay Authority and American Usage, in which he suggests that SNOOTlets (DFW's neologism for budding grammar nazis) develop their hypertrophic linguistic abilities due to an inability to mimic other kids: 

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT - in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for 'peer rapport'..." (Consider the Lobster, p. 103)

Culture here reminds me of biology: adaptations evolve due to a weakness in the organism with respect to the pressures of its surrounding environment. Ergo, if you adapt perfectly, there's no need for the claw or tail or eyespots to be called from the depths of their cells.

So far so good... But what about that second group we mentioned above, the Successes, who set out to imitate, and do? To those of us getting spat on, their lot seems pretty sweet. But I wonder if there isn't more to it, at least in some cases. To adapt is one thing, but to be born into a world that seems to have adapted itself to you, before you even got there? 

The self-mutilation that this fit might demand returns us to that old saw, the Prodigal Son. His story was a favorite of Walser, who also achieved a fair amount of success as a young man. His first essay-stories and novels floated into the world to critical acclaim and then disappeared, as he eventually did, to a Swiss sanitarium. The rest of his career can be seen as a series of increasingly-drastic obstructions, both literal (the sanitarium, an aggressive abhorrence of self-promotion) and literary. Of these latter, the most famous is Walser's habit - adopted around the time he entered the sanitarium where he would spend the last two decades of his life - of writing his stories out in stenographers' shorthand on whatever scraps of paper came his way. These included beer coasters, bills, envelopes, postcards. Sometimes the story filled the frame, sometimes it didn't. 

Fans of the Microscripts (as these collected stories are called in English) usually praise the product, while lamenting the (diagnosed) schizophrenia that caused Walser's life to be so strangely, severely mangled. Rightly so... But behind these lamentations is the question of whether the Microscripts could exist without the weird panoply of obstructions that their author adopted, or felt the need to adopt, in order to call them into existence. The question, difficult and unsolvable, turns around our conception of happiness. What is it? And what about those strange individuals who seem to run, not to it, but away from it - as if in terror of the nightmare of perfect adaptation? 

The story of the prodigal son contains a great mystery, which is why someone with a happy life would decide one day and seemingly out of the blue, to exchange that life for wandering and unhappiness. Why would anyone do that, we wonder? And yet, we exchange our happiness for unhappiness everyday and in a hundred different ways. Walser and Dickinson write in ways that they "shouldn't", live in ways whose invisible logic we describe as tragic and impossible - as if it weren't logic at all but a sort of super-human, sub-human force, like gravity. 

Progress

Here's something from a poem in novels I'm writing called Eugene, OR. It's in progress, of course. Actually, I just spent the last hour writing it.

The Prose Poem

One night, when the moon was in the sky and the smell of wet grass clinging to the earth like a torn shift on the body of a drowned girl, the prose poem went down to the river. Behold me, said the moonlight! Beheld, said the prose poem irritably; only in truth this answer had less to do with the transcendental qualities of moonlight than with the darkness and uneven earth. We can assume there was a woman in it somewhere: not the drowned girl, we’re not talking about her at this point, but a woman, meaning a consummation. Something devoutly to be wished, as the prose poem described it while dipping its feet into the river’s edge. What do you mean “devoutly”, asked the moonlight? I mean devoutly, like on your knees and with your eyelids droopy, almost asleep. Your remember Sunday mornings? (Of course the moonlight remembered Sunday mornings) Well, there is a certain feeling that one gets, no matter what one’s spiritual orientation. There’s the left side of the sky looking bright and the right side dark beneath a quilt of clouds. Do you follow? Behold, whispered the moonlight, more insistently now (for it was nearly dawn). Behold, behold! But by this point the prose poem was starting to see it. You never washed my dishes, you never cared – or rather, you did these things, but without any of the sexually-suggestive aprons that men secretly expect from a lover. Your complaints became verbose, dead on, to the point that soon I watched you like a man watching his house burn down in the middle of the night. Literally burn, asked the moonlight? But the prose poem shook its head. As usual, he was getting tired of explaining himself. There are stellar bodies – stars, so to speak – and then there is this moon, this hole in the sky. The light drains through it until it’s all gone, at which point god takes the waist and turns, like this. Moonlight: Well, ok, that works, but now you've missed her. Prose poem: But I always miss her. That's what she loves about me. 

