Category Archives: Books

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 · 2:32 pm

Novel obsessions

I’m wondering what people think about the conversation in Don Quixote between the canon and the priest in chapters 47-48. The canon at times seems very logical and at other times inconsistent. He criticizes novels of chivalry as “foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time.” And yet he says that he has read the beginning of almost every chivalric novel that’s been written. He can’t read to the end of any of them, though, because their plots are so repetitive. So why does he keep beginning them over and over?

In spite of being so critical of chivalric novels, he can’t seem to let them go:

Despite all the bad things [the canon] had said about those books, he found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered, describing shipwrecks, storms, skirmishes, and battles …

and the canon goes on for a long paragraph listing all the wonderful things a writer of chivalric novels can write about. He ends his long speech describing how fabulous a chivalric novel could be if only people wrote them well:

And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the great goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as verse.

He’s so convinced the genre of chivalric novel can be saved, that he has tried to write one of his own and has written more than a hundred pages.

The canon sees so much potential in this genre that he seems obsessed with it. And I can’t help but think of Don Quixote itself when I read the last sentence of the above quotation — Don Quixote has its own “free writing style” that combines epic, lyric, tragic, and comic aspects, with a little poetry and rhetoric and a lot of prose. Is Cervantes speaking through the canon here, working his way toward the new genre that the novel will be?

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Monday, June 25, 2007 · 7:17 pm

New books

I’ve been on a book-buying and book-mooching spree lately; I’m not sure why, since I don’t need any more books and have distressingly little time to read (my summer class has begun and it’s intense), but when does that ever stop a book lover? Just today The Walker’s Literary Companion arrived in the mail, a book I’ve mentioned multiple times on this blog. I’m not sure I’ll read the entire thing, but it will be a good source of information on authors who write about walking for whenever I get in the mood to read about it.

Just the other day, Kate Sutherland’s book of short stories All In Together Girls arrived in the mail; I want to read at least one more collection of short stories this year, and this sounds like an excellent one — plus I’m looking forward to reading the work of a fellow blogger. I ordered it from Canada; the book will be available in the U.S. in August, but given the mood I’m in, I decided not to wait.

Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage I received recently from a Book Moocher; it’s “the best book about not writing a book about D.H Lawrence ever written” according to Amazon. I really don’t care about D.H. Lawrence all that much, but a book about the struggles of writing a biography sounds like just my thing. Another interesting nonfiction book to arrive recently is Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, which is part memoir, part philosophical pondering, part literary criticism. It sounds like a great mix.

And I also mooched Stephen Dixon’s Gould; I’ve never read Dixon before, but lots of bloggers rave about him, so I thought I’d give him a try.

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Monday, June 25, 2007 · 6:47 pm

Not for children!

Online Dating

I got this rating because I used the words “dead,” “death,” and “murder.”  Hmmm … I didn’t know this blog was so morbid …

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007 · 5:48 pm

Gone for the weekend …

I’m going to be out of town for the next few days, traveling to western New York state where my parents live — I have a brother who is graduating from High School this weekend (I’m the oldest child and he’s the youngest, with five other siblings in between), so Hobgoblin and I will attend the graduation ceremony and the graduation party. We’re bringing our bikes along with us to ride on the relatively flat roads along Lake Ontario. What a difference it will be from the never-ending hills of Connecticut!

I don’t think I’ll get a whole lot of reading done on the trip, but of course I’m going to bring along some books. Virginia Woolf is definitely coming along; I’m about halfway through The Voyage Out and enjoying it a lot. As other bloggers have noted, this first novel hints at some of the directions her later fiction would head, although it’s more traditional in form than books like To the Lighthouse. Then I’m bringing along Ali Smith’s The Accidental, which I probably won’t get to, but I want it on hand in case I finish the Woolf.

And then I began a new nonfiction book last night: Adam Sisman’s book Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, about the writing of his Life of Johnson. I’ve read the introduction and first chapter, and it promises to be quite entertaining. It’s got three sections, one giving a brief biography of Boswell, the second — the longest — describing the writing of The Life, and the third discussing its reception.

Here are a couple interesting bits from the introduction:

In his book James Boswell made a heroic attempt to display his friend “as he really was.” He did not conceal his partiality; his reverence, affection, and even love for Johnson are obvious throughout, and an endearing feature of his biography. But neither did he conceal Johnson’s faults: his rudeness, his prejudices, and his temper. Boswell was the first biographer to attempt to tell the whole truth about his subject, to portray his lapses, his blemishes, and his weaknesses as well as his great qualities: an aim we take for granted today, but in Boswell’s time a startling innovation.

Sisman tells how Boswell was mocked for his insistence on filling the biography with everyday details about Johnson — his eating, clothes, behavior, etc. All the things that make the biography fun, in other words, were the things people didn’t seem to get when the book first came out.

Sisman has this to say about the relationship between the two men:

The Life of Johnson can be read as an unending contest between author and subject for posterity. Johnson and Boswell are locked together for all time, in part-struggle, part-embrace. Boswell will forever be known as Johnson’s sidekick, remembered principally because he wrote the life of a greater man; Johnson is immortalized but also imprisoned by the Life, known best as Boswell portrayed him. Each is a creation of the other.

I wonder what they would have thought of this fate, if they could have known.

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Tuesday, June 19, 2007 · 7:18 pm

Final thoughts on The Walk

I finished Jeffrey Robinson’s The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image recently, and I enjoyed it immensely (which won’t surprise you if you follow this blog, as I’ve raved about it a few times before), although I think it’s a rather odd book. The key to understanding the purpose of the book is the word “notes” in the subtitle; it’s really not a developed, detailed argument, but a short, suggestive exploration of the topic. If you come to the book expecting to find depth, you will be disappointed, but if you want an introduction to all kinds of walking literature and the kinds of topics and themes that appear in that literature, this is definitely a good resource.

