Disappointed Potential: The House of Paper

This is one of those books with vast potential that is left untapped, and ultimately disappointed. The premise of the story is spectacular, Borgesian, intriguing and mysterious: a book encased in cement with an inscription to an unknown person from a recently deceased professor is sent to her office and discovered by a colleague. He decides to try to find the sender of the book (no return address) based on the somewhat mysterious inscription, and return the book.

The set up is there,...more This is one of those books with vast potential that is left untapped, and ultimately disappointed. The premise of the story is spectacular, Borgesian, intriguing and mysterious: a book encased in cement with an inscription to an unknown person from a recently deceased professor is sent to her office and discovered by a colleague. He decides to try to find the sender of the book (no return address) based on the somewhat mysterious inscription, and return the book.

The set up is there, and the scope could be grand, labyrinthine, compelling and significant. But the short format makes the story seem hurried rather than unfolding, and dictated rather than narrated. The exquisite insights into the mind and heart of a bibliophile, or even just an avid reader, are plunked in as though the story is being tied up with significant meaning, instead of letting the meaning evolve through the story. It reminded me from the outset of The Shadow of the Wind, a complex mystery centered around the obscure author of a hidden book, but The House of Paper falls significantly short of what it could be.

Perhaps that's what's most frustrating about reading this book - that it could be infinitely more than it is. That the story could be experienced by the reader, rather than relayed by a rather monotonous narrator whose voice (perhaps because of poor translation) sounds no different than the character that tells the bulk of the story. Instead, it is a series of epigraphs linked together by a skeletal and merely sketched plot. Though eminently quotable, it amounts to little more than an excuse for these nuggets of wisdom about the significance of books and libraries in our lives.

The translation itself is in sore need of revision and editing, and reads more like a draft than a final version. The clumsy language obscures whatever rhythm and beauty may have been present in the original.

It is worth reading though, if only for the gift of its potential. And worth expanding upon, should the author and publisher see fit to do so. I would read this happily as a full-length novel rather than merely a novella.

KALIMA

"Without translation, we would be hopelessly lost to one another, lost to the possible exchange of the hopes and fears that make us all human. The KALIMA Project affirms the centre that connects us all, language and structures we build with it, including our capacity to love," poet, playwrite and translator Aafa Michael Weaver said.

KALMIA is a massive translation undertaking sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), which plans to translate 100 titles annually into Arabic from classic and modern texts in other languages. Announcing its first list of titles this year, if successful, could be the translational equivalent of the library of Alexandria, or more recently, google's ambitious Alexandria project. It's humbling in its magnitude, and unsurprising then that it is only because of translation to and from Arabic that much of 'western' literature and knowledge has passed through to us today.

Delerium

A friend, Christopher Lee Donovan, brilliant photographer and artist, shared with me his work in a webzine, Area Zinc. The zine itself is bilingual Spanish/English, and is rather spectacularly edited and designed. This issue's 'theme' is delirium, and the collection of art (primarily from the US and Latin America, but with a strong representation of other countries) is haunting. I'm thrilled to know of a new venue in which to indulge my art-voyer habit!

I'd like to be a writer

“There's a kind of confessional impulse that not every literate, intelligent person has,” Mr. Updike said in his 1990 Globe interview. “A crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive, and I guess that, more than talent, is what separates those who do it from those who think they'd like to do it. That your witness to the universe can't be duplicated, that only you can provide it, and that it's worth providing.” Quoted boston.com in their article about John Updike's death.

I can't help feel insignificant in light of this - feel as though what I want to do is devote my days to writing in the belief that I can be one of the few, lucky writers to do so. I don't know if I'm a coward or just lazy, but I haven't yet learned this kind of insanity. But I hope to.

The death of teaching

Stanley Fish, in a blog for the New York Times on January 18th, The Last Professor, lauds a book by a former student of his that in no uncertain terms declares victory for the utilitarian model of education and predicts the demise of the university as a place for "understanding and explaining." He's not entirely wrong, but neither is he entirely right.

I haven't read the book he's reviewing, and based on his review I likely won't. As a poet, moreover, a literary translator, and an aspiring academic, I hear often enough how the humanities don't contribute to the world in a tangible or measurable way. I hear often enough that higher education is "an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility." This is the triumph of the corporation over the individual, the system over the human. And those who can view this change with satisfaction, with victory, have clearly never read Dickens' Hard Times.

Had they bothered to read literature they would perhaps understand that this is the ultimate dehumanization. The author of the book, Donoghue, concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” He's not wrong - in fact, we have already seen this happening - it continues to happen to the fields of imaginative pursuits. It is not my purpose to rehash the classic arguments that only by first imagining a better world can we then create it, or by taking an imaginative perspective on the world can we critique it, and therefore improve it. I fully subscribe to these arguments, as anyone pursuing my future would have to. But the idea that the future holds no place for the imagination, and only for utility, is not to be congratulated as pragmatic but lamented as defeated.