Russian: A Love Story

A dangerous admission: I am actually not that good at Russian.

No doubt this sounds odd coming from a self-identified translator, but it's true. At best, I'd put my language abilities at "low-advanced" to "high-intermediate". My favorite and strongest skills are interpretive: reading (which I do all the time, with a dictionary at my elbow) and listening (which I don't do that much). According to a Russian friend who I have tea with every once in a while, my speaking is about on the same level as a 17-year-old. My writing is awful. Altogether, I have a pretty solid vocabulary and a sound, if not totally intuitive knowledge of Russian grammar. I'm certainly not hopeless, but I recognize that there's huge room for improvement.

How, given these limitations, can I possibly have the cheek to translate Russian books - and not just any books, but the classics, the high points of pride in one of the most religiously bibliophillic countries in world history? How could I have I presumed to write an English version of Pushkin, the greatest and in some ways most subtle Russian prose writer? Have I no shame?

Actually, shame has been one of the ground-notes in my relationship to Russian since I started learning it 17 years ago. A snotty and distractible student, I had little patience for the memorization and painstaking work that all language-learning requires (I still don't, which is probably one of the reasons my Russian's been stuck at this level for years). What I did have was curiosity - a curiosity that was only increased by my wonderful high-school Russian teacher, Keith Moon. Anyone who's been in school long enough has had (or should have had) a teacher like Mr. Moon. From the first minute of the first day of class, he bounced around the room, pulling answers from our tiny class (there were five of us in Russian 1 and barely twice that in the entire four-year Russian program, maybe a twentieth of the recruits for French and Spanish). On that first day, without speaking a word of English, he taught us the Cyrillic alphabet and a dozen vocabulary words. Walking out of his classroom, I felt like my head was going to go flying off at any minute. 

The scant gifts I have to offer the world of Russian translation can all be traced back to that class. In my opinion they boil down to a passion for something that I have come to understand as "Russianness", in all its various forms: music, food, language, people, and of course, literature. 

What to say about Russian literature? After I graduated high-school, I took the not-that-unorthodox step of going to live with a family in Moscow for the fall and winter. The Lyubopitovs (whose name means "curious" - I am not making this up) were warm and welcoming, eager to share their culture with me. The father, who worked for the military and had therefore not been paid for over three months (this was smack in the middle of the huge currency crash of 1998, during which the ruble was devalued drastically), had neat grey hair and sad eyes. One night, while the rest of the tiny apartment was asleep, he asked me which Russian writers were my favorite. I answered Tolstoy (I'd read Anna Karenina through cover to cover earlier that year, on a three day bus trip from Connecticut to California) and Pushkin (whose Eugene Onegin I was reading in Charles Johnson's acrobatic translation). He smiled and recited, effortlessly - though with a fair amount of eyebrow waggling - Tatyana's love letter to Onegin. 

If I wrote a novelization about my experiences as a young expat in Moscow, this scene would probably not make the cut. It's too obvious - too stereotypical and predictable. But it happened, in that small, dimly-lit kitchen, with the Lyubopitov's electric-blue budgerigar Keyasha watching from behind Mr. Lyubopitov's shoulder. When we finished our tea, I went back to my bedroom (by far the biggest in the apartment, with a huge picture of mid-scream Freddy Mercury hanging above my bed) and, after reading a few stanzas of Johnson's Pushkin's Onegin to get my juices going, wrote three terrible Pushkinian stanzas about the experience. 