I say it’s odd partly because of the way it meanders through its topics; I wasn’t always sure where Robinson was heading or why he was discussing a particular work in a particular chapter, and sometimes his arguments get a little abstract, without a whole lot of supporting details to back them up. He also mixed up personal experience with discussions of literature; he opens the book by describing a walk he took in Denver, where he lives, and there’s another chapter made up of numbered notes that describe a walk he took through a Degas exhibit at the Met in NYC. I love this mix of the personal and the academic, when I know a little bit about what attracts an author to the subject and can feel the author’s enthusiasm for the subject in a direct way.

And of course this type of book is wonderful for the recommendations I can glean from it for further reading; I’ve got The Walker’s Literary Companion on the way right now, a book with tons and tons of selections from all kinds of authors, from Dorothy Wordsworth (yay!) to Eudora Welty. I’m actually not super-fond of reading anthologies and selections, but I imagine I’ll find lots to read in this one, and that it will lead me to the longer works that get excerpted here.

Let me leave you with a quotation from the book, one that says surprising things about the benefits of forgetting:

On a walk one is continually encountering the new and, by the “despotism of the eye,” the tyranny of bodily pleasure, willingly forgetting the old. Every forgetting is an assertion of freedom from which the mind goes on another journey. Every forgetting is, in addition, a self-forgetting, an assertion of renewed innocence and pleasure. As we forget, and forget ourselves, we become aware of the gradual fact of hoarding of encounters, impressions, and discoveries. We begin to experience our world as a growing plenitude …

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Monday, June 18, 2007 · 7:12 pm

Time for reading?

How many books do you think you could read in, say, a year, if you had all the time you wanted to read? I’m thinking about this question right now because I’m on “summer vacation” and am not doing as much reading as I thought I might. I put summer vacation in quotation marks because I don’t want anyone to think I’m doing no work whatsoever — I have work-related writing projects to agonize over and a class to teach beginning very soon. But I do have extra time right now, and what I’m finding is that I read about the same amount as I did when the semester was in full swing and I was busy.

It seems that I read about the same amount year-round, maybe a bit more during the summer, but not as much as I expect. During the school year I look forward to the summer and eagerly anticipate all the books I’ll rip through, but when the time comes, I read just about the same amount as ever, and I spend any extra time I have on … I’m not sure what.

I’m beginning to think that there’s only so much I can read at any one time, only so many hours a day. That’s roughly true — there are always exceptions, like the times I can’t put a book down and will sit with it for hours. But generally, if I sit still with a book for too long I get antsy, and if I spend too many days in a row doing little but reading I get restless.

So — why do I look forward to vacation as a time I’ll get so, so much reading done? I’m not a binge reader, capable of doing enormous amounts of reading all at once. Better to think of myself as a slow and steady reader who can consistently read, say, four or five books a month and that’s it. And why do I wish I didn’t have to work so I could spend more time reading? Because I probably wouldn’t spend all that time reading.  I’d still read 50 or 60 books a year and fill the extra time with something else.

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Sunday, June 17, 2007 · 5:49 pm

Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City

218ht7ekj0l_aa180_.jpgFirst, let me say that I am SO HAPPY to be sitting quietly in my study doing nothing right now. I rode the hardest race of the season this morning, and now I’m beat (riding seems to be good for my back and neck, at least in the short term — they are feeling much better). It was a hilly road race, and while I didn’t do all that well, getting dropped on a particularly nasty hill, I did better than last year, when I got dropped on one of the foothills of the particularly nasty hill, and that’s really all I was hoping for. If you’d like to hear more about these vicious hills, read Hobgoblin. All I have to say about it is that hills suck.

But I wanted to write about Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, a collection of novellas and stories. Most of them were first published in China in 1944 in a book called Romances, and they have been reissued by the wonderful NYRB Classics. I got off to a tiny bit of a slow start with the first novella, but after that I gobbled these stories up; they are gripping tales of love, family, and politics — often about the conflict among these three things. Chang lived through and wrote about political and social turmoil; the title novella takes place in a besieged Hong Kong, where scenes of violence strengthen the main character Liusu’s shaky romance and settle her uncertain future. This is not to belittle the political turmoil of the time, but to show how it can affect individual people:

Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect? Who knows which is which? Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated? Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering, after than an earth-shaking revolution … Liusu didn’t feel there was anything subtle about her place in history.

Liusu’s “victory” is getting her lover to marry her, therefore ensuring a comfortable future and no loss of social status. In these stories, love often seems indistinguishable from war — whether it takes place in a besieged city or not, love and courtship can be a fight for one’s life.

Chang also writes about the conflict between traditional family structures and customs and the modern world that’s threatening them. One of the things that’s fascinating about this book is the glimpse it gives into a world where family members refer to each other as “Ninth Old Master” or “Second Mistress” or “Third Brother,” where a matchmaker arranges marriages, and where one’s status in society can determine one’s life. But the stories also tell of characters who are struggling to be modern, such as Zhenbao in the novella “Red Rose, White Rose,” who was “the ideal modern Chinese man”:

Never had a son been more filial, more considerate, than Zhenbao was to his mother; never was a brother more thoughtful or helpful to his siblings. At work he was the most hard-working and devoted of colleagues; to his friends, the kindest, truest, and most generous of men. Zhenbao’s life was a complete success. If he had believed in reincarnation — he didn’t — he’d have hoped simply to pick up a new name, then come back and live the same life all over again.

Zhenbao came from a poor family but worked hard to create a better life for himself; Chang describes him as the perfect Western self-made man. But — and this should be no surprise, for if an author describes a character’s life as perfect in the beginning of a story, it simply must get shaken up — Zhenbao cannot be “modern” in the sense of following all his desires. He is unhappy with his wife but feels he cannot pursue the woman he loves; he is torn between romance and loyalty to family and friends. He is in many ways a traditional man wanting to be free of tradition, but unable to make himself so.

The gender dynamics are a little hard to take, which is no surprise, as the book describes a society that is still old-fashioned in many ways; what I’m uncertain about is Chang’s take on the subject. Occasionally, the narrator will step in and say something about “what women are like,” which tends not to be very flattering, and I don’t know if this is Chang talking to us, or if she is speaking for the culture and not for herself. It’s not easy to detect Chang’s presence in this book — what her views are on the stories she tells.

