Translation revisited

Last week, our friend BDR, in linking to Stephen Mitchelmore's recent meditation on Peter Handke's fiction, reported an opinion of a professor acquaintance who told him "if you can't read Handke in German don't bother since Handke's main interest is the language." With all due respect, I call bullshit on this. I cannot read Handke, or anyone else, in the German, but I would be much the poorer for not having read the English translations of Slow Homecoming, Across, or Repetition, to name only three from the 1980s. They are remarkable works in their own right. I'd go further and say that few works written originally in English from that same decade compare favorably with them. So to say I shouldn't have bothered? Nonsense.

On a related note, back in March, translator Daniel Hahn had a post at Words Without Borders in which he took issue with how translations are reviewed. He rants thus (emphasis his):

what makes me crazy is when the reviewer praises something that I did and gives the impression that I’m not there. By all means compliment the author on the tightness of the plotting, on the deftness of the characterization, and ignore me—they’re supported by my work, of course, but marginally. But a reviewer who thinks he can praise the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice, without acknowledging who’s responsible—as though those things in an author’s original simply reappear automatically after the mechanics of translation have been applied to a text—that’s a reviewer who simply has no understanding of what translation is. There’s a reason the copyright in my translations belongs to me and not the original author. The plot and the ideas and the themes aren’t mine, but the words are, all of them, and the way they all fit together, too. And if that’s what you’re reviewing, I want credit. (Or, for that matter, criticism.)

This strikes me as, frankly, wrong. All three of those Handke titles I mentioned above were translated into English by Ralph Manheim. Another of my Handke favorites is the memoir about his mother, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which was also translated by Manheim. Perhaps it's simply Manheim I like! I think not.

I began reading Hahn's post expecting it to contain utterly banal points with which I would trivially agree. After all, it is all too believable that reviewers both tend to ignore the work of translators and have little understanding of what it is the translator does. But Hahn takes it further, appearing to claim that the translator is entirely responsible for "the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice". In fact, the translator is responsible for conveying as best as possible the original author's rhythm, texture, beauty, warmth, and wit. The translator makes the best possible decisions within constraints presented by the original work.

Along with those Manheim-translated works mentioned above, I've also read Handke books rendered into English by other translators, such as Scott Abbott and Michael Roloff, and have never gotten the impression I was reading a stylistically different writer. I have just begun reading Charlotte Mandell's translation, from the French, of Mathias Énard's recent novel, Zone. The last novel I read was, coincidentally, Mandell's translation of Jonathan Littell's remarkable novel, The Kindly Ones. Oddly, they have very little in common at the level of the sentence! And neither of them bear any obvious resemblance whatsoever to Mandell's translations of Maurice Blanchot, which themselves are instead stylistically similar to other Blanchot translations, for example, those by Ann Smock or Lydia Davis (meanwhile, Davis' own fiction is nothing like her translations of Blanchot). This point aside, which I am sure I have belabored, Hahn here, in so easily separating plotting and characterization from the language used, demonstrates as little appreciation of fiction as the standard mainstream reviewer.

Daniel Green, highlighting Hahn's post, agrees with him too readily, though he makes this excellent point, which is the point I'd originally thought Hahn was going to make, as I began reading him: "Too many reviewers make too many facile judgments of translations in which the translation itself drops out. . ." Unfortunately, Dan uses this as an opportunity to once again all but throw his hands up when it comes to translations. He writes:

This is the tragedy of translation: Many of us will read some great books only in their translated versions, and thus we won't finally really know fully what makes them great. It's also possible we might read some rather mediocre books that have actually been made better by their translations. Given the cachet translated fiction seems to have acquired among some readers (its very lack of widespread availability, its lack of attention from the major newspaper book reviews perhaps allowing the devotee of translated fiction to feel one of the enlightened few), I think it likely some translated books of this latter kind are getting more attention than they deserve--under the prevailing circumstances, any new translated work deserves notice. Making authors and their work available through translation is an entirely worthy service, but understanding their limits are also important. We shouldn't make claims about the underlying work--on which the translation is a variation and therefore a new work--we can't possibly validate without in fact reading it.

There are some good points mixed with the bad here. I think he's right that there is some excessive valorizing of translated works for their own sake, and it's of course trivially true that translations have their limitations, and that we should be cognizant of them. However, where Daniel Hahn wants to isolate plot and structure from the "rhythm, texture, beauty, warmth, and wit" of the language, Daniel Green insists, as he often does, that because we necessarily read some great books in translation, "we won't finally really know fully what makes them great" because of that distance. The problem with this is that it assumes that "knowing fully" what makes great books great is the ultimate object of reading.