I wrote a lot of those while I was in Russia - more than I'd ever written before, about anything. In fact, looking back I think I can say that Johnson's Eugene Onegin was the book that prompted me to take that first step from wanting-to-be-a-writer to writing. The regular, rhymed stanzas just seemed so unassuming - so flexible and attractive. Pushkin applied them so liberally to his world (and that's really what EO is: a world) that it encouraged me to try and create my own tiny planet. Poetry could be fluid, witty, light. It could cover everything, animating memory and experience and transforming the thousand-thinged world into a gigantic, glistening chandelier. And I could do it. Badly, but I could do it. So what if I didn't do it a fraction as well as Pushkin, or Johnson, did. I could try. And there was something worthy in that. 

Twelve years later I am still trying, and failing, to write like Pushkin, like Kuprin, like Zabolotsky. Translation is a losing proposition, especially for someone like me, with less-than-prodigious linguistic abilities - and though I understand and agree that the coin of great literature should not be debased unnecessarily, I am wary of voices who would deny people like me (that is, essentially, amateurs, meaning lovers) the chance to add something valuable to the constellation of Russian-in-English. Translations are not monuments - not even great ones, like Johnson's Onegin or Volkonsky-Pevear's Karenina, or Nabokov's Lermontov. They are attempts, doomed at the outset, to make express in one language what was originally expressed in another. 

I approach my own translations with humility, excitement and, yes, shame. I know I won't be good enough. At the same time, I have too much respect for the human spirit of curiosity and passion to simply give up the race before it's been run. Translation is failure - but that's what makes it so wonderful. Like marriage, it's a process that can seem doomed at the outset - to the unsympathetic viewer, at least. Which is what makes both marriages and translations so quixotic - even heroic. 

I pray that I'll be given more opportunities to publish my translations, not only because the process has become so important to me, but because I honestly believe I am a good translator. Russian has been one of my great, hopeless loves since I was a young teenager. No matter which book of hers I open, she's there, floating seductively in an area whose accessibility I can't determine for sure. Is she beyond my reach, within it? Will she ever be? Who knows. But I know she's there. 

WHIM

No essay today: I'm just too beat, which is something that I feel reluctant to mention but want to, if only to ruin this past week's "streak". I'm suspicious of streaks. They're superstitious and inevitably lead to non-streaks, especially for worriers like me. Anyway, blogging is (god willing) a complicated and ongoing failure and I'm really just shooting myself in the foot by pretending otherwise. So there it is: WHIM (on my forehead).

We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were - a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides. This is Time for the repetition of useless gestures, for minimal mobility, and especially for stasis at the siesta hour. But it is also ritual Time, given a rhythm by the vain liturgy of idle pleasure more rigorous than the work of any office hour. (Andre Bazin writing about Jacques Tati's Les Vacances, as translated by Bert Cardullo)

I'm excited about this week of blogging and have a few ideas for the blog going forward. Ideally, I'd like to continue with the poetics and add more personal stuff, while at the same time working in more discussion of translation as a process, not to mention translations themselves (my own and others). Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments, either by leaving comments on the individual posts or contacting me via email at josh.billings@gmail.com. And of course thank you for reading, whoever you are.

Oh yes, and I did some heavy edits on yesterday's essay on parody, which I think improved and deepened it. Have a look!

Small Man Trapped In A Box, Says, YOUR GENIUS - wait for it - IS YOUR ERROR

But what about parody? In an interview with J. Alfred Appell (a name whose Nabokovishness a Russian teacher of mine once taught a whole class on), Vladimir Nabokov says, "Satire is a lesson. Parody is a game." The distinction may seem thin - good games always teach you something, after all - but I think I see his point. There is art that keeps you seated and art that invites you to get up, and for some reason parody seems to stand balanced like a sword between these two, with the potential to fall either way.