The writing is captivating, although it follows a rhythm that feels unusual to me — many of the stories cover large sweeps of time, decades in a character’s life perhaps, and Chang will offer a scene for a few pages that gives all kinds of detail and moves through time slowly, and then she’ll sum up years in a short sentence or two. The narratives move abruptly. This is not a flaw; it just takes some getting used to.

For more information on this book, check out Scott Esposito’s interview with Chang’s translator Karen S. Kingsbury and Orpheus’s interesting post on Chang and popularity.

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Friday, June 15, 2007 · 5:58 pm

Books, etc.

So much for celebrating walking — Hobgoblin and I went on a three-hour walk today and about halfway through I could feel one of the muscles in upper back/shoulder area tighten up into an ugly knot, and now I can’t easily move my head. I’ve had trouble with tight muscles and knots and pinched nerves in my upper back for quite a while now. I’m pretty sure this began shortly after my first rather disastrous backpacking trip for which I carried a backpack that was much too heavy and which apparently did a lot of damage.

Funny, as much as I’m loving reading The Walk, it hasn’t yet talked about how much walking can hurt, and yet, much as I love walking, it quite often hurts very badly.

Anyway, just a couple quick notes on books — I finished Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies recently and thought they were extraordinarily beautiful. They cover so much it’s hard to describe what they are about, but it seems like they are about everything important — birth, death, angels, lovers, time, beauty … rather than try to describe the book, I should simply give you a couple quotations:

Who has turned us around this way so that we’re always whatever we do
in the posture of someone who is leaving? Like a man
on the final hill that shows him his whole valley
one last time who turns and stands there lingering —
that’s how we live always saying goodbye.

…

How we squander our sorrows gazing beyond them into the sad
wastes of duration to see if maybe they have a limit.
But they are our winter foliage, our dark evergreens
one of the seasons of our secret year — and not only a season
they are situation, settlement, lair, soil, home.

If you are looking for some great poetry to read, I highly recommend this.

And I’ve begun Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out; I’m excited to be reading Woolf again, and so far I’m enjoying it — I was particularly pleased to see Richard and Clarissa Dalloway appear as characters here; I’m curious to learn more about why Woolf used these characters multiple times and how they develop from one novel to another. Fortunately, I have Julia Briggs’s book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life on hand, which perhaps will explain some of this for me.

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Filed under Books, Life, Poetry

Thursday, June 14, 2007 · 5:46 pm

Happy books once again

I got some very interesting comments to that post on happy books I wrote a couple days ago — thank you! — and they got me thinking. First of all, I realized that my own claim about not paying attention to whether books or happy or sad or something in between isn’t quite true. When I pick up a title that’s new to me I’m not all that concerned about what type of ending it has or whether the book’s mood is light or heavy. But it’s different with re-reading. I realized that one of the charms of Jane Austen novels, which are among my favorites in the whole world, is their happy endings. When I re-read them, which I do fairly regularly, one of the reasons I do it is because of the comforting quality of the happy resolutions. I suppose most of the time I feel ready for the challenge of whatever I might find — happy or sad, serious or light — in new books, but other times I want the familiar, and the familiar is usually happy.

(That said, though, even those Jane Austen novels don’t always have perfectly happy endings — isn’t Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley just a little odd, more like a father/daughter relationship than a husband/wife one? And Marianne’s marriage from Sense and Sensibility? Edmund and Fanny?)

A number of people suggested that my students wanted entertainment out of their reading rather than to be hit with seriousness and sadness, and I think that’s true for some of them. For some, they don’t like reading and so they were wishing the experience could fly lightly by, as though they were reading fashion magazines or something. For others, they like reading but prefer to read something that’s going to leave them with a happy buzz — that’s not really going to challenge them.  One student mentioned the Chicken Soup for the Soul books once, and I worked hard at not rolling my eyes.

But others are good readers and serious students, so for them, the explanation is different. For these students, I think it’s more a matter of how they understand the world and how their view of literature fits with that understanding. Some are very aware of how harsh life can be, and they seemed not to want to be reminded of it again — they didn’t want to have to dwell on it while doing their homework and sitting in class. I can kind of understand this, but I don’t share the feeling — reading and thinking and talking about the harshness of life I find comforting because it makes me feel less alone.

I’m remember now, though, that students were more likely to make this sort of comment at the beginning of class, and by the end they seemed to like whatever it was we read a little better. I think I tried to communicate what inspires me about the stories in the hope that they would find their own sources of inspiration, and sometimes I think they did.

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 · 5:53 pm

The walking essay

I could write a post on each and every chapter of Jeffrey Robinson’s book The Walk, although I won’t, as I’ve already read four or five chapters now without commenting on them and I’d have to catch up (and you might get bored), but I say I could write a post on each chapter because they are all so suggestive and thought-provoking and fun.

So I’ll limit myself to a few quotations from Robinson’s chapter on the the walking essay, which begins with this marvelous bit about Virginia Woolf and essays:

For no subgenre of literature do Virginia Woolf’s remarks on the requirements for the essay — that it “lap us about and draw its curtain across the world” — apply more aptly than for the walking essay. If one does not, at least while reading such an essay, believe in the cozy pleasure of essay reading, a pleasure in which the mind is active but refuses the sharp twists and turns of mind in its most elaborate purposefulness, then one should not waste time with walking essays. In the walking essay, familiarity is its own solution; it confirms itself. One walks either to make a destination, or one walks for the pleasure of walking, says the walking tradition. If you choose the latter walk, you approximate the choice to read a walking essay.

I love the way Robinson connects the experience of walking with that of reading — he does it throughout the book; in fact, that’s really the main idea running through it. And with the walking essay, the idea is that walking and reading both offer a comforting familiarity, a way of engaging the mind that is active, but meandering. The point is not to get anywhere particular; the point is to enjoy the journey. No wonder I love both walking and essay reading so much! A bit later Robinson describes discovering a wealth of walking essays, once he began to look for them, and writes that walkers, “who are almost always bona fide essayists, are urged from somewhere to ambulate on paper about ambulation.”

