Translation As Art - Hélène Cardona (Literary Event)

When I was younger and sillier, I thought that in order for a novel, story, or poem to be translated, the author had to be fluent enough to write their story in multiple languages.  Little me, who had little dreams of writing one day, thought that my work could only ever be in English - or maybe Spanish if I learned it perfectly.  It took ages for me to learn that other people translated the work for artists in many cases, and that that meant those words weren't actually necessarily the original story.  That was a surprise to me.  [I categorize this realization with the more recent realization that all the Great Illustrated Classics I read - all the great novels I read at so young an age - I never actually read them.  They're so short, and so much of the story is missing, it's like it isn't the story at all.  But that is an internal struggle for another post, I suppose.]
This realization has taken a long time to process.  There are things I will never be able to read - authors' words I can never understand.  But the translations of their texts are an art to their own.  That is why I enjoyed Hélène Cardona's poetry talk for Tabula Poetica.  Cardona is a translator, poet, and actor.  She speaks more languages than I could ever hope to.  She speaks French as her first language, but says she chooses often to write poems in English.  I cannot imagine being fluent enough in another language that I could write poetry in that language without writing it in my first language first.
I am sorry to say that last semester if you had played a word association game and gave me the word "translation", the first thought in my head would not have been the word "art".  Now I see it differently.  Cardona's talk was enlightening, giving insight into the experience of translating, and the role the translator plays in taking a piece of art and moving it between languages.  One thing that has always bothered me about translation in poetry, is that I know some of the nuances of the poems are lost in the process of moving it out of it's natural language.  Rhyme is often, as I've observed, the first thing that cannot be translated.  But Cardona's discussion on her work as a translator and poet helped me understand what goes into a translated poem, the rhythm and phrasing, which must be carefully sculpted.  She explored the creative liberty of the translator in creating a new piece of art which preserves the purpose and meaning of the work it is born of, sometimes using new tools and new feelings to convey these ideas.
Cardona painted translation in a new light for me, one which has mediated my original concerns about translation, cementing its immense value in my appreciation of literature.  Translation is art.  I get that now.  I should have understood that much sooner, but it's never too late too change your mind, right? 

Poetry Has Value - Jessica Piazza (Literary Event)

When Jessica Piazza came to discuss poetry at a talk for Tabula Poetica, she told her audience that she would be discussing the (commercial) value of poetry, something which I had not heard discussed at any length by any professor or poet before.  Piazza's project, Poetry Has Value, is a year-long practice of submitting to journals, magazines, and reviews that pay for poetry, as opposed to publications that offer "exposure" to people who offer their creative work in exchange for their living.
The project itself is an interesting introspection into the life of a poet and the way poetry is treated in the literary world.  With her project mere days from completion, I found myself completely agreeing with Piazza, the system is broken, and something needs ti be fixed.
If you've got even a couple minutes to read, I highly recommend the blog.  Piazza has provided lists of paying publications and month to month updates of her progress in getting published, or rejected, by these publications, as well as a tally of costs and earnings.
One thing she discussed during her talk that I loved was (and I don't remember if this was quite how she referred to it, but...) Literary Citizenship.  This phrase here refers to the process of engaging in and contributing to the communities from which you seek literary works of art.  For instance, you go to a bookstore and buy a novel - that is an act of your literary citizenship.  But if you seek out poetry online for reading, do you pay for those poems?  How are you contributing to these communities who provide this art?  If you don't pay or subscribe, it makes it really difficult for them to provide the artists with compensation for their work.
Piazza offered several solutions.  One was to subscribe to journals, magazines, reviews, etc. that provide art you consume.  My favorite solution, was her suggestion to buy poetry for people you know.  She mentioned giving a book of her poems to her aunt, I believe, and how in doing so she made her aunt realize that she actually enjoys poetry.  One of my favorite poets has published several books now, one collection and two illustrated books of one poem each, one of which is still in preorder.  Since I heard this suggestion, I realized that I can be gifting loved ones with poetry that means a lot to me.  I've got 3 people who will be getting books of poems in the next 4 to 18 months, and the idea of sharing these poems - at a time I think is meaningful, a stage in their lives when they need to read them - is wonderful, kind of like that warm feeling you get when someone lends you a jacket or blanket they've been using.  I love sharing poetry with those I am close with, but never once had I considered giving a collection to someone else.  But now, I will.
And that is a wonderful form of literary citizenship, continuing the cycle of discovering a love for poetry by passing poems on in a way that supports the writers - giving them "exposure" AND compensating them for the beautiful work they do.
I think it's something we should all try to do more.

The Book of My Life (Reader Response 20)

While I love reading the Chapters in Imaginative Writing - each one explaining aspects of the craft in different ways - I had a lot of trouble siting down an committing to talking about one of the stories in this chapter besides Tandolfo the Great, which I responded to earlier this semester.

After a lot of deliberating, I decided upon The Book of My Life, partly because of it being creative non-fiction, which I don't often get to read, and partly because the way the narrator described his Professor reminded me of a teacher I had in high school.