In Nab's underrated The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the eponymous hero's breakthrough book, The Prismatic Bezel, is described like this:

As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J.L. Coleman has called it 'a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,' and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bevel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud. The decayed idea might be in itself quite innocent and it may be argued that there is not much sin in continually exploiting this or that thoroughly woen subject or style if it still pleases and amuses. But for Sebastian Knight, the merest trifle, as, say, the adopted method of a detective story, became a bloated and malodorous corpse. He did not mind in the least 'penny dreadfuls' because he wasn't concerned with ordinary morals; what annoyed him invariably was the second rate, not the third or N-th rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoral. But The Prismatic Bezel is not only a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale it is also a wicked imitation of many other things... (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight p. 90)

The parody that Nabokov describes Sebastian using - whose humor bends into a "springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion" - is one we see over and over again, both in Nab himself and in many other high-points of 20th century fiction (Flannery O'Connor, for example). For these writers, in order to be serious you have to first earn your reader's trust by showing him or her that you know how deeply unserious the majority of daily life is. The debatable assumption behind such a method - that more people experience their lives as absurd than tragic - feels like a natural product of a time in which ironically bitching actors are used to sell soda; but its origins go back much further than Nabokov. As literary critic Erich Auerbach describes in his book Mimesis, comedy and tragedy have always struggled against one another - to the point that, in classical literature, the concept of "realism" was itself held to be utterly comic and unserious:

In modern literature the technique of imitation can evolve a serious, problematic, and tragic conception of any character regardless of type and social standing, of any occurrence regardless of whether it be legendary, broadly political, or narrowly domestic; and in most cases it actually does so. Precisely that is completely impossible in antiquity...Everything commonly realistic, everything pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on any level except the comic, which admits no problematic probing. A a result the boundaries of realism are narrow. (Mimesis, p.27)

For Auerbach, this division between serious-high and comic-low was a natural one in a world whose writers were almost exclusively upper class generals, politicians, statesman, or at least landholders. But with the rise of Christianity - a religon whose heroes come from all walks of life, including the working and peasant classes - this dynamic changes. Christ's speech both promises an inversion of earthly values in heaven (the rich will be poor and the meek inherit the earth, etc.) and demonstrates how this could happen in his stories, which treat their poor subjects with dignity. So a realm that was until that point seen as comic comes to be seen as secretly serious.


Parody is, in many ways, a literary version of this same switch. It attempts to find seriousness in places that have traditionally been seen as unserious: in genre-writing, for example, or television, or on the internet. A protean impulse, it has at its heart the democratic (and, dare I say it, Christian) idea that anything, no matter how unpromising it might appear, can be valuable - can be real - if it is loved.

Perhaps it is the hovering Paracletean Silverhawk in me (to borrow, sort of, a Michel Tournier formulation) that encourages me to set this loving parody up against the hateful parody practiced by Sebastian Knight. Maybe I'm wrong here - maybe the two emotions are not so easily separable, and the key to successful animation is the strength of feeling in the animator (take as an example of this the savage parodist Nathaniel West, or another favorite of mine, Flannery O'Connor). But then what about Nabokov himself? Is there any other writer of the twentieth century whose love for and fascination with his objects of fun is so obviously, inescapably sincere?