Robinson also talks about how walking is similar to reading and writing essays because they are both about collecting: readers and writers love to collect essays; walkers love to collect experiences and observations and memories; essays are collections of observations, events, and sometimes lists. He has this to say about the essay:

Acquisition seems to be an important impulse behind the familiar essayist’s activity. Essayists love to list things, particularly, though not by any means exclusively, books. As many essays as there are about walking, there are perhaps twice as many or more about book collections, libraries, books-I-have-enjoyed.

Now this description of the essay reminds me of book blogs, with their frequent lists and tales of book acquisitions and descriptions of books-I-have-enjoyed. Perhaps blogs are about collection too — the collection of posts, of memories, of thoughts, of comments.

Then the essay moves into a discussion of library organization (these chapters really do wander from subject to subject), and includes this wonderful quotation from A.A. Milne on shelving books:

To come to Keats is no guarantee that we are on the road to Shelley. Shelley, if he did not drop out on the way, is probably next to How to be a Golfer through Middle-Aged.

Having written as far as this, I had to get up and see where Shelley really was. It is worse than I thought. He is between Geometrical Optics and Studies in New Zealand Scenery. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whom I find myself to be entertaining unawares, sits beside Anarchy or Order, which was apparently “sent in the hope that you will become a member of the Duty and Discipline Movement” — a vain hope, it would seem, for I have not yet paid my subscription. What I found Out, by an English Governness, shares a corner with The Recreations of a Country Parson; they are followed by Villette and Baedeker’s Switzerland. Something will have to be done about it.

I am not quite sure how Robinson got from the Virginia Woolf quotation to this A.A. Milne one, but I can say that the journey from one to the other was a pleasure.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007 · 2:40 pm

Happy books?

Do you think about the (relative) happiness or sadness of books when you choose to read them? I’m thinking of this because I recently read Hepzibah’s post in which she describes people telling her to stop reading so many depressing books and to read something happy instead. And reading that post I remember how some of my students voiced mild complaints about the depressing stories I chose for them to read. They wanted something uplifting.

I was surprised when my students said this, because it really hadn’t occurred to me to think about whether what I’ve read or asked my students to read is sad or not. Perhaps what I put on the syllabus is affected by a taste for sad stories I may have (this is a class where I teach students how to write about literature, so I can choose whatever literature I want), although I’ve never thought of myself as having such a taste, but my first response to this complaint is to think that much of really great literature is sad because that’s the way life is, and there’s nothing to be done about it. In fact, I’m guessing that what my students would consider “uplifting,” I’d consider cheesy and overly sentimental, and if I ever feel “uplifted” by literature, it’s when an author has said something bracingly difficult but true about life.

But maybe this has to do with how I read — with the fact that although I get caught up in stories I don’t tend to believe in them or get involved with them to the extent that what I’m reading affects my mood. I rarely feel sad, much less get depressed, when I read a sad book, so to call books depressing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, reading something beautifully well-written can make me feel happy or reading something shoddy can make me feel irritated, but if I read a story where everybody dies or the marriage breaks up or a character fails to reach her dreams or whatever I’m not bummed for the rest of the day.

But maybe my students are? I do recall treating some of the violence in a Flannery O’Connor story lightly (not that this violence doesn’t carry significant meaning, but she does find humor in it sometimes) when that violence shocked my students. I wanted to tell them … but, but, it’s a story! Don’t take it so seriously! I mean — take it seriously, definitely, but don’t get upset about the violence! No one is actually dying here!

So, am I callous, or are they overly sensitive, or is this an age and experience thing?

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Sunday, June 10, 2007 · 6:43 pm

Storytelling

My reading in Don Quixote is zipping along; I’m nearly up to p. 300 and enjoying it immensely. I’m now in the middle of the first of what I understand will be several long interpolated stories; I remember people saying they get a bit dull and make one long for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to return, and I will probably feel that way eventually, but for now I’m enjoying the story of Anselmo and Lotario from “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious.” Isn’t that a great story title?

These interpolated stories are nice reminders of just how interested Cervantes is in storytelling, and I like how he includes one just after the chapter in which the characters — Don Quixote excluded — discuss the value of those chivalric romances DQ is so obsessed with. We get discussions about the value of stories and then we get the stories themselves, so we can think about them theoretically — maybe that’s too strong a word, but we can think about what their purpose is and what makes them work along with the other characters — and then we can experience them directly. I haven’t gotten to the end of “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious” yet, but I’ll bet when it’s finished, the characters will have a discussion of the story’s merits and perhaps of the quality of the reading (the priest reads the story out loud). I love the way Cervantes includes all these layers of story and response — and I’m only talking about the interpolated stories here, when they are only a small part of all the self-reflexivity going on.

I really got a kick out of reading Chapter 32, the one mentioned above about the merits of chivalric romances; when the priest tells the story of how these romances turned DQ’s brain, the innkeeper launches into a defense of them:

The truth is, to my mind, there’s no better reading in the world; I have two or three of them, along with some other papers, and they really have put life into me, and not only me but other people, too. Because during the harvest, many of the harvesters gather here during their time off, and there’s always a few who know how to read, and one of them takes down one of those books, and more than thirty of us sit around him and listen to him read with so much pleasure that it saves us a thousand gray hairs; at least, as far as I’m concerned, I can tell you that when I hear about those furious, terrible blows struck by the knights, it makes me want to do the same, and I’d be happy to keep hearing about them for days and nights on end.

Cervantes is clearly having a laugh at these people and the simplicity of their enjoyment and their response (they sound like modern-day boys going to see thrillers at the movies because they like the violence and the special effects), but there’s also something charming about this story of the harvesters gathering around and listening to the stories of chivalry. Their pleasure in them is infectious.

