v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Luis Cernuda

THE TRAVELER (El viajero)

It’s you who’s breathing
This warm night air
Among the unfalling
Leaves. Isn’t it strange

Slipping like this into the pleasure
Of another climate? It seems
An impossible marvel
To be so free. Look

From under a dark palm
Up at the dripping stars.
Is what you’re seeing a dream
Or is it true? The magical

World you carried
Within, waited
So long for, flares
Into light outside. If now

Your dream is at last aligned
With your truth, don’t think
This truth is any more
Fragile than that dream.

Open Letter Books

From Saturday's NYT, an article about an unique publisher:

“There’s a set of readers out there that’s very interested in translations and international literature and is not getting what it wants,” said Chad W. Post, Open Letter’s director. “So we believe our business model can work. American literature has a lot of great works. But English-speaking readers don’t have full access to voices and viewpoints from around the world, and we’re trying to rectify that.”

Though none of Open Letter’s 16 titles has yet sold more than 3,000 copies, its efforts have quickly attracted attention and critical praise. Open Letter books, including the recently published “Season of Ash,” by the Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi, have appeared on Best of 2009 lists; and Amazon.com, which has begun an effort to bring more international writers to the attention of American readers, recently awarded Open Letter a $20,000 grant to support publication of “The Wall in My Head,” an anthology by East European writers about the collapse of Communism there.

The world of American publishers specializing in translation is small, and each house has adopted a slightly different strategy to stay afloat. Archipelago Books has gone the nonprofit route and solicits tax-deductible contributions; Europa Editions is the extension of an Italian house and publishes only trade paperbacks; and the Dalkey Archive Press, where Mr. Post, 34, worked until coming here, is both a nonprofit entity and, like Open Letter, tied to an academic institution, the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

“If you’re publishing authors whose names aren’t known, you have to give readers a reason to pick up a book and to get excited about your press,” Martin Riker, associate director of Dalkey, said. “There’s a branding going on, and Chad is definitely trying that.”

Open Letter published its first title, a collection of essays by the Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic called “Nobody’s Home,” in September 2008, just as the economic crisis was erupting. But more than a year earlier, to herald the book’s arrival and attract potential readers, Open Letter had begun a blog called Three Percent (rochester.edu/threepercent), a mordant reference to the literary ghetto to which translation is consigned.

 

Macedonio fernandez's The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Translating makes me much more

A Lydia Davis overview from Intelligent Life:

Lydia Davis is either revered or ignored. She has won many awards, yet her books rarely reach the uninitiated. She is more like a secret handshake, treasured among those in the know—writers, mostly. Rick Moody has called her “the best prose stylist in America”; Francine Prose has admitted to reading Davis “when I feel that I’m becoming too narrow, too rigid, too limited”. Introducing Davis at a reading some years ago, Dave Eggers suggested that many writers can’t help but try to copy her.

Yet a recent visit to the Strand bookstore in New York (“18 miles of books”, new and used) yielded nothing by Davis. A woman at the help desk explained: “Her work is rarely reissued, and the people who have her books tend to hold on to them.”

Davis should pick up more attention now, as Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis”. Though she is only 62 and still writing, this book has a career-culminating formality. Weighing in at nearly 800 pages and drawn from the stories in “Break It Down” (1986), “Almost No Memory” (1997), “Samuel Johnson is Indignant” (2001) and “Varieties of Disturbance” (2007), “The Collected Stories” is the kind of backbreaker that shoves an author into the canon.

Davis has made her name refining and redefining short stories. Her writing is chiselled and precise; her characters are often unnamed and very self-conscious. She has an almost clinical way of handling the knots and frayed edges of an over-active mind, which makes reading her a little cathartic. Consider the narrator in the title story of “Break It Down”. “He’s sitting there staring at a piece of paper,” it begins. “He’s trying to break it down.” The story is at first restrained, with a man calculating the cost of a holiday. But soon it is clear that he is trying to itemise a love affair, to make sense of something that is gone. The sentences grow longer, the memories more intense:

…I was afraid to say it but I had to say it because I wanted her to know, it was the last night, I had to tell her then or I’d never have another chance, I just said, Before you go to sleep, I have to tell you before you go to sleep that I love you, and immediately, right away after, she said, I love you too, and it sounded to me as if she didn’t mean it, a little flat, but then it usually sounds a little flat when someone says, I love you too, because they’re just saying it back even if they do mean it, and the problem is that I’ll never know if she meant it, or maybe someday she’ll tell me whether she meant it or not, but there’s no way to know now, and I’m sorry I did that, it was a trap I didn’t mean to put her in, I can see it was a trap, because if she hadn’t said anything at all I know that would have hurt too…
 

He continues to break it down, and the affair continues not to add up. Davis’s language captures the disorder with a deadpan tidiness that is almost comic.

The Thought of Minimalism

From The Reading Experience about Mary Robinson's work:

Among those American writers who were originally identified as "minimalists," a group that would include Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison may have been the most minimalist of them all--or, to use the word she has said she prefers to describe the  narrative/expository strategy employed by these writers, the most radically "subtractionist."