In my last post, I worshipped the Menelaen sincerity Viktor Shklovsky demonstrates as he grapples Tolstoy in his book The Energy of Delusion. Writing like that is powered, not by clinical detachment, but by an impulse: the probing feeling-your-way-through-a-dark-room that we get so powerfully in writers from Sterne to Kafka to Bolano. The Russian sweater-maker Osip Mandelstam describes this impulse when he says that There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of worms, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence. (Conversation about Dante, p.41) Which I think brings us closer to what really happens at the center of the Proetus myth. You remember this myth, of course. Menelaus (who the Coen brothers bring back to life as Governor Menelaus "Pappy" O'Daniel) is told by the shape-shifter's daughter that if he hangs on long enough, he will get his answer. Wrestling in ancient literature is usually a one-way affair. In the Greek version of the myth, the God changes. In the Biblical version, the human being (in the case I'm thinking of, Jacob) is the one who steps away from the battle altered. But strangely enough, when I imagine these battles, I see both shapes shifting. The angel, who after all is defeated, must finish the fight with at least a little food for thought, in the same way that, when I think of Menelaus grappling, the thing that really interests me is what's going on inside him. Maybe this is the novelist in me speaking: for if any image encapsulates writing a novel, for me, it is wrestling. The thing changes under your hand; but you change too, perhaps just as dramatically. In fact, you might go so far as to say that the writing changes because you change: because there is a consistently-different person writing it, in the same way that Menelaus who's already wrestled Proteus the Lion and Proteus the Pig has a different set of tools to tackle Proteus the Tree or Lake or Flea.

Cinema, which after all depends as a genre on many successful transformations (of places, people, objects), understands the palaien nature of transformation at least as well as literature. There is a wonderful moment late in the recent movie The Trip, when Steve Coogan tries to imitate his frenemy Rob Bryden's "Small Man Trapped in a Box" routine. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Coogan gives up. "I don't care about silly voices," he squeaks bitterly. The moment is touching - especially so since it comes towards the end of a movie that has, up to this point, succeeded precisely because of Coogan & Brydon's encyclopedic (dazzling, frightening) ability to mimic whatever they want. More than touching, actually: it seems real. (Ironically, and puzzlingly, Coogan's failure simultaneously feels like the most fictional moment in the movie, since after an hour and a half of watching him become everyone under the sun, I have absolutely no doubt that he could mimic the shit out of "Small Man Trapped in a Box").

Like impression, parody is often seen as a soft, or minor genre. It is, mostly - but only because most parody is unsuccessful: a daliance instead of a possession. Or I could approach the problem from the opposite direction by saying that impression is undervalued in literature because the greatest parodies don't look like parodies at all. Seen this (come to think of it, is quite Nabokovian) way, parody is not a minor literary form at all, but rather one of writing's most integral mechanisms. Nabokov parodies Joyce who parodies Sterne, in the same way that, say, Marilynne Robinson parodies Melville parodying Milton. In each case, the attempt to rewrite one's favorite book results in a completely different one - but the spirit, the "magnetized impulse" is ferried over, changed and, ultimately, enriched.

Seth's uncle Deano draws the moral from this story in his documentary on the 80s punk band Recklessness:

(I always tell my students not to worry about originality; just ty to copy the manners and musics of the various, the more various the better, poetries you love: your originality will come from your inability to copy well: YOUR GENIUS IS YOUR ERROR.)

Deano's idea inverts Harold Bloom's famous idea that strong art comes from an attempt to escape the art we love: no, Dean says, not escape, but imitate. To become what we love, which we can't no matter how many books we've read or not read. The Law of Identity rules on earth as it does everywhere else in the universe, thank God, since it's exactly the differences between ourselves and our idols that provoke us to mimic them in the first place.

Village Explaining

Talking this way, I risk earning that most famous literary pejorative: "village explainer". The epithet applies more easily to Americans than it does to writers from other countries, which seems mysterious to me. Why isn't Gombrowicz a village explianer? How do Milosz and Kundera and Brodsky escape the title, when their non-fiction writing is no more acute than Pound's was and in most cases much less? Is it something national, something inherently cranky in the American non-fictive voice? And if so, should I really try to avoid it?

But a question like this really is nothing more than a placeholder for a larger one, isn't it? Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up at four o'clock in the morning and engraving my "thoughts" (more like moods or weather patterns) onto the unruled palm-sized electronic notecard that blogger hands me? What do I get out of this? Fame? But surely you realize that I might be writing all this down on the back of a beer coaster for all the people who will ever read it? My own patient passage through the Vale of Soul-Making? As if Keats would have written a line without the promise of someone, somewhere waiting for him on the other side...