After the innkeeper speaks, several other characters give their assessment; the innkeeper’s wife, speaking to her husband, says she likes chivalric tales “because I never have any peace in my house except when you’re listening to somebody read; you get so caught up that you forget about arguing with me.” Maritornes likes the love stories, and the innkeeper’s daughter enjoys feeling sorry for the knights who are mourning the absence of their ladies. These are all unsophisticated ways of reading, and I think Cervantes wants the readers of his novels to read in more complicated ways than these characters do, but I also think Cervantes hopes his readers get some simple pleasure out of his novel too; he knows just how much fun it is to sit around and listen to stories with others or to read them in privacy, so just as much as he’s making fun of the inkeeper and his family, he’d like to be able to entertain them too.

The priest and the innkeeper then to go on to debate the truthfulness of the chivalric tales; the priest tells the innkeeper that some of the books are full of lies, while others tell stories that are based on historic events. He seems to be trying to keep fact and fiction separate and therefore to be a much more sophisticated reader than the innkeeper, who believes, much like Don Quixote does, that many of the obviously fictional tales are real. But even the priest has trouble telling what’s what; of the adventures of Diego Garcia de Paredes, one of the real-life heroes of literature, he says:

he [Diego Garcia] recounts them and writes about them himself, with the modesty of a gentleman writing his own chronicle, but if another were to write about those feats freely and dispassionately, they would relegate all the deeds of Hector, Achilles, and Roland to oblivion.

Even the priest, trying hard to teach the innkeeper how to be a more sophisticated reader, ends up mixing fact and fiction, real life and literature himself.

So when the priest tries to lecture the innkeeper on the uses of chivalric literature (they are “intended to amuse our minds in moments of idleness”) and claims that “I would have something to say about the characteristics that books of chivalry ought to have in order to be good books,” I don’t think we’re meant to take him seriously.

What we have are the priest and the innkeeper with conflicting views of what’s valuable and what’s true, and neither of them is particularly persuasive. The innkeeper is enthusiastically gullible, and the priest is more sophisticated but patronizing and lecturing and lacking in self-awareness.

I see this a challenge to the readers of Don Quixote — can we be better readers than the innkeeper and the priest? We have plenty of models of bad reading in this novel (Don Quixote himself as chief among these) — can we do any better?

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Friday, June 8, 2007 · 8:00 pm

Library Sale!

Hobgoblin and I just returned from a library sale — not a bad way to spend a Friday evening, is it? One of the best parts of the trip was seeing local blogger Hepzibah and getting to chat about books a bit. She works at the library and graciously showed us around and had set aside two Edith Wharton novels for us (thank you!). And here is what I bought (for $22 — not bad):

  • The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith (origin of the character Charles Pooter and the term “pooterish”)
  • Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf (her last novel)
  • How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton (essential Proust reading; most likely I’ll get to it when I’ve finished Proust)
  • The Accidental, Ali Smith (I’ve been meaning to read this one for quite a while, having heard so many good things)
  • Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ann Tyler (I believe I’ve heard this is one of her best)
  • PopCo, Scarlett Thomas (I know little about this, actually, but have heard good things about her latest, The End of Mr. Y)
  • The Last of her Kind, Sigrid Nunez (Another recommendation from bloggers)
  • Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant (A NYRB Classic — how could I resist?)
  • Wild Decembers, Edna O’Brien (I didn’t recognize the title but recognized the name)

I love library sales!

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Thursday, June 7, 2007 · 5:37 pm

Favorite novel?

Kate S. quotes a Sven Birkerts essay in which he discusses his favorite novel, Humboldt’s Gift, defining “favorite” as:

[the novel] I visit most often in my thoughts, know most intimately, down to the structure of its cadences, and which fills me with the greatest covetousness and inspires me to emulation.

Kate then asks readers to cite their own favorite, according to Birkerts’ definition. Now, as I’m not a fiction writer and don’t aspire to be one, I can’t answer the question fully, but if I leave out the last criteria — the novel that inspires me to emulation — then I’d have to answer Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I wish I had a more original answer. Big surprise, right? But that’s the one that comes to mind first. It’s surely the novel, setting aside children’s books, that I’ve read most often; I don’t know how many times. It’s the novel I know best, one I re-read when I want something comforting and familiar but one that always seems new and newly interesting.

If I were a writer, my answer might be different, because I’m not sure I would want to try to emulate her, or that my style would be at all like hers — I mean, even remotely like hers, because, of course, it wouldn’t really be like hers, as she’s in a category of her own, I think.

Anyone else have an answer?

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Wednesday, June 6, 2007 · 6:05 pm

Anita Brookner’s Leaving Home

A friend recommended Anita Brookner’s novel Leaving Home; this was a book she’d loved and was intrigued by, partly because of Brookner’s writing style, which breaks the “show don’t tell” rule all over the place. This style is one my friend is drawn to because it’s similar to her own — this is the friend whose novel I’ve been reading and giving feedback on. Both Brookner and my friend write about consciousness, what it’s like to live in one’s mind, and do so in an analytical way — although there’s lots of emotion in the writing too — that involves a lot of explanation and summary. This style appeals to me greatly; while I like plot, what I’m really drawn to (and I know I’ve written about this at length already) is character and idea, and there’s something appealing in a writer breaking a commonly-known rule (show don’t tell) and writing something great while doing so.

Although I enjoyed reading Leaving Home, I have to say that as far as analytical, idea-driven, consciousness-exploring novels go, I’ve been having more fun reading my friend’s book than Brookner’s. I don’t think this is fair to Brookner, though; maybe reading two novels in this style at once is a little much, and at another time I would have been more absorbed in Brookner’s book. I liked it, definitely; I just was willing to set it aside a little too frequently.

The story is about 26-year-old Emma who decides to leave her quiet life with her mother in London and move to Paris to study landscape gardening. She longs for a life that is fuller and more exciting than what she’s known, but she also knows herself quite well and knows that she is most comfortable in the order and solitude she has left behind. She leaves home and then begins to wonder what “home” is and whether she will ever feel at home again. Although she learns to be independent and meets new people in Paris — Michael, with whom she takes very chaste walks, and Francoise, who lives the kind of exciting life she sometimes wishes for — she soon enough finds herself returning to London — and then traveling back and forth between the two cities — as she tries to figure out just what she can have and what she wants out of life.

