“Es verdad. Si se para uno a considerarlo bien, hay muchos libros. Se tropieza uno con ellos a cada paso. Acechan a la vuelta de los más ocultos recovecos; acompañan en el viaje, aunque no se más que el modestísimo del tranvía; entretienen el aburrimiento o la angustia de las salas de espera; templan la melancolía de las convalecencias y de las tardes de lluvia; usurpan, a veces, las funciones del amado ausente; montan guardia en las mesas de noche, al alcance de la mano del insomne; se esconden bajo las almohadas como el secreto más peligroso de la adolescencia; presiden ciertos actos solemnes y risibles; resplandecen de venalidad en los escaparates de lujo; amarillean en los puesto callejeros; se mustian bajo las axilas de los estudiantes; se abren, de par en par, en las cátedras; duermen en las bodegas de los ricos; arden en las hogueras de los fanáticos.
Lucked out by reading a really good book on a really good beach day in Tarragona, Spain.
You GUYS, this book! This book is so good! (It’s so good it made me come back to blogging. Whoops, re: the past however many months I’ve not updated this . . . ) Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a 365-page essay on translation and the relationships it forges and exposes—and it’s so well-written and thoughtful and engaging that I blasted through it in like three days, snatching moments to read whenever I was sitting still and had it within reach.
My copy is very dog-eared, but here are a couple select excerpts:
“I would argue that this is what reading offers us: occasions for inappropriate, improbable identification. For powerful reality-suspending identification with a character, a writer, an idea, an experience, a fantasy. Fantasies that apparently have nothing to do with me – isn’t this, in its way, the power of a fantasy? – that do not appear to directly concern or pertain to me. But that catch me up nonetheless. Like a complicated miracle. Like the everyday complicated miracle of reading books written by other people – especially, perhaps, books in translation, originally written in languages we will never speak, about places we will never visit and experiences we will never have. Books that, through the work of translators, address us nevertheless, include us in the remit of their address (not by expanding it, necessarily, to some broad and flattened out universal of shared experience but, as in the haiku, but narrowing it and sharpening it to the absolutely local, the absolutely particular).”
And:
“Perhaps you’ll hear me say that there are works in French I haven’t truly? or fully? or properly? read because I have only? read them in translation, but that’s surely premised on the chance, the plausibility, of one day reading the originals. Mann on the other hand? Tolstoy, Ferrante, Kang? All those books? Yes, I’ve read them. Or, let me maintain that I have read them. Let me believe that what I have read in English partakes, in all its difference, of what you have read in German, in Russian, in Italian, in Korean. This, after all, has been the form of my aesthetic experience, my own expansive and authentic aesthetic experience. I notice that the more remote the languages seem from my own capacity to learn them, the more assertive I feel. Why is this? I am more willing to register and be troubled by the close, familiar differences than the more distant ones, I realize, and perhaps this is complicatedly true of all of us: when we are presented with a version of something that we know we can’t know, or not without some great, unlikely effort on our part, we are more prepared to accept how it comes, and to grow attached to the only form in which we are able to receive it.”
There’s so much measured, generous insight in this book. Go to your local independent bookstore and get it!
“There is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.”
-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Nominee for 2018 House Representative in NY-14
Political news has been pretty horrible lately, folks. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in her Democratic primary this week was a huge moment of hope, and we needed hope pretty badly. (Fun fact: she founded the college blog I wrote for and edited throughout my undergrad at BU! Not surprised at all to see her taking Howard Thurman’s message to the streets so powerfully.)
Other people giving me hope are the good, good people working hard to protect and support immigrants and refugees, adults and children, who arrive to our country hoping for better lives. Here are a few organizations where this work is being done, and to whom I’ve donated what I can—if you can donate some money too, will you join me?
I know these are not the only groups doing this important work, but it’s a start if you’re feeling you don’t know how you can help—just help those who have been helping all along.
Mujer, pues, de palabra. No, de palabra no.
Pero sí de palabras,
muchas, contradictorias, ay, insignificantes,
sonido puro, vacuo cernido de arabescos,
juego de salón, chisme, espuma, olvido.
This is one of my favorite poems by Rosario Castellanos. For those of you who can read Spanish, don’t miss reading the full poem here. (This site also has an audio recording of Castellanos reading the poem, so don’t miss that either!)