There once was a time when a literate person knew and could read multiple languages as a matter of course. There are no doubt countless reasons why this is no longer the case, at least in the Anglo-American world. And, of course, literacy itself is more widespread. Anyway, regardless of the reasons, many of us rely entirely on translations if we are to read anything originally written in a language other than our own. There is undeniably a distance between the original work and its possibly multiple translations. Some of us, myself included, have looked on this situation with anxiety. How do I know which translation to choose? What am I missing? How will I ever know or understand the work in question? As such, we owe good translators a great debt of gratitude, and we should always remember what it is that they do for literature. And certainly praising any quality of the prose without mentioning its status as translation is opening a reviewer up to easy and deserved criticism. But the history of literature is rife with misreadings and poor interpretations and context-free assessments, not to mention misleading translations; indeed, the history of literature arguably is these misreadings. We do the best we can with what we have. That so many of us require translations in order to read most of the great works of world literature is no reason not to read them, nor is it a reason to refuse to critically engage with such works at whatever level we see fit.

As readers, we can never "know fully" any work, translated or not. We are always at some remove from the work. Treating art as a set of objects to be assessed and judged is finally little different than treating it as a set of commodities to be bought and sold.

"a slow, inquiring narration"

In the preface to the American edition of his book A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, after noting the (some might say hysterical) commotion the text caused when it first appeared in Europe, Peter Handke wrote this:

Now the text is translated, and I trust that you will read it as it is; I need not defend or take back a single word. I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar—of aesthetic veracity; that has always been the case in what I have written, from the beginning to the final period. Dear reader: that, and that alone, I offer here for your perusal.

[Update: it has just come to my attention that by coincidence, at The Goalie's Anxiety, Scott Abbott has excerpted part of this same preface, to an actual purpose: taking issue with James Agee's offhand criticisms of Krishna Winston's recently published translation of Handke's Don Juan, His Own Version. Abbott has himself translated Handke in the past (and, in fact, translated A Journey to the Rivers), and he takes the time to look at certain decisions Winston made in the translation, comparing them with what he might have come up with, not unfavorably. Time, that is, that Agee does not take, at least not in the space he's provided in the New York Times. The whole post is worth a read, especially if you're interested in questions of translation.]

"the simplest, if perhaps least imaginative, way"

Following up on the recent Blanchot posts, this comes from Charlotte Mandell's translator's note to The Book to Come, which I've only dipped into here and there (the opening essay on Proust is excellent):

there flourish two much-beloved groups of words, whose ambiguities in fact pervade ordinary French usage, but which are here frequently and trenchantly put into play.

First is the simple-seeming word expérience. A good deal of the time it serves the same purposes and covers the same terrain as the word it looks so much like in English. The word however also means, in ordinary French, "experiment" in the scientific sense—but also (and here the reader is warned to be wary) in the literary or artistic sense, as when one speaks of an experimental novel. There are more than a few sentences in this book in which the translator has candidly had to guess which hand of the word was gesturing in the text. "The Experience of Proust" is also "Proust's Experiment." And a sentence that plausibly reads "The experience of literature is a total experience" might suddenly seem far richer a statement if read as "The literary experiment is a total experience," or "The experience of literature is utterly an experiment." To rescue my author from my own opinions (which seems decent chivalry for a translator), I have usually chosen the simplest, if perhaps least imaginative, way of handling this issue, that is, construing what seems most obvious at the moment, and alerting the reader, herewith, to the problem of the word's surprising range of meaning.

Though at times I've had considerable anxiety about translation, I am generally not one to avoid reading an author because I lack the language to read it in the original. But it remains the case that there are times when that lack becomes a potential barrier. A crucial word might have multiple possible meanings, all of which can come into play; reading is in part about balancing that play. One doesn't necessarily decide on a particular meaning while reading. And if even lovingly scrupulous translators like Charlotte Mandell are nonetheless forced into deciding on a meaning, perhaps settling on the most prosaic sense for the purposes of expediency or consistency, something is undoubtedly lost, and who's to say that that something isn't the element that allows a work to live for the reader?