The fundamental question she faces is whether she should push herself to change the kind of person she has been in order to live a more vibrant life, or whether she should accept the quietness, the isolation, the melancholy, as simply who she is, make peace with it, and go on. The landscape gardening she studies becomes a metaphor for this conflict — the careful control of nature she sees in the gardens mirrors her own self-controlled, orderly life, and as she feels ambivalently about her life, so she feels ambivalently about those gardens, wanting, at times, nothing more than to devote her life to studying them and, at others, rejecting the whole enterprise.

The writing is very calm and matter-of-fact, expressing Emma’s personality by both hiding and revealing the emotional turmoil underlying the surface quiet. The sentences themselves are generally simple and straight-forward, almost emotionless; for example, she says of her mother:

We passed the slow day together, reading. I was beginning to mirror her habits, her reclusion. When we embraced it was wordlessly, as if we understood each other perfectly. Away from her it seemed as if there were no end to leaving home.

But the emotion is there, after all, and maybe more present because it is so seldom acknowledged. In this sense, Brookner does show instead of tell — she leaves the reader to intuit the level of turmoil her narrator experiences. The narrator tells us much about her thoughts and feelings — in long analytical passages of summary — but there are also depths she hides.

I will certainly read more Brookner novels in the future; this is my second one (after Hotel du Lac), and I’ve liked both of them enough to be interested in reading them again, as well as picking up more of her numerous other novels.

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Tuesday, June 5, 2007 · 7:48 pm

Choosing a book and other things

First of all, my race report: same as last week, basically. Yay! We rode 24 miles and finished in about 55 minutes; I stayed with the pack the entire time and finished somewhere in the middle. I do have things I want to work on (like staying closer to the front of the pack), but that’s the kind of finish I’m very happy with these days.

But I entitled this post “choosing a book” because I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoyed Denis Johnson’s story collection Jesus’ Son and how surprising that might seem because it’s so different from what I usually read. I picked it up because of a friend’s recommendation, but this isn’t a friend I always agree with when it comes to books, and I got the recommendation a long time ago, and I’m not sure why it stuck with me. And I had no idea why this friend recommended it and what the book was about when I bought it. So these weren’t the most auspicious circumstances.

But it makes me think I should choose books in this almost random kind of way a little more often — to take more risks. It’s so easy to make judgments about what a book will be like and whether I will like it or not, based on criteria like what the book looks like, what I’ve heard about it through the media, things I know about the author. But it’s such a pleasure to be surprised, isn’t it? To find out that the book is nothing like what we thought? Or that if it is like what we thought, that we’re surprised by how much we like it?

Here are some of my recent choices, some typical of what I usually read, some not: I finished Anita Brookner’s Leaving Home recently, and I hope to post on it soon — this is fairly typical of what I turn to frequently — contemporary fiction, thoughtful, character-driven, about ideas. I just began Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, which is a bit of a departure, although not a huge one — mainly it’s a departure because it’s not British or American, and it’s made up of novellas and stories, when I usually choose novels. I also received A.J.A. Symons The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography in the mail today through Bookmooch; this is even more of a departure because I have no idea who A.J.A. Symons is, no idea who Corvo is, and little idea what is meant by “an experiment in biography.” But I read about it in a Michael Dirda book and was intrigued, and, although I have little idea when I’ll actually pick it up, I’m excited about it.

I suppose there’s no sure-fire way to make surprises like Jesus’ Son happen more frequently, except to stay open to suggestions from unusual places and to try to develop courage as a reader.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re a participant in the Slaves of Golconda book group (or want to be one — new readers are always welcome!), check out Imani’s choices for the next book and vote on what you’d like to read.  She’s got some great possibilities.

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Monday, June 4, 2007 · 5:32 pm

More on The Walk

Every time I pick up Jeffrey Robinson’s book The Walk it makes me happy, and what more can one ask from a book? The Walk also makes me open up my computer almost immediately to see if the books it mentions are available. Yesterday I came across a reference to The Lore of the Wander: An Open-Air Anthology by George Goodchild (Amazon doesn’t have it, although I found it elsewhere), and E.V. Lucas’s collection of essays Turning Things Over, which contains an essay entitled “A Journey Round a Room” which Robinson praises highly, and which is inspired by Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around my Room (published by Hesperus), which I read and loved a few years ago. You see why this is fun?

This book isn’t perfect; I was disappointed by the third chapter, entitled “Throwing off the Burden: Walking and the Self,” which sounds so promising but didn’t quite deliver. Robinson seemed most interested in talking about walking and the self to make a point about Wordsworth, when I would have preferred him to talk about Wordsworth to make a point about walking and the self. This book is quite short — 140 pages — and I’m discovering that it makes no attempt to dive deeply into ideas, but instead covers a lot of ground (so to speak), and so is more suggestive than thorough. I’d like it to be more thorough, but I’m also coming to think that its suggestiveness is part of what makes me so happy; it leaves lots of room for me to read and think some more.

But even that disappointing chapter has this utterly charming pair of quotations to offer; first, this is Hazlitt from his wonderful walking essay “On Going a Journey”:

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the sun-burnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like ‘sunken wrack and sumless treasuries,’ burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again.

I think that’s wonderful, but I’m also sympathetic with Robert Louis Stevenson who has this to say about Hazlitt (from “Walking Tours”) — and those of you who are feeling overwhelmed by all that laughing, running, leaping, and singing might like it too:

I do not approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry the respiration, they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air confusion, and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the body and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind.

Although I admire Hazlitt’s energy and joy in his walking, I’m more on the side of Stevenson; I prefer to let walking soothe and calm my mind, almost to put it to sleep, and to walk in a regular pattern that invites a kind of quiet meditation. I don’t need to walk to think; I need to walk to keep from thinking.

