By The Power Of The Book
Listen up all you single people out there, if this post on a Guardian blog is correct, you too can attract a suitable boy/girl by reading the right kind of book in public, such as on the subway, on the bus, in a park, in a cafe etc. Now I am not much of a cafe person, and prefer to do most of my reading in bed, standing at a tall desk, and occasionally in the smallest room of the house. And the only time I chatted up a young lady reading, she was holding Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and I think she prefered to be left with her solitude. You can read similar stories of others in the comments section of that post; here is a sampling:
"If I ever bumped into a young lady reading a David Foster Wallace novel, I'd do my best to disregard my lack of physical appeal while turning up the charm and attempting the seduction of my life. Unfortunately I think there's more chance of bumping into a singing Daschund belting out an uncanny version of Bohemian Rhapsody."
"In the US, "Christian fiction" about the coming rapture/apocalypse is quite popular -- seeing someone reading that doesn't just turn me off, it scares me."
"I was clocked reading Geek Love by an attractive girl on the tube the other day. She asked me what it was about, and I told her: a circus family experiment with drug and radioisotope cocktails to breed their own freak show. She went strangely silent, turned away, and started talking to her friend on the other side."
"- A DIY manual - this guy's already hitched and a home-maker. No chance
- Shakespeare's complete works. You'd never be short of conversation."
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So maybe it is time for me again to appear in public, hefting Tolstoy's "War & Peace" or Dante's "Inferno". To rephrase an Apache Indian song "Arranged Marriage":
"Me wan gal say a soni kudi Me wan gal that say she read wif me"
Also any ladies, reading this post, please give me your suggestions as to what would work best?
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A related link derged up decause of comments: this witty NYT essay titled "You Can't Get a Man With a Pen".
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A Rebel's Letters
The twin loci of my attempts at translating poetry are Gulzar and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I have very little Urdu, and a bit of Hindi that has grown rusty from disuse. Yet, I persist in producing half baked translations (if you have the patience, these translations are here; and this is an note in which I tried to explain how I went about translating a Fai'z ghazal) with the main hope that a little of the sensibility of these two poets will travel, as I have traveled, from those Eastern languages into this Western language, the only one in which I can fashion sentences I am not ashamed to claim parentage of, and also the one I call home. This is task is further complicated by the fact that there have been many precursors, some illustrious such as Agha Shahid Ali, who have done this before, especially in the case of Faiz's poetry. Yes,, Prof. Harold Bloom, your anxiety of influence strikes again.
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Naomi Lazard, who is among one the earliest translators of Faiz, in this article* writes about her memories of interacting with Faiz, and also working with him on her translations. She correctly notes the enormous popularity enjoyed by Faiz in the Subcontinent, and to illustrate narrates the following anecdote:
"When we were leaving Honolulu, I asked for his address. He told me I didn't really need it. A letter would reach him if I simply sent it to Faiz, Pakistan. The reason? He helped found the postal workers' union. They were his people. They would know where to find him."
Ms. Lazard, after noting that it is difficult to describe the process of translation that is much like describe the process of writing poetry, goes on discuss, via examples, of her process of translating Faiz. I envy the luck and advantage she had of working directly with Faiz's literal renderings into English, as well the opportunity to interrogate Faiz on his choices of words, phrases, metaphors etc. Now what would I give for that!
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his opus "The Gulag Archipelago" - a must read in my opinion for its ability to shift the readers consciousness - writes satirically about Moscow's hypocritical condemnation of the prosecution of left-leaning writers abroad while simultaneously hearing writers and other members of the intelligentsia into the most degrading of prison camps. He notes, correctly, that compared to the Gulag, prisons elsewhere in the world would surely be like paradise.
Faiz, like the Chilean Pablo Neruda, the Turk Nazim Hikmet, the Greek Yannis Ritsos among others, was one of these writers who was a dedicated Communist. Consequently, like many writers in this ground he was also imprisoned for various periods of time; the longest being four continuous years. The readers, who are familiar with Faiz's poetry, have no doubt encountered the brooding images of the prison and the gallows, the shadows of prison on memory and on love, etc. These connections might be further illuminated by reading some of the letters* Faiz wrote from prison to his wife, Alys, and her letters back to him.
In these letters, Faiz and Alys, apart from discussing the difficult financial and emotional situation the prison put them in, in a minor fashion, also talk about their daughters, learning French (Alys, jokingly, reprimands Faiz for wanting to quickly master French by writing, "I am glad your French progresses, but don't rush too far ahead. I must maintain superiority in at least one sphere - even if it be French (and the biological status of having babies)" ), the weather, memories of their ten years of marriage, gossip of friends and family etc. Of course Faiz also has some very interesting things to say on the psychological effects of prison on him. So go read them.
*H/T to N.V of Within/Without for the pointer to The Annual of Urdu Studies
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The Fundamental Book - Gabriel García Márquez
That afternoon he returned dejected to his office and consulted the dictionary with childish attention. Then he and I learned for the rest of our lives the difference between a dromedary and a camel. In the end he placed the glorious tome in my lap and said: “This book not only knows everything, but it’s also the only one that’s never wrong.”
It was a huge illustrated book, on its spine a colossal Atlas holding the vault of the universe on his shoulders. I did not know how to read or write, but I could imagine how correct the colonel was if the book had almost two thousand large, crowded pages with beautiful drawings. In church I had been surprised by the size of the missal, but the dictionary was thicker. It was like looking out at the entire world for the first time.
“How many words does it have?” I asked. “All of them,” said my grandfather.
The truth is that I did not need the written word at this time because I expressed everything that made an impression on me in drawings. At the age of four I had drawn a magician who cut off his wife’s head and put it back on again, just as Richardine had done in his act at the Olympia. The graphic sequence began with the decapitation by handsaw, continued with the triumphant display of the bleeding head, and ended with the wife, her head restored, thanking the audience for its applause. Comic strips had already been invented but I only saw them later in the color supplement to the Sunday papers. Then I began to invent graphic stories without dialogue. But when my grandfather gave me the dictionary, it roused so much curiosity in me about words that I read it as if it were a novel, in alphabetical order, with little understanding. That was my first contact with what would be the fundamental book in my destiny as a writer.
- from "Living To Tell The Tale"
Note: Don't all writers - by that I refer to those that take up upon themselves that sisyphean task of transmuting the ephemera of their minds into the more solid etchings on paper - at some point fall under a dictionary as under an avalanche, and surface holding fistfuls of words?
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