Lost in Translation

Towards the end of his short essay titled "Translating" (found in Friendship), Maurice Blanchot writes the following:

The example of Hölderlin illustrates the risk that is run, in the end, by the man fascinated by the power of translating: the translations of Antigone and Oedipus were nearly his last works at the outbreak of madness. These works are exceptionally studied, restrained, and intentional, conducted with inflexible firmness with the intent not of transposing the Greek text into German, nor of reconveying the German language to its Greek sources, but of unifying the two powers--the one representing the vicissitudes of the West, the other those of the Orient--in the simplicity of a pure and total language. The result is almost frightful. It is as if one were discovering between the two languages an understanding so profound, a harmony so fundamental, that it substitutes itself for meaning, or succeeds in turning the hiatus that lies open between the two languages into the origin of a new meaning.

At the beginning of the essay, Blanchot mentions the notion of the pure, originary language towards which, it was believed, translation must work. But, "In fact translation is not at all intended to make the difference [between languages] disappear--it is, on the contrary, the play of this difference..."

Translation is always controversial--should it be literal? should it be a work of its own? how much leeway does the translator have? what is a literal translation anyway? English is the only language I have. I am completely dependent on translations for much of what I want to read. As such, I have considerable anxiety on the subject, though it ebbs and flos. My purpose in quoting the passage from Blanchot at the beginning of this post is to highlight the sort of experience that is completely lost to me, to perhaps shine a light on this loss. Obviously I know neither German nor ancient Greek, so both sides of this transaction, this translation are necessarily beyond me.

Let me back up a bit and try to explain what I'm getting at, for I can see I've already written myself away from the original spark. Even if I had the ancient Greek, say, Hölderlin's translation into German would be irrelevant to me. That is, approaching Antigone, I am either going to read it in the original, if possible (which, for me, it is not), or in one (or more) of the many English translations. Hölderlin's work here is not available to me, it cannot, itself, be translated into English. There are third-hand translations, of course, so don't misunderstand. It's not that Hölderlin's translation could not, in theory, be the basis for a subsequent translation into a third language, possibly English. I mean that Hölderlin's achievement, which for Blanchot is "almost frightful", is necessarily lost to me unless I am a native speaker of German, or, possibly, a particular scholar or enthusiast of Hölderlin. The frightfulness is lost, is it not?

I was merely struck, while reading Blanchot's essay, by this unavailability. It wasn't an anxious moment, as when I worry about which translation to read, or when I'm all too aware that I have not yet read this or that work relevant to a discussion. I can alleviate the latter anxiety by reading the work in question. But I cannot gain access to the sort of experience necessary for me to appreciate Hölderlin's translations. This is not a problem. It is an acknowledgment. Not everything is translatable, including other translations, a reminder that not every work of art, not every piece of literature, can be experienced by everybody.

We lack jouissance

A few weeks ago, I questioned the appropriateness of Leon Wieseltier's preface to the new edition of Reflections, a collection of essays by Walter Benjamin. In the offending passage I quoted from, there was a small fragment with which, on its own, I must admit some sympathy. This is when he writes: "I confess that there are many pages of Benjamin that I do not understand . . ." Unfortunately, he completes this thought with ". . . in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself, and no direction is clear", which seems, again, designed to exert undue influence on the reader approaching Benjamin for the first time.

Nevertheless, I also confess that there have been many pages of Benjamin that I have not understood, though I am not so eager to assign the blame to Benjamin. It's possible that many of his pages, which often amount to sketches or fragmentary thoughts, are less explicable to me because, in fact, they are incomplete and were not intended for publication. Perhaps he simply hadn't completed the work necessary to make himself more clear, either because he didn't have time, or because he gave up on the item in question. But the truth is, I have some of the same problems with parts of essays that are clearly finished and were published during Benjamin's lifetime, so this provisional explanation doesn't satisfy me. I've written here before about my experiences reading Benjamin, describing a "vertiginous feeling" I have while doing so. While there are great moments of lucidity, when it seems as if complex ideas suddenly come into focus, the fact remains that I often literally don't know what the words on the page are supposed to signify. I have experienced similar problems with other critics. I'm thinking now of Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. I have great difficulty understanding what they're talking about. For the most part, the words look like words I should understand, but the sense often eludes me. It takes me several passes before I am able to decide what is being said in a given passage.

What is the problem? Are these writers simply obscure? Is it all gibberish? I think there are a few problems. First, note that each of these three writers wrote in a language other than English--Benjamin in German, Barthes and Blanchot in French. I read neither German nor French, which means that I am, by necessity, reading these writers in translation. So something is lost, something which perhaps makes it difficult for me, at least, to access these writings. Richard Howard writes in his preface to Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text:

. . . the French have a vocabulary of eroticism, an amorous discourse which smells neither of the laboratory nor of the sewer, which just--attentively, scrupulously--puts the facts. In English, we have either the coarse or the clinical, and by tradition our words for our pleasures, even for the intimate parts of our bodies where we may take those pleasures, come awkwardly when they come at all. So that if we wish to speak of the kind of pleasure we take--the supreme pleasure, say, associated with sexuality at its most abrupt and ruthless pitch--we lack the terms acknowledged and allowed in polite French utterance; we lack jouissance and jouir, as Barthes uses them here. The nomenclature of active pleasure fails us. . .