And a couple more quotations from the introductory chapter (I haven’t even touched on the chapter on the walking essay, which I’ll have to save for another post):

The walker observes things from a distance, and if the power of the object is in some way too compelling, he by definition detaches himself from it by walking on. Yet the walker is in experience, feels and thinks in his movement through time and space, and is reaching out (or can) to the world in time. To deny either side of the walk is to deny half of experience.

……

When I walk, my mind does not flow like a stream. More literary than that, it works in mixed genres: at times autobiography, polemic, natural description, dialogue, essay, even treatise, story. Sometimes it seems a genre that keep resisting genre. Sometimes internal pressures or laxities break the integrity of genre. Other times the break comes from the squirrel that will not get off the path, the sprinkler’s spray that I must circle around, the old man trudging past in a heavy great coat on this warm day, the vague green lines of algae on lake water.

Robinson constantly points to the ways writing and reading and walking are all similar; in fact, I don’t think you can write a book about walking without doing so to some degree. He slips back and forth between the experience of walking and the experience of reading as though they are the same thing: “walkers, who are almost always bona fide essayists, are urged from somewhere to ambulate on paper about ambulation.”

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Sunday, June 3, 2007 · 7:10 pm

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

imagedbcgi1.jpg I finished this book a few days ago and have been thinking about it since then. It’s a collection of linked short stories with the same first-person narrator in each one; it’s a powerful collection, moving and disturbing and beautifully written. This is very far from the usual sort of story I read — the narrator is a young man who is an alcoholic and drug addict who drifts through his life looking for more drugs, wandering here and there, meeting people, getting into trouble, getting high, and thinking about life.

He doesn’t tell us a whole lot of what he thinks about life, actually, as more often than not he seems to be trying not to think, but he comes out now and then with comments and judgments on the world around him that are all the more startling for being relatively rare. The narrator’s voice is haunting; he’s mostly matter-of-fact in the way he recounts his life, often using strings of short sentences or long sentences made up of strings of short phrases that seem not to reveal much until suddenly they reveal a whole lot. This is the way one story begins:

I was after a seventeen-year old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn’t her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way.

This is a typical Denis Johnson sentence, I think, one that starts off a little bit shocking and becomes more complicated as you go on, and then ends with a phrase that takes you into another place entirely, some place larger and more thoughtful. Here’s how another story begins:

I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d even known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.

And you’ll find passages like this one, where the narrator starts off describing the events of a day and end up taking the measure of his life:

Georgie and I had a terrific time driving around. For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts. A champion of the drug LSD, a very famous guru of the love generation, is being interviewed amid a TV crew off to the left of the poultry cages. His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop. It doesn’t occur to me, as I pity this extraterrestrial, that in my life I’ve taken as much as he has.

I’d like to keep giving you example after example of the writing, because it’s so beautiful and so stunning. You can see in the last quoted sentence that the narrator is looking back on his life, writing about it in some future time; occasionally he’ll make reference to how he has changed and what he has lost, sounding nostalgic at times for this youthful, free-wheeling life and culture. He mentions urban renewal a number of times, soon to become reality (the book is set in the early 70s), which will destroy the landscapes he knows, bleak ones, yes, but familiar ones too.

And yet he also is writing from the perspective of sober adulthood, knowing very well just what a harsh and difficult life he has led; the last story describes a narrator newly-sober and struggling to settle into a new life, offering the reader a hint of the narrator’s future trajectory. This last story is one of the best and most disturbing, I think; the narrator spends a lot of time spying on an unsuspecting couple in their home, longing to understand and maybe to imitate their normalcy. He can only gaze in on this conventionality from the outside, though, and the people he finds himself actually involved with are outcasts like himself. The story ends with this thought:

All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

In spite of all the darkness, the collection ends with the possibility that the narrator will find his place after all, will figure out how to shape a life for himself.

From the collection’s title you will be able to guess that there are religious references throughout; these don’t occur all that often, but just enough so that you know the narrator has a spiritual awareness; he is aware of just how far he has strayed from God, perhaps, or maybe it’s that he feels that God has abandoned him and the world he sees around him. The title feels ironic at times — this guy is Jesus’ son? — and yet he also seems watched over, somehow, as though the older narrator knows that the younger version of himself will find a way out of the mess; if he won’t find salvation, exactly, he’ll find a new life:

There were many moments in the Vine like that one — where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn’t be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

To be found innocent for ridiculous reasons — that’s one version of salvation, I suppose.

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Friday, June 1, 2007 · 6:22 pm

The Walk

156478459201_aa240_sclzzzzzzz_v63860474_.jpgI’m wondering now why it has taken me so long to pick up this book, The Walk, by Jeffrey Robinson; I’ve had it on my shelves since December, and I’ve kept my eye on it as a possibility, but never quite got around to it. But when I picked it up yesterday on a whim, I realized very quickly that it is a book I’m going to enjoy a lot. First of all, and this isn’t even related to the book itself, I noticed that it’s published by Dalkey Archive Press, and it’s got a list of their books in the back, a list which looks quite wonderful, full of world literature titles, some of which I’ve heard of and many of which I haven’t. From what I can tell, they seem to be lesser-known works that tend toward the experimental and subversive. I’ve only recently begun to check out publishers’ websites and blogs, and now I’m wondering what took me so long with this too; I’ve enjoyed checking out the Hesperus Press blog and A Different Stripe, the New York Review of Books Classics blog.

But back to the book; after checking out the Dalkey Archive books, I looked through the “Bibliographic Essay” and the “Afterword,” both of which list books about walking. This sort of essay is a goldmine, isn’t it? Neither of them lists a whole lot of books, but the ones they do are intriguing. Here are a few of them:

  • The Walker’s Literary Companion, eds. Roger Gilbert, Jeffrey Robinson, and Anne Wallace
  • Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry, by Roger Gilbert
  • Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (I’ve raved about this one on this blog before)
  • Joseph Amato’s On Foot: A History of Walking
  • Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (I’ve read bits of this but never the whole thing)
  • Edward Hoagland’s Walking the Dead Diamond River
  • Gary Snyder’s book of poems The Back Country (I’ve never read Snyder, but think I will one day)
  • Eric Newby, A Traveller’s Life
  • Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
  • Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist
  • Authors who write about urban rather than rural walking, including Restif de la Bretonne, Baudelaire, Nerval, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Kafka, and Walter Benjamin. Also, Alfred Kazin (A Walker in the City), and poets Frank O’Hara and Charles Reznikoff.

