The Beiderbecke Affair

Like Looking in a Mirror

The Washington Post has a wonderful piece today in which novelist Mayra Montero (Captain of the Sleepers) and her translator, Edith Grossman (Don Quixote), interview each other.

Grossman: I'm curious: How did you feel when you first read my translation of your work into English?

Montero: As though I were in front of a mirror. It was strange. I can still feel the rhythm, the connection, the spirit of my own story, like a heart beating within the text.

Grossman: Do you find something illuminated when you read yourself in another language? Is there anything in your own work that becomes clearer?

Montero: Yes! I see the whole idea of the novel in another light. Amazing things are revealed. What is surprising is that I can discover departures immediately. It's as if I carried the entire novel in my head. I can suddenly remember perfectly what I wrote in Spanish, even though I might not be able to recite it.

Grossman: So if there's the slightest difference or change you catch it immediately. That's interesting and a little disconcerting.

Once in a while I read that some curmudgeonly man of letters has declared he doesn’t read literature in translation. After all, what would be the point? Montero’s observation that the heart still beats, even in translation, is not a thorough rebuttal, but for me it’s good enough.

Remembering the Rebels

It is difficult for my wife, who is Jewish, to endure not only the inanities of the Christmas season, but the unrelenting, unforgiving Christian-ness of it. That Jews have elevated Hanukkah is less a reaction to the materialism of the season (you have one day of gifts? we'll have a whole week!) than a defense against millions upon millions of heartfelt, unthinking Merry Christmases. So thank you to the good folks at Long Sunday for their clear & passionate reminder of what Hanukkah means.

Alain Wittman notes that the holiday commemorates the "rededication" of the Jerusalem Temple after the Maccabees' successful revolt against the Hellenistic forces of Antiochus IV. A day's worth of oil lasted eight, a miracle that prompted the festival. "Note that the holiday commemorates the miracle of the oil, not the military victory," Wittman writes.

Traditionally this has been explained by noting that the Jewish faith does not glorify war but I suspect there is also another reason—the rabbis who shaped rabbinic Judaism may have felt that the success of the rebellion was too short lived and was not "spiritual" in character.

But another way to interpret these events is that it was one of the first national liberation struggles in recorded history. The true miracle was that a group of people, against all odds and a far superior military force, rose up and fought off the shackles of oppression. These people rejected the imperialist imposition of a foreign religion and culture, inspired by the vision of a God who enables us to change, transform and heal the world. They were not realists, trying to find a way to accommodate the status quo—these were people who, guided by their faith, said the way things are are not the way they have to be. Their stubbornness is an inspiration for all those who seek a better world.

Wittman's is a provocative vision, but that's what makes it worthy. His argument suggests that like the Temple's oil, the meaning & importance of Hanukkah continue to burn.

Meanwhile, an NPR essayist worries about the secular nature of both Christmas & Hanukkah, but finds meaning in Isaac Bashevis Singer.

And Slate offers this, apropos Wittman:

So the miracle-of-the-oil celebration of Hanukkah that the rabbis later invented covers up a blood-soaked struggle that pitted Jew against Jew. The rabbis drummed out this history with a fairy tale about a light that did not go out. But really, who can blame them—after all, what nation creates a living monument to a civil war?

(These last two links via Nextbook.)

Christmas Is the New North Korea

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens (left) is bracingly grouchy on the subject of Christmas, decrying the "collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy." Then, rather unexpectedly, he compares the yuletide atmosphere (enforced by the happy likes of John Gibson) to life in North Korea.

And yet none of this party-line unanimity is enough for the party's true hard-liners. The slogans must be exactly right. No "Happy Holidays" or even "Cool Yule" or a cheery Dickensian "Compliments of the season." No, all banners and chants must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader. By chance, The New York Times on Dec. 19 ran a story about the difficulties encountered by Christian missionaries working among North Korean defectors, including a certain Mr. Park. One missionary was quoted as saying ruefully that "he knew he had not won over Mr. Park. He knew that Christianity reminded Mr. Park, as well as other defectors, of 'North Korean ideology.' " An interesting admission, if a bit of a stretch. Let's just say that the birth of the Dear Leader is indeed celebrated as a miraculous one—accompanied, among other things, by heavenly portents and by birds singing in Korean—and that compulsory worship and compulsory adoration can indeed become a touch wearying to the spirit.

On that note, I'm off to celebrate Hanukkah in Maine . . .

Agit Pop

Scott McLemee recently recommended a CD with the ambitiously weird title Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom (Sublime Frequencies). According to a review in Pitchfork, the album “was assembled and edited by Christiaan Virant from store-bought tapes, short wave recordings from Voice of Korea, television programs, and live performances taped while he traveled as a tourist.” The review notes that styles are “all over the map, with frequent operatic touches, a heavy Eastern European influence courtesy of the political leadership’s obsession with Stalin, syrupy enrichments of folk melodies, bizarre show tunes, and homegrown responses to Western pop.”

For his part, McLemee wasn’t satisfied with this description. He offered his own:

Imagine, if you will (and, basically, you can’t), the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of a particularly strident Lawrence Welk, forcing maximum possible fervor from every note. Now, add some reverb.

We’re talking operatic psychedelic polka music here. I am not making this up.

And it’s true. He’s not. On the authority of this description, I immediately bought the disc. It is every bit as weird (& enjoyable) as advertised. I would only add this: Its weirdness is not entirely a function of its being North Korean. Flip around the cable in South Korea, or better yet, go to a karaoke bar, and you will hear at least some of the styles featured on Radio Pyongyang.