Bloggers are the New Crusoes. You remember the story? If you do, you don't, since the real book happens in the gorgeous, green-green valley between Crusoe's arrival and when Friday shows up. Not that I don't like Friday: I do, especially after reading the French anthropologist/aspiring-vampire Michel Tournier's translation of him. But his arrival transforms Crusoe's redolent solitude into a society, which means conflicts, motives, and, eventually at least, plot. The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky titled his book on plot in Tolstoy "The Energy of Delusion", which as I understand it is meant to equate the conviction required for story-making with the kind of whipped-up and blinkered myopia we might find in someone wearing a sandwich board. Shklovsky's own book is frustratingly plotless: a whirlpool of lines that seem to be less arranged against their margin than clinging to it, like iron filings on a magnet or arrows from St. Sebastian's side. This is frustrating at first - but the further you read in the book, the more you come to see that Shklovsky is in fact attempting his own kind of literary mimesis: mimicking the peripatetic and searching adventure of Tolstoy's drafts (hundreds of them on AK - entire rewritings even!) in his own investigation. The result is an unending digression on literary creation, a fractal fable:

"I'll repeat what's important for me: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy said that he didn't know how to draw a circle; he had to close the line and then correct it.
He knew how to think by juxtaposing words, by awakening them, in a way.
When he wrote his major novels, he would begin with something plotted, i.e., something that was happening or had already happened, and sought the relationship between the incidental and the inevitable.
He studied the thoughts of a child and how cunning emerged at its first stages.
The so-called draft version is not an adaptation of a text to the norms, not sorting through gems, like jewelers do when making necklaces or crowns.
Drafts weigh the essence of events. The scenarios, which the hero of the work goes through, they should be called 'hypothetical circumstances.'
This is the analysis of how man was created, i.e., his sensation of the world, and how through the movements of scenarios, experimented and tested hundreds of times in fiction, the truth becomes clearer.
This work is like that of a captain who navigates by the stars and moon, using his chronometer to verify and make sure of their hypothetical place in the sky. The captain is testing the ship's course." (p. 134)

Shklovsky's dedication to the search ("The purpose of my search is art", he says) was so great that he scrapped the more recognizable generic forms ("The only genre that interests me is film itself" - Tarkovsky) for something ragged and messy-looking. His book is, at times, almost viscerally embarrassing. But failure or no, it is also something infinitely valuable: it is sincere. An outmoded and abused virtue these days, I know....but how striking! How amazing, to watch him flail and attempt and then finally hit on something that you know he simply could not have said in a 20-page letter to the academy. Why couldn't he have said it? Simple: because he couldn't have seen it. As he describes it being for Tolstoy, writing for Shklovsky is a sea-voyage - a discipline (or ecstacy) of perception, wherein the calcified generic modes must be stripped, Blake-style, from the organs of perception, so that the truth of the world (truth, which likes to hide) can be glimpsed and revealed.

Does this actually happen? I'm wondering. Whatever good news I have to bring, I'm bringing; but I'm wormy and skeptical, especially when it comes to the rhetoric of vision. Blogs, luckily, let you do this. You can backtrack and undermine, revising your own assertions as you go. What won't you get by doing this? Well, among other things, you will never write Anna Karenina. Make peace with that right now: stare yourself down in the mirror, sure in the knowledge that your beard will never dangle, nor your t-shirt stretch into the peasant blouse that you so sorely desire. Your eyes will go unhaunted by that revelation of ordinary life that is Levin and Kitty, or the romantic pyre of their dark, ridiculous shadows, Anna and Vronsky. Not for you.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out here (what a village-explainery sentence!) is: what am I writing? At the same time, I think I'm trying to forget that: forget "novel", forget "blogging", forget "Tolstoy". No wonder I feel the need to explain myself so much.