Readers looking for an introduction to minimalism in its most rigorous form could do no better than Robison's first book, the story collection Days (1979). In the book's first story, "Kite and Paint," two men and a woman hold a mostly trivial conversation while waiting for a hurricane to arrive. At the close of the story--which has taken up only six pages--the two men are about to go outside into the increasing windstorm to fly kites. In "Sisters," a college-age woman staying with her aunt and uncle receives a visit from her sister, a nun. They all go to a spagetti dinner in the basement of the local Catholic Church. In "Widower," a recently widowed dentist and his two children are visited by the father's new girlfriend, and as the children and the girfriend are heading to the beach, the father receives a phone call from a man with a dental emergency. There are intimations of larger significance in such stories, fleeting implications of backstory or future forward movement, but mostly they seem to be fixated on the depiction of present moments.

Robison's style is as pared back as her narratives. It is essentially restricted to brief expository statements--"Guidry was in bed, tangled in the oversheet"--and seemingly insignificant details--"At the firehouse, two men in uniforms were playing pinochle and listening to Julie London on the radio." The largest part of most of the stories in Days is dialogue, and much of it works by indirection as well, except for those moments when a character suddenly blurts out some incongruous statement: During the spaghetti dinner in "Sisters," we hear the college student sister tell a priest that "I'd like to be excommunicated. . .I want the thirteen candles dashed to the ground, or whatever, and I want a letter from Rome."

Peter Markus

boy

We knew this other boy in town who was brother to nobody-an only child with only a mother and a father and no brother to call his own. So we took him in as brother. We did not call him brother though. We called him Boy. Boy was littler than us brothers. Boy was born years-no, centuries-after we were born. We were down by the river with our fishing man father the day that this other brother was born into this world. This boy, this brother, we were told, was born with teeth and a full head of hair. What he was not born with, we discovered, was a tongue. This boy's mouth was a hole in his face he fed food into. Once in a while we might hear some mouthy sounds grunting out. For the most part, though, Boy was silent. Some of the time we did not even know he was near, standing close by, his feet-flopping inside his father's boots-sunk into the river, ankles deep in the river's mud. At times, Boy was more dog than he was a boy. Boy was a dog who always came whenever we called, to do whatever was told. Us brothers taught Boy more than a few tricks. We taught Boy how to walk on water. It is true that Boy drowned the first time he walked out. Boy floated face down down the river. But then he walked upriver back. Back to us brothers. Good dog, we told Boy. We scratched Boy's back. We pulled a bone out from Boy's hand and tossed it to the river. Boy, we told him. Go fish. Boy took to the water like he was part dog, part fish. Then Boy swam back to the river's muddied bank and flopped down on the shore. Like a fish. This boy here is a keeper, Brother said. If you say so, I said to Brother. And then we chopped off this boy's head.

Italo Calvino

Cities & The Dead

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies, and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.

From up here, nothing of Argia can be sen; some say "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.

Michael Boyko

The Researcher

-9-

The researcher walks to the nine o'clock station and circles the cube, taking notes and making sketches. He removes a symbol from the cork and folds it neatly, slipping it into his pants pocket. He examines his fingers, rubs them together, them wipes them on a nearby towel. He walks to a pole and lowers a flag, removes it, then removes his sweatshirt and hoists the garment to half-mast. It lies limp. He re-lowers it and puts it back on. He picks the flag up off the ground and dons it like a cape. He leans against the pole and begins his ninth list.

Italo Calvino

Hidden Cities 1

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squeares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girlde of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.

Cortazar's Jump Skip and Fall

From  The Complete Review:

Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch remains one of the most influential and significant novels to appear in Latin America after the Second World War. It is, in part, notorious for its unusual presentation: it comes with a "Table of Instructions". There Cortázar announces: "In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all."
       The volume itself consists of 155 chapters. Cortázar suggests that the book can be read simply from the beginning to chapter 56, where the book can be considered to end -- "the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience." The alternative he proposes is to begin with chapter 73 and then proceed according to a sequence listed in the "Table of Instructions". (For convenience, each chapter ends with an indication of the next that is to be read in this particular sequence.) Needless to say, this version does not end with chapter 56.
       To many readers this sounds like a contrivance that is too clever by half. Rest assured: it is not. The book allows for these -- and other -- readings. Indeed it can even be read front to back in its entirety.
       The first section -- From the Other Side -- (56 chapters in some 361 pages) is fairly straightforward. The "expendable chapters" that make up the second section -- From Diverse Sides -- are considerably shorter (99 of them in just over 200 pages) and include a variety of notes, embellishments, quotes, even an Octavio Paz poem. They can be considered as integral to the text, or merely as support for it (or, as Cort&aacutezar suggests, as entirely expendable).

Bolaños point

"But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes. This book is not a satirical attack on the right-wing imagination in North and South America: it is a darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible. What is compelling about these portraits is not their plausibility, which is slender and intermittent, but their profusion and variety. (...) This book knows the future and is glancing backwards from an even further future." - Michael Wood, London Review of Books