Technically he wasn't a teacher yet.  He was still a student, a paid assistant to our teacher on who would soon be on maternity leave.  It was months into the semester, her reactions to students growing harsher with every day her child swelled in her belly.  When she left in the middle of the year to tend to her newborn, it was as if the class had been freed.  All we had was our class assistant, Mr. X [Let's just assume his last name was actually X...].  Mr. X became our teacher the remainder of the semester.  But we didn't really call him Mr. X.  We called him Saint X.  To his face.  I have to admit it's a ;little embarrassing, and he insisted it wasn't right, but he was an angel compared to our teacher and he understood us, and helped us out of hell.  I remember a joke shrine in the corner of the classroom, and the liberation of having a teacher who still remembered what it was like being a student.

He taught us, without a fight.  He showed us he supported our passions and the causes we cared about - even if it meant buying boba for a fundraiser when he hated the drink. He promised to take some of us surfing.  He passed out phone numbers in case any of us needed someone to talk to.  He let us carry on with our hero worship because he understood us.  he was closer to us in age than anyone in authority really ever had been.  And he care about each of us in a way many of us don't get often from complete strangers.

I find the little slip of paper where he wrote down his first name every once in a while, remembering that over 5 years ago he promised to accept any friend request once we graduated.  Whenever I see it,  I think about what he meant to us, then and now.  But he's a human being.  And just like running into a teacher outside of school, we would one day surprise ourselves by realizing he was more than what we had seen.

I'm sometimes terrified to think of who are heroes really are, all their faults and fumbles and beliefs that they held back from us.  The problem with heroes is that most times we don't know who they are.  Not really.  Unless you limit your heroes to your immediate family or your best friends, you won't know.  And even then, you still really can't.

Mr. X is still a saint to me.  But I call him Mr. X now, because it's what he preferred and I owe him that much.  But I never reached out after graduation and I still haven't gone in search of his Facebook.

In the non-fiction piece, the professor turns out to be someone dangerous, who taught with a mind full of things students don't learn in a classroom - ideologies and justifications that teachers usually never share.  And that's a good thing, probably.  But it prevents us from really knowing the kinds of people who inspire us and shape us.   And that is a dangerous thing, too.

Things I Need

“What are you doing up?”

“I want to get my phone back.”

“Where’d you leave it?”

“Daniel has it.”

“Seriously?  You don’t even need it right now.  It’s 3 in the morning, just go to sleep.”

“I have to set my alarm.”

“I’ll wake you up.  What time?”

“I need to talk to Katherine.”

“Okay use my phone and call her.”

“No, I don’t know her number.”

“Lucky for you she’s my friend too, so I do.”

“I’m leaving.”

“No you are not.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“Yes I can.”

“No you- Woah.  Put me down.”

“You aren’t going out on your own until the sun is back up.”

“But I need to.”

“You can get it after you’ve rested.”

“I have to go now.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“You do if you want your keys back anytime soon.”

“You suck.”

“Why?”

“I’m not talking about this.”

“You are gonna sit down and explain yourself.”

“I just want my phone back.”

“For?”

“For safety sake.”

“Not good enough.”

“What if my Mom calls?”

“Your phone will be dead anyway.”

“What if there’s a fire?”

“We will all be standing on the street together anyway.”

“What’s really going on here?”

“It’s none of your business.  Now give me my keys.”

“You aren’t even answering my questions.”

“Please stop.”

“Alice, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Just talk to me.”

“Stop it.”

“If you just answer me I can help.”

“Oh my God. No.”

“What is going on with you?”

“I have embarrassing things on my phone.”

“And?”

“Daniel has it.”

“Okay.  I’ll be back soon.  Go to bed.”

“But-”

“I won’t mess with it.  Just get some sleep.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be quick.”

“You better be.  Wake me up when you get back.”

“Only if you actually go to bed.”

“Okay, go.”

How to Date a Brown Girl (Reader Response 19)

Let me just start by saying that Junot Diaz is really important to me.  I have a long list of favorite authors and favorite books, and he is very high up on both of those lists.
Two years ago, I wrote a short story unlike anything I've ever written.  I won't call it great, because I don't know if it is or not.  I wont even call it the best thing I've written, because I don't know how to judge these things.  But it is my favorite piece of all the stories I've ever written.  I had just finished reading This Is How You Lose Her, one of many works I devoured that summer, ravenous after years of required readings and ignoring my own long list of stories I really wanted to enjoy.  That summer, I remember by the books.  I remember Father's Day, nestled on the couches of two of my grandfathers' homes, zen noise app playing sinister chimes as I worked back through the Giver series.  I remember sitting, dehydrated and ill in the backseat of my mother's car, unwilling to get out or get a drink of water  or get some fresh air until I finished the next chapter - No, now the next chapter - No the, fine, I'll get out but I'm reading it as I walk.  The summer was filled with stories that I held as if they were the blood in my veins, tracing the spines like they were alive.  They felt so alive.  This Is How You Lose Her was the first book I read that summer.  I saw a photo of the cover once online, thought it was poetic and tragic and lovely looking.  Two weeks later I came across the following quote:

“Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom.  You glance at the offending passages.  Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die.  Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.  This is how you lose her.” 