Howard goes on to discuss the solutions translator Richard Miller devised to bridge this gap, but the point here is the gap itself. Is it possible that these texts are simply not to be understood? Obviously this is not an acceptable answer. Others seem to be able to read them, and I consider it the height of presumptuousness to assume that readers are not actually reading, with pleasure or with understanding, what they say they're reading. (Ignoring for the moment the inexplicably popular writer, as well as those times in our lives when, perhaps, we do indeed claim pleasures in order to please others.) Though Miller generally supplies "bliss" for Barthes' jouissance, the latter is a term I've seen used by writers writing in English--one of those terms for which the translated word is simply not sufficient, so the original has entered the target language. Yet for it to do so, a body of readers would have had to understand the term conceptually.

In any event, too many people I respect consider these and other critical thinkers to be not just coherent, but of the utmost importance to them. One such person is Gabriel Josipovici, and if I'm able to profitably read Josipovici's critical essays, why then shouldn't I be able to read Maurice Blanchot's? Of course, Josipovici himself writes in English (and appears to be able to read French and German, not to mention Hebrew), so perhaps this is still the difference, for me? Or maybe that's only part of it.

As I might have expected, Steve Mitchelmore suggests a possible direction. This is only appropriate, since it was through This Space that I first learned of Josipovici. Last week, Steve posted a list of some of his favored texts of literary criticism, texts which he warns "may contain erudite literary argument." One of these is Maurice Blanchot by William Large & Ullrich Haase. (It also includes Michael Wood's wonderful The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, the only book on the list I've read.) In the comments to this post, Steve writes that he recommends the Large & Haase book because "it's a straightforward and memorable intro for English readers mired in English commonsense reading habits." That final phrase "English commonsense reading habits" jumped out at me, as if Steve had been reading my mind as I've been struggling with these issues and writers. (And as such, this book has been immediately added to the wishlist.)

"Commonsense": this word by itself says a lot, doesn't it? I think the idea of "commonsense reading habits" as related to what I was getting at recently in a couple of posts in which I lamented a kind of writing that I called "depressingly utilitarian", which I further identified as primarily Anglo-American. I said that this writing--journalism, columns, opinion pieces, not true essays--means to impart information. And we, as readers, expect usefulness; we expect information. We don't expect to work too much. We resent work. We might be conditioned to shout down someone who appears to be making an issue too "black and white" (usually when we simply disagree: everyone else is always more intractable than we are), but in reality, we have difficulty with nuance; ambiguity bugs us. I mentioned Anglo-American writing, but I can really only vouch for my observations as a middle-class, white American, with a lazy college degree, and a blandly liberal, yet politically conservative, upbringing. We expect writing to speak plain truths--we assume truths are plain. We want the language, in general, to be plain-spoken. If a book cannot be simply opened up and read and grasped by an uninitiated reader, then it must be bullshit ("gibberish"). Writing that is not plain-spoken is difficult and therefore pretentious. People who claim to enjoy supposedly difficult writing are poseurs (or, possibly, elitists). Philosophy is suspect. In my life, I've had more than one person say to me that they had no intention of reading philosophy, because why should someone else's random thoughts on life have any bearing on your own? What makes the philosophers' "opinions" more worthy of consideration than my own? What use could they possibly have? Or, why read philosophy when science has actual answers? (I realize these are gross generalizations and over-simplifications and that plenty of Americans do not subscribe to these attitudes. Forgive me.) My instincts tell me that this problem has to do with the culture of capitalism (and of course it has everything to do with education), but I have neither the time nor the energy to expand on that notion right now. (Having neither time nor energy being intimately related to said culture.)

Ok, I'm all over the map in this post (so it feels), and I'm going to have to come to an unsatisfactory close. Steve's recommendation and the acknowledgment contained in his "commonsense" phrase, these are reminders that some things do require work, pleasure among them. One must learn to read philosophical and critical writing. One must spend time with it (time which may be hard to come by). And those of us used to expecting utilitarian writing, used to a certain kind of reading, may need to teach ourselves how to read differently, better, and may need some assistance in learning how to do so as we approach certain kinds of writing.