Western culture filtered through a foreign sensibility sounds fun & weird whether done by commies or democrats.

The Seamy Side of Teaching, Or Welcome to the Marmot's Readers

Thanks to the Marmot for mentioning these pages. Reading his comments section is an excellent way to keep up on the various controversies surrounding Korean politics & culture.

In fact, in the very post where he mentioned The Beiderbecke Affair, ensuing debate touched on what one person called "the seamy side of English editing/teaching." My wife & I taught in Daejeon, and although our experience was probably typical, it was nevertheless eye-opening. I hope to touch on some of those experiences in the coming weeks.

Unhappy Thought of the Day: Writing = Death

Ludwig Wittgenstein (left) pops up unexpectedly as a character in Carson’s Shamrock Tea, which reminded me that I also ran across him in Jorge Semprun’s memoir Literature or Life (1997). Semprun was a 20-year-old philosophy student and a member of the French Resistance when he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald in 1943. After the war, he spent a lot of time with his friends catching up on philosophy and poetry. He recalls discussion of one particularly “trenchant, limpid sentence (the ultimate meaning of which, however, was uncertain) from the Tractatus of Ludwig Wittgenstein.”

Wittgenstein’s sentence translates to, roughly, “Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived.”

Semprun comments:

No doubt, I’d written three years earlier, in the black imitation-leather notebook, no doubt death cannot be a lived experience (vivencia, in Spanish): we’ve known this ever since Epicurus, at least. Nor can it be an experience of pure consciousness, of the cogito. It will always be a mediated, conceptual experience, the experience of a social, practical occurrence. Such evidence, however, is quite meager. In fact, to be rigorous, Wittgenstein’s pronouncement ought to be phrased like this: “Mein Tod ist kein Ereignis meines Lebens. Meinen Tod erlebe ich nicht.” In other words: my death is not an event in my life. I will not live my death.

That’s it, and it’s not much.

This sentence of Wittgenstein’s is nevertheless important for Semprun because he describes his experience as having participated in a kind of collective death. That he survived makes the experience no less real. Writing about Buchenwald, then, forced him to relive his death. He therefore found it necessary to quit writing, to quit remembering, in order to live. Hence his title.

Fun with Footnotes

It's a bit obvious, but Arthur Salm, The San Diego Union Tribune's books editor, does it anyway: He reviews David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster with footnotes. (Via Romenesko.)

Outlandish But True

With Seven Lies, Lasdun is well toward perfecting the creepily unreliable narrator. In his first novel, The Horned Man (2002), an unusually politically correct & slightly paranoid professor discovers that guys like him really do have enemies. Ultimately, it’s a book about making connections: what at first seems arbitrary or coincidental comes to have meaning; the outlandish turns out to be true.

This same theme is played out in two other novels I read at the same time as The Horned Man: Ciaran Carson’s Shamrock Tea (2001) and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). Sebald writes of nocturnal animals finding their way in the dark; Carson and Lasdun both use the honeybee to make their point. Writes Carson: “The seething comb of black and amber bodies seemed without purpose, but he knew that this was far from the case: by dancing, by touch, by scent, by the vibrations of their wings, bees communicated a map of the immediate nectar-bearing countryside.”

It’s a wonderful metaphor for both storytelling and reading.

I wrote an essay for the Concord Monitor back in 2002 about the connections between these books about connections that can be read in full after the break.

Seven Lies

I just finished reading James Lasdun’s Seven Lies. It received only a middling review in The New York Times, but I thought it was better than that. Lasdun, who is a British poet, writes prose that is literary in an old-fashioned sort of way—very formal & considered—and taut. This is his second novel and his second tour de force. It begins with an unknown woman throwing wine in the face of one Stefan Vogel at a New York soiree. Confused about what could have provoked this, Vogel begins to write about his past; the reader, meanwhile, is led to understand that this very act of recounting will eventually necessitate Vogel’s death. Is he contemplating suicide?

The novel shifts into bildungsroman mode: Vogel grows up in Communist East Berlin with a diplomat father, an overbearing & pretentious mother, a rebellious older brother, and an uncle who is a state security agent. He trips into a small lie that will grow larger, that will define him for the rest of his life, and that will unravel a bit more with each page. Even though he hails from a society constructed on lies & betrayal, Stefan has a lot to answer for by novel's end.

Like the film Oldboy, Seven Lies has been criticized for its implausible plot twists. The Times’ complaints are reasonable enough, I guess. But I was convinced by the absolute control of Lasdun’s voice & craft. As in a short story, there was not a detail out of place.

Highly recommended.

Is It Real or Is It Red McKenzie?

Sides like "Hello Lola" were originally recorded on 78, a format that positively freaks out people raised on CDs. Which is why one must call on Irish poet and 78 aficionado Ciaran Carson for a proper defense.

Upon hearing digital sound for the first time, the German conductor Herbert von Karajan reportedly exclaimed, “all else is gaslight!” “[W]ell, what’s wrong with gaslight?” retorts Carson in his book Last Night’s Fun.

For you can use your imagination, make figures out of shadow. And lo-fi has a beauty and a logic all of its own, which has something to do with the imperfectability of listening or hearing, or of the act of recording itself. Where do you put the mikes? What are you looking for? In any session of music, no one will hear the same thing: it will depend on context, on placement, on experience—whether or not you’ve heard the tune before, whether or not the person next to you knows the tune that you might only half-know.

But do we ever fully know a tune, or only versions of it, temporary delineations of the possible?