I was hooked.  I got the collection the moment the opportunity presented itself.  I did not take my eyes off the page, even when I was coming off as rude or anti-social.  I couldn't pull myself out of the stories if I tried.  And it killed me, because the character was the last person I ever would've imagined myself rooting for and I still did and I loved Diaz the more for it.

But I get carried away.  The moment the book was ending, when I felt the stack of pages growing thinner by the minute, I let the writing carry me away.  I closed it after the last page, set it down and grabbed my laptop.  And I wrote.  I wrote with reckless abandon.  I wrote with a full head and a full heart.  I wrote as if it was breathing.  I hardly knew I was doing it, but I knew I had to.  At ten pages, I found myself happy with an end.  I had characters I loved and characters I hated and words I loved and something I was proud of.  I've had two professors give me feedback on it, and no one's said it sucked yet, so I'm hopeful I got something right with this one.

I digress.  Junot Diaz is one of my favorites.  He writes beautiful and insightful stories that I can't break away from.  This story is no exception.  It features Yunior as the story's voice, the same Yunior I learned to love in This Is How You Lose Her, revealing pieces of himself from within his dysfunctional relationships.  The voice is incredibily strong - perhaps that is why I am so enamored with these stories.  Yunior's language brings Spanish, slang, and unique colloquialisms that somehow are incredibly particular but work with ease.  Reading This Is How You Lose Her exposed me to this in higher frequency and intensity, and I was stunned by it.  Speaking both English and Spanish - albeit, the latter only semi-fluently - I found myself weaving between the languages freely, without any hinderance, not even realizing these switches until I looked back later, quoting it to a friend and realized she didn't fully understand some of the sentences I read to her, even though she found them as lovely as I had.  But I think that speaks to the way Diaz writes, that he creates a character that is so rooted in his culture and community, but still universal that anyone can read him and form a firm image of his characters.

Plus, Diaz is a master of second person, something I've always found incredibly beautiful.  I can't read Diaz without wanting desperately to write my own masterpiece.  I love his work, not necessarily because his style or characters are things I want to emulate in my own works, but because he captures life and beauty and pain and everything about our world in his words and it's poetry and magic and something I can't put words to.  I mean, I might be biased, but it's hard not to want to write, to want to make something beautiful, when I read his work.  

So, you could say I kinda liked this story, I guess.  

Freewrite 10/29

The last few nights, she had a recurring ream about never getting home.  It always started with a nightmare airport experience - a freak blizzard, and epidemic, a terrorist plot.  Somehow, she always got from A to B, but by the time she got to New York, or Los Angeles, or wherever the hell she was, she was wandering around trying to remember where exactly she lived and - this building looked close, but the shutters were the wrong color.  Or she'd get in the taxi and when the driver asked for the address, she'd try and scrape it off the tip of her tongue, but it never came out of her mouth.
See it wasn't really about getting back home.  It was finding home in the first place.
When she woke up in his apartment, after a night of comatose sleep, she caught a glare from the window that made him look just a bit softer.  Just a bit sweeter.  That's when she remembered the dream ended safely.  In a warm bed.  At a family dinner. Or on a couch by the fire with warm arms around her, and she wasn't quite as terrified.
Not to say that he was her home.  Because that was ridiculous.  But she was learning how to make a home.  Right now, he just happened to be a part of it.
That was all that really mattered for now.

Missed Connection (Reader Response 18)

She had fallen in love with far too many strangers.
The old woman selling vegetables in the family-owned market by the Finsbury Park tube stop.
A Moroccan man in the Costa by Trafalgar Square.
A child watching with wide, curious eyes from the window of a daycare center by her flat.
A teenager watching her phone as she meandered down High Street, looking away from it until she reached the crosswalk.
Then there was the man on the subway, the one who clutched his briefcase like the world would fall apart if anyone saw inside it.  She pictured the two of them, two brown-eyed children grasping her hands, as he kissed them goodbye each morning.  She saw him coming home, disheveled and worn, lost in his own world.  He didn't kiss her hello, only goodbye.  She took off her ring and had considered custody arrangements by the time he got off at his stop.
He was her favorite daydream.  The one she got lost in at work.  She saw him that once, but so many faces looked like his and she couldn't separate any person from the person they weren't.  She promised herself if she saw him again, she'd strike up a conversation.  But he was never there.  She thought about posting fliers, but that seemed silly.  She tried to look up him LinkedIn, but she didn't have a name or a business or anything helpful besides what train he took to work, and that's when it hit her.

Missed Connection
We sat across from each other on the Victoria line on October 15th.  I got on at Finsbury Park.  Your eyes are deep brown like chocolate, but nicer and your briefcase matches your shoes and I want to know what secrets you were guarding.  You had a book in your hand that you tried to read between the bumps, but I never saw the cover and I really wish I had.  I didn't know you were gone until the doors were closing at Green Park.  I missed my stop and had to get off the next stop and trace a new route, and I was running behind and didn't get a chance to grab a coffee, but I think if I got to see you again, I'd consider it again.  I'll be in the third car.