Our Eerie U Our Ray

Yesterday, I wrote that an urge towards mimesis - that is, towards a sort of free-hand copying of the world's things and procedures - is one of the main impulses of my writing. Is this true? Well, I think it's true, though of course there's a very real possibility that I really only like the idea of myself as a mimetic writer, and that all this blogging vs. fiction writing crap that I'm trying to build up is really just another way for me to justify and entomb myself - to make myself feel right and secure and padded with the sofa-cushions of Truth when really I am as wandering and peripatetic as everyone else.

Still, I guess I can at least say truthfully that I am deeply in love with the word "mimesis" and the process of art that it seems to represent. Mimesis. Something small and squeaky and therefore incredibly mouse-like about its sounds; come to think of it, something mouse-like about the entire word, with its unmissable M-ears, then the "eek!" as it's seen, followed by the scurried disappearance of that tail-like "sis"... And do you, dear reader, remember when words used to do that? When they seemed, not just evocative but actually alive on the page, like tiny penned animals? Maybe that, more than the Greek stamp of approval, is what I'm looking for: a return to the kind of relationship with words that I remember having as a kid, when every letter seemed like an animal flush with its own integral, mysterious life.

The connection between words and animals is something that any child whose ever stared longingly into the large, pony-sad eye of a lower case "a" can tell you about. Here is David Malouf, who is not a child, but who is Australian, describing Ovid describing a wild Eurasian boy he's adopted mimicking, first bird-call, and then man-call :

I have begun to understand him. In imitating birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him and revealing the accuracy of his ear or the virtuosity of his speech organs. He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man. Speech is the essential. I have hit at the very beginning on the one thing that will reveal to him of what kind he is. In making those buzzing sounds he discovers his throat. In intoning through his nostrils he realizes that he has a nose, and behind it, caverns where the sound reverberates. And so on for lips, tongue, teeth. As he builds up the whole range of sounds that we make, he is building up in his own head the image of head, checking and rechecking with his fingertips against my throat, my jaws, my lips, that he is made as I am, that he is a man.

Paraphrased by Malouf (via his made-up Ovid), the process of mimicry transforms into something more than a game; but it is important to notice that there are actually two types of mimesis described here. In one - the kind practiced "by our [Roman, civilized] mimics" -the movement occurs from the outside in and so exerts only "accuracy" and "virtuosity": valuable skills, sure, but not exactly ground-breaking. The child's form of mimicry, on the other hand, is a sort of studied possession. It, too, is virtuosic - but it employs its virtuosity as a tool in its search for a deeper, essential identification with what it's trying to imitate. The point is not to "pass": the point (or dream, maybe) is to imaginatively enter another being, and then to speak, for as long as you can, from within that being. So the child becomes a man in the same way that he becomes a bird: imaginatively, meaning (in Malouf's formulation, at least) for real.

Writing it, I see it: mimesis as art is a door, an imaginative tunnel from the self into the world and then back again (loaded with riches). To borrow a phrase from the non-Maloufian Ovid (or at least, Arthur Golding's version of him), it's a "translation of bodies", in which the mimic's powers of observation, control and - perhaps most importantly - imaginative generosity are all used to ferry the spirit of his subject from one set of (temporal, linguistic, physical) circumstances into another.

In this way, the Child's mimesis resembles another sort of translation - the kind that I'm ostensibly more familiar with but really just as baffled by. In his wonderful study Translating Neruda, the essayist/translator John Felstiner describes it in terms that we might happily juxtapose with Malouf's:

To get from the poet's voice into another language and into a translator's own voice is the business of translation. It depends on a moment-by-moment shuttle between voices, for what translating comes down to is listening - listening now to what the poet's voice said, now to one's own voice as it finds what to say.