Some Further Thoughts on Trust (if not On Trust)

The new issue of Harper’s has an admiring review by John Lukacs of a book by Bryan Cartledge titled The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary. Overall, I found the review strange and weirdly off-putting (repeated invocations of squishy notions like “national character” tend to make me itch), but towards the beginning of it Lukacs says something that interested me. He writes:

The great Jacob Burckhardt once told his students in Basel that history has really no method of its own. But, he added, "You must know how to read." Bryan Cartledge knows how to read. Here is a professional diplomat who spent less than four years in a country, who has no personal ties with it, but whose interest was acute enough for him to learn its difficult language and read volumes and volumes about matters in which many of his predecessors, especially political historians, were not much interested.

This passage made me think of a couple of things. First, I had a Romantic, daydream vision of The Scholar, doing the difficult research, the close reading, the thankless work, following leads down alleys and potential dead-ends. Second, I was struck by this phrase: "whose interest was acute enough for him to learn its difficult language". This made my mind wander, thinking about how much we trust in the written word and in translation.

There is some irony in this, of course, in the context of my ongoing engagement with the work of Gabriel Josipovici, and in particular his book On Trust. After all, I've been writing about how "we" lack trust in tradition, in society, in institutions. I've been reading, and reading about, writers who feel this lack of trust keenly--writers who have doubted the value of writing, questioned the entire project of novel-writing, while at the same time feeling an urgent need to write. These struggles resonate with me. I feel it at the level of my own creative impulse: it is difficult for me to allow myself to even recognize an urgent need to write. (I fear that makes no sense at all.) I suppress the creative impulse. I relate this struggle with my own sense of what is wrong with society. It seems self-evidently true not only that our institutions cannot be trusted, but that most people lack this trust on a most basic level--and yet we desire it, do we not? We want desperately to trust in the institutions we have.

We latch onto things to trust in, however fragile that trust may be. I'm not talking here about religion or anything like that. I’m talking more about our basic trust in the written word. We may think that the media is not doing its collective job (as we see it—that it may be doing its actual job perfectly well is not clear to as many people as it might be)--we may, if pressed, claim to distrust the media as being full of shit, as pandering scandal-mongers, as obfuscators—as agents, finally, of widespread confusion and misinformation about our political process and the most important issues of the day--and yet, when it comes to the basic content of the news, how often do we simply believe that it’s basically true? It takes a lot of work to sift through the crap. Some of us do it more or less successfully. But when it comes, say, to the text of a world leader’s speech, how often does it occur to us, immediately, to question that the content is correct? That the very words can be trusted as accurate? For unless the leader gave the speech in English (or some other language we know), we inevitably encounter the words (out of context, most likely) in translation.

You'll have likely worked out that I've referred here to the oft-reported content of a speech from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he is said to have threatened to have Israel "wiped off the map". When this speech was first reported, my first instinct was to groan, because despite knowing better, I did probably trust, without even realizing it, that the content had been reported accurately. I groaned because it seemed likely to be the kind of thing that could only hurt efforts to prevent an American attack on Iran. But I don't take Ahmadinejad's pronouncements seriously, so other than bemoaning the speech's possible rhetorical value, I didn't pay much attention to it. Then when I read reports that he had been mistranslated and misunderstood, well, this was more interesting. Here we could pretty easily talk about the uses of propaganda by warmongers and the lock-step reporting by the media on the path to war. But even here, I was trusting that these counter-reports were accurate, wasn't I? I have no choice, ultimately, right? When it comes to translation issues like this, I have to trust somebody--after all, I don't speak or read Persian or Farsi (or, really, anything outside of English; my lame smattering of French hardly counts for much). But, of course, people earn our trust. We decide who to credit by weighing various factors. I'm not inclined to believe what the United States government says, so that's one factor. I believe I first learned about the mistranslation issue through Juan Cole. I don't read Cole's work religiously, but I read enough to know that he's a serious person. I don't agree with everything he says, but he doesn't seem to bullshit. He doesn't write outlandishly stupid things about topics that I do know something about. So, in this context, I was inclined to believe Cole's account of this business. That's another factor. I read subsequent articles from various Middle Eastern sources (probably translated, naturally), which tended to support Cole's arguments. A third factor.