Not only that, but it seems to me to be distinctly wrong. One might just consider events of the past several months as an example. The devastating crash of the unregulated market, and the resulting loss of faith in the free market as a suitable system of moral guidance for life, is a place to start. The free market, we have learned, is very good at one thing, but can not serve as a model for all things, nor even can it be left to its own devices without oversight. No longer can we associate goodness as a virtue with the manifestation of material wealth and productivity, as the utilitarian model requires. While we need technicians, engineers, investors and bankers to make the system run, so also do we need the visionaries who imagine ways to improve the system, to make it both more efficient and more human. We need people with the developed ability to envision alternatives to the status quo, both in the name of progress and in the name of morality. And these people don't just learn to do this by studying numbers or processes. It requires the nurturing and development of a different set of skills, those of the imagination, through literature, philosophy, dare I say art?

Second, look at the recent (political) victory of the intellectual imagination over the lowest-common-denominator. It is the ability to envision change, envision a better world that we can all be part of, that in large part ensured the success of the Obama campaign. No longer are the willfully ignorant lauded as being more 'authentic' - but the chance for education must be extended to be universal. Only by having an imaginative, engaged and educated populace can a democracy thrive. People get the government they deserve in a democracy; it is by celebrating the life of the imagination, the ability to make real in the world what our artists, writers and philosophers dream for us as a better existance, that we have come finally to a new beginning. There is hope in this national shift, though no assurance it will become permanent.

The stifeling of the imaginative intellect visibily damaged the world we live in. These are but two examples. Perhaps there is a future in which professors, and university life that stimulates imaginative thinking, is gone entirely. But I rather doubt it. How many students vy to go to the University of Phoenix (mentioned approvingly in the article) over Harvard, or even the University of Massachusetts? This is not soley because of name recognition - it is because for the most part we still understand that without an interactive, imaginative education we are limited to our technical skills. Like a machine working into all eternity with no purpose.

Giving Thanks

Last year I was incredibly fortunate to receive a grant from the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. As part of my responsibilities, I needed to send them a completed version of my project, along with a letter describing how the grant helped me in completing it.

Writing the letter, I realized that, while the grant was incredibly generous and had a significant financial impact on my ability to work on the project, perhaps even more significant was the impact on my confidence as a writer and translator. As a relatively young translator, with no major publications as yet, it's difficult sometimes to believe that my work has any value outside of my immediate circle of friends, family, mentors and colleagues. It's difficult to remember that it is to bring the work to the world outside of my direct interactions that I'm doing the work in the first place.

Receiving the support of an institution to which I have no direct connection was perhaps the greatest assurance I could have gotten that not only is the work I've selected worthwhile, but my own translations are as well. It is not only the completion of this project that this grant has supported, but my ability to take on new projects with assurance, and to continue to pursue my passion with confidence in my ability to succeed.

UnCommon Sense

Denise Levertov is one of those great poets who is sometimes overlooked because of her politics. Which is why Jacket's issue on her is such an important thing. These essays, reflections and sharings of very personal interactions with Levertov are necessary, not only because she is a poet of peace and we are again in a time of seemingly endless war, but because she has particularly valuable insights about poetry's role in the world.

As the responsibility of the poet (which makes me think, now, of the wonderful poem "Responsibility" by Grace Paley read last week at the Joiner Center's tribute to her), Levertov is recorded by poet Mark Pawlak as saying:

"It is not the responsibility of the individual writer to increase the literacy of the masses,” Denise asserted. “To assume oneself responsible and able to do so would be arrogant. A complete upheaval of the social order is necessary to achieve that. It is rather the individual writer’s responsibility to work toward a revolution."

This profoundly reasonable understanding of how a poet can be 'of the people' addresses something I've thought about for a long time, since first reading Neruda and Vallejo as a teenager. How can a poet write in the voice of the people without a kind of condescention? And this quiet private conversation points me in the right direction.

Later in the same piece, Pawlak shares another few sentances from an interview which hold the kind of no-nonsense wisdom that I associate with Levertov:

"A poem can have only literal meaning and still be a poem. I think of such poems as ‘plain’ poems. But, myself, I prefer that layering of meaning upon meaning which metaphor allows. However, any metaphor deserving the name must in poetry arise from the literal; and the layering of one meaning upon another must never obscure the literal; reading of the poem.”

Metaphor arising from the literal, the layering of meaning upon meaning while still remaining transparant to the concreteness of the image, this has always been for me the ultimate poetic achievement. I find this to be the common ground in every poem that moves me - though I couldn't have put it into these words exactly.

Finally, in the same Pawlak piece, he discusses her view of writer's block, something I have languished in recently.

She has as much as said that the creative unconscious has a natural rhythm of its own that cannot be rushed. Because one is not putting pen to paper, she has explained to me, does not mean that there is inactivity in the unseen depths of ones being, activity that might eventually surface as poems.

And this rational, undramatic approach to writing and life is perhaps what inspires me the most about Levertov, and about the perspective offered by this issue. Levertov has been for me one of those poets that I want to know better, that I want to read more carefully. This is still true, perhaps it will always be that she is one of the poets I feel like I can never fully approach, or appreciate. But the demonstration of her uncommonly common sense, her practical apprach to the world, and to writing is something that is so often missing in poetry. She dispenses with the mystique, the persona and is simply engaged with the world, without pretension. This is why now more than ever we need to read poets like Levertov - poets who engage the literary world with the actual world, who see with rationality and sense the work that needs to be done, and literature's place in doing it.