At first, superficial glance, Felstiner's description of literary translation sounds a little like the "copying of something outside" that Ovid attributes to his Roman contemporaries - but this doesn't do justice to the book in which we find the quotation. Translating Neruda is, as Felstiner himself says, an anatomy. It includes, not only Felstiner's wonderful translation of Paplo Neruda's "Alturas De Macchu Picchu", but also a 200-page description of the history and poetics that Felstiner studied in order to make the translation. Part biography, part ars poetica (or ars translatica...sorry, I couldn't stop myself), it is really a long, fascinating digression on, and demonstration of, translation's unique mode of "listening". It admits - as the Malouf quote perhaps does not - that even the most possessed and imaginative mimicry has limits. Two voices can never be the same, and this is both limit and opportunity, since it takes translation out of the goopy, table-floating realm of pseudo-literary seance, and puts it squarely where it belongs: in the house of art. John Felstiner is not Pablo Neruda, as "Heights of Macchu Picchu" is not "Alturas De Macchu Picchu", and to claim any differently is to paradoxically impoverish translation's possibilities. We try to copy, and fail to do so perfectly - but in our failure, we create something entirely new in both languages.

As an art built on the admission of limitation that is typically swept under the rug in other genres, translation gives us a unique place from which to consider literary success. It makes us understand what we can't do while at the same time exciting us by the possibility of what we can. As the Irish taxonomist Paul Muldoon says in his introduction to The Faber Book of Beasts, "It seems that in poetry, as in life, animals bring out the best in us. We are most human in the presence of animals, most humble, and it is only out of humility, out of uncertainty, out of ignorance, that the greatest art may be made."

Are Australians naturally humble? As someone who grew up (at least partially) on an island only a few hundred miles to their north, I am tempted to say "not especially". But then there is way that fat man/bard Les Murray becomes, not just a bat, but batness:

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry - aura our orrery,
our eerie u our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear our aery Yahweh.

This is taken from the sequence of poem/translations titled Presence: Translations from the Natural World. It is itself a paraphrase: in the book, the bat-speak is the part in italics, and that "u" in the second to last line should be an umlaut, which I can't seem to get blogger to write. Do these changes make a difference? Without a doubt. In my version, it is Murray's voice that is flying italicized through the air, and the bats' that comes to a stop as if jerked. This seems like an unfortunate confusion of effects - although who knows, maybe the stillness of the sonar is meant to suggest the platonic perfection of their voice, their true voices. And now it is "our eerie you": an address - to Yahweh? The reader? The ambiguity seems important, though I miss that umlaut and its ludicrously-small hat.

Murray's humbly-audacious translations are what I'm talking about. Reading them, I feel the same way as I did when I was four years old, leafing through my still favorite book, I'm as Quick as a Cricket. Through it's simple and inexhaustible magic, I transformed into animal after animal, simply by uttering those two words: "as a". The miracle of metaphor, which I found to my stunned amazement was portable and could open anything. Armed with it, I could not just wander, but inhabit the world, snuggling down into its nooks or soaring through its spaces. And with each transformation I wrote another line in what I come to see now was a riddle. I am you and you and you, which adds up, at the end of the day, to I am this, I am this, I am this, until inevitably we arrive at the question that all poems ask, the underquestion: What am I?

Writing, like translating, is riddling. Books are riddles with as many solutions as readers. In 1072, the Bishop of Exeter died, bequeathing to the Cathedral library the Codex Exoniensis (Exeter Book) that we can only hope gave him so much joy, thought, and consolation while he was alive. Here are two of its riddles, which most subsequent commentators agree are really separate versions with the same answer. Brilliantly translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland:

66
I stretch beyond the bounds of the world,
I'm smaller than a worm, outstrip the sun,
I shine more brightly than the moon. The swelling seas,
the fair face of the earth and all the green fields,
are within my clasp. I cover the depths,
and plunge beneath hell; I ascend above heaven,
highland of renown; I reach beyond
the boundaries of the land of blessed angels.
I fill far and wide all the corners of the earth
and the ocean streams. Say what my name is.

and

69
On the way a miracle: water become bone.