Ok, I've sort of gone far afield. I started talking about how we trust in translation and in the written word. In the case of the Ahmadinejad speech, I've had to do some minor work of my own deciding what to believe about the basic elements that had been reported in a particular story. Too often, we don't do the work. We're less likely to notice the more subtle shadings in the news, even when trained to expect it. We have a strong tendency to want to see the newspaper as a portal to objective reality--we think that this is the role of the newspaper, that it should, in fact, be this portal. Certainly The New York Times cultivates this view--"all the news that's fit to print". It presents itself as the factual record, and generally it is trusted as such, even as it is attacked from right (often inanely) and left (more fruitfully). A lot of us criticize the Times and other media outlets--often, I sense, we feel that our trust has been violated. The media has been entrusted by us, we think, to provide us with the information we need, and it fails at this task spectacularly. And yet we go back for more: maybe this time we'll find that that trust will not have been given in vain. Maybe our trust, already given in advance, will be earned. Maybe.

A Prelimary Post on The Sleepwalkers

Earlier this year I read Hermann Broch's massive novel of ideas, The Sleepwalkers. Unlike with Despair, I did mean to write a semi-cohesive review of it here, but it kind of got away from me, and now that it's been several months, I'm afraid I'm too far removed from the reading of it to do what I had intended. Instead, I'm going to post what I can about my reading of the book in irregular installments. For now, a very brief note about the translation.

The novel was translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (best known to me as translators of Kafka). Divided into three sections, in English the section titles are rendered as “The Romantic”, “The Anarchist”, and “The Realist”. As far as I can tell the Muirs' translation is well thought of. However, there are some questions. In their review of the novel, The Complete Review complains, rightly I think, about the translations for the three section titles. I don’t know German, so it’s not like I’m any kind of judge generally. Except that it’s clear that the name for the main character in each section is included as part of the original German title—for example, "Pasenow oder die Romantik", which becomes “The Romantic”, features the name "Pasenow". But, as they say, that one fares better than the other two. When I first picked up a copy of The Sleepwalkers my interpretation of the title of the second section was that the main character in it would be something like a political anarchist. Indeed, that was an element that piqued my curiosity, given my nascent interest in Anarchism. How, I wondered, would a major German novelist of the interwar period depict a political anarchist in fiction? Well, I needn’t have worried, because the main character, Esch, is nothing of the kind. According to The Complete Review, the German for this section title ("Esch oder die Anarchie") should translate as “Esch, or Anarchy”--which is quite a different thing, referring, it seems clear to me, not to political anarchism, but instead to the idea of anarchy as “chaos”. This kind of thing tends to make me wonder what other meanings I'm missing by reading in translation. Naturally, there's no way to avoid this completely. But the question remains.

That's about it. As I said, the translation is well regarded. It's certainly rendered into a good, solid, literary English, for the most part quite readable (ignoring for the moment the problem with valuing "readability" over all else in a translation). The only times I was made aware in the reading that it was in translation were multiple instances of English slang, like the word "what?" at the end of a sentence. (Unfortunately, I didn't make note of these instances, so I can't provide an example.)

I hope to get my more substantive posts on the novel (which may or may not be in three parts, one for each section of the novel) up before the end of the year.

Reading Rilke

Certainly not to be confused with the William H. Gass book of the same name.

No, I'm referring to my reading selection for the wedding, from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

It is ...good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person... it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.

Alas, I must admit that I selected this passage out of one those wedding readings books. I have read neither the Rilke nor the Gass. Gass is, however, one of my favorite writers and certainly my favorite critic (admittedly the latter honor is largely by default, since I've not read much real criticism and have read three of Gass' books of essays).

Related: an excellent post over at CultureSpace on Gass' new collection of essays, A Temple of Texts:

...the distinctions that most interest me in this wide-ranging, opulent book are the ones Gass draws in the opening essay about the importance of literary classics. Having picked up A Temple of Texts not long after I brought home The Idiot, I began to think not only about the reasons we read Dostoevsky, but how we think about classics in the first place. I have long become bored with the tired, old arguments about the literary canon, about which books and authors are deemed essential. "Classics," Gass writes, "are by popular accord quite old and therefore out of date; while by the resentful they are representatives only of the errors of their age, their lines sewn always on the bias, their authors willing tools of power and privilege....

Gass...beautifully and cogently elucidates why classics matter.

I'm looking forward to reading this book. I'm also interested in Reading Rilke; I had been wary of it, mainly because I've never read Rilke's poetry, and, for that matter, am not a good reader of poetry. But, the book's subtitle, Reflections on the Problems of Translation, clinches it for me. I'm fascinated by translation questions, particularly as worked through by a writer the caliber of Gass.