And that’s not even all of it, and doesn’t include books mentioned in the main text itself. I’ve read the first two chapters of the main text, the first one an introductory chapter and the second on “The Foot and the Leg.” I love the idea of a chapter on the foot and the leg! I may post on quotations from the introductory chapter some other time, but for now, here are a couple of things from this second chapter:

People observe their feet or write about them with a unique detachment. The foot is not quite a part of the rest of the body, but not quite part of the mind and heart that direct actions and receive impressions. The foot is simply there, as the shoe that eventually may fit it is simply there.

Yet this does not mean that thoughts about the foot are simple or that people agree about its functions and, more provocatively, its character. Thoughts about the foot tend to exist in oppositions: the useful vs. the useless, the primitive or natural vs. the civilized, the animal vs. the spiritual, the physical vs. the mental, the heavy vs. the airy, the earthly vs. the spiritual, the ugly vs. the beautiful, the repulsive and disgusting vs. the sexually attractive and the adorable, the innocent vs. the seductive. The foot either responds to the body’s commands or works from an independent center. The foot is a thing or it is human.

And one more thing from later in the chapter:

Charles Lamb gushed over walking: “walked myself off my legs, dying walking!” This would be life as a pleasurable fulfillment, a leavening of the body into spirit, the rhythm of the legs dissolving the weight of the legs into energy. “To walk one’s legs off” does not indicate dismemberment. No violence hides beneath the swing of the legs. Along with the legs, one will have walked off self-consciousness, all heat. One may have arrived at what Rilke calls “The profound indifference of the heart.”

This is one of the reasons I love walking so much; I can walk off self-consciousness, and turn weight into energy.

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Thursday, May 31, 2007 · 5:36 pm

Rilke in translation

I’m now halfway through Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and am loving the experience of reading it. In an effort to understand it better, I’ve begun to check out other translations online when I’ve finished a section from the book I own, translated by David Young. I haven’t decided whether I like or dislike Young’s translations, not really knowing enough to make a judgment, but I discovered that I could understand the poem much better when I looked at more than one translation. I have the original German too, which I’ve been reading after I read the English a few times, but my German’s not good enough for me to judge translation quality. And, yes, these elegies are complicated enough to require a number of readings (they are relatively short, and this doesn’t take long). I am finding them beautiful and rich and mysterious — they touch on death, love, consciousness, relationships, loneliness, isolation, the world of the mind — they are about everything important, it seems like.

But to show you what I mean about the translations, here’s a short section from the Fourth Elegy, as translated by David Young:

But we, when we’re fully intent on one thing,
can already feel the pull of another. Hatred is always close by.
Aren’t lovers always coming to sheer drop-offs inside each other
they who promised themselves open spaces, good hunting and a homeland?
As when for some quick sketch a contrasting background
is made with great care so we can see the drawing. No effort is spared.
We don’t know the contour of feeling, we only know what molds it
from without.

The meaning of the first part is clear to me, and I like the idea — that we have trouble focusing on one thing, on the present moment, and are always in pursuit of what’s next. The bit about the lovers is interesting — they expect infinite possibilities from each other and are disappointed. The next four lines have an image that took me a while to get, but once I got it, I liked it; the artist took pains with the background of the drawing to make the drawing itself clearer, although the drawing itself is only the work of a moment. Somehow, this is like the way we experience emotion; perhaps emotion is like the sketch, which remains fleeting and mysterious; all we can know about emotion is what shapes it — the thing that molds it, like the carefully-prepared background. What’s confusing about this passage is the way the fifth line (“As when …”) seems at first to relate to the image of the lovers, not the lines about emotion. It’s only by thinking through the images carefully, that I can figure out the image of the sketch and the ideas about emotion go together.

Here’s the same passage translated by Robert Hunter:

But we cannot focus on
a single object without
worrying about another.
Conflict is our essence.
Aren’t lovers always
crowding one another,
despite mutual longing
for wide open spaces,
homestead and plentiful hunting?
As when a canvas is carefully
stretched and primed to receive
a spontaneous sketch,
the better to offset it,
we do not observe the
background of emotion,
only what is splashed upon it.

The passages are similar — but not the same; the meaning of each one seems different. Isn’t “hatred is always close by” different from “conflict is our essence”? It’s the difference between something existing outside us but easily available and something that is in us and a part of us. And then there’s the difference between “Lovers always coming to sheer drop-offs inside each other” and “lovers always crowding one another.” These are two very different things, aren’t they? It’s the difference between finding something inside the other — some emotional or mental attribute — and bumping into the other’s body. And in the second translation the sketch is clearly connected to emotion, as it forms one sentence, instead of the three sentences of the first.

And here’s another, translated by John Waterfield:

We, though, where we intend one thing, and mean it,
are vexed by shimmering alternatives.
Enmity’s near to hand. Don’t lovers always
come upon fences in each other’s souls
where they expected hunting, home, and freedom?
Then briefly a design that’s based on contrast
comes into focus, carefully prepared
for us to see. (They take some pains with us.)
We do not know the contour of our feeling:
only the thing that moulds it from without.

Now the lovers are encountering fences in each other’s souls — the place of conflict, the soul, is a more clearly defined, and we have a fence instead of a drop-off. And in the parentheses, some mysterious “they” gets introduced; I notice now the other versions used passive voice (“a canvas is carefully stretched,” “a contrasting background is made”). Who is this “they”?

I guess I’m pointing out something that’s fairly obvious if you think about it, which is that every translation is an act of interpretation. Every translation introduces its own meanings and shades of meanings. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time puzzling out different translations, though, so I’m struck by this idea in a different kind of way, actually seeing the various interpretations in front of me at once.

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