American newspapers

I read the International Herald Tribune, published in Paris, every day
(but I also read other papers every day, including the Italian La
Repubblica). The Trib is not an international paper. It's an extremely
U.S.-centric paper. And that's a problem, as this excellent article by
John Judis in this week's New Republic makes clear:

Obama in Seoul: My Problem with Foreign News

I used to be the foreign editor of In These Times in Chicago. I didn't
particularly enjoy the job, because I have never been fascinated with
the world outside of the United States. I am not sure whether I could
find Honduras or Liberia on a map, and I have never mastered the
current spelling of Chinese names. (It's Mao Zedong not Mao Tse-Tung.)
But I thought at the time that my ignorance and indifference were an
asset, because I demanded of our authors that they make clear in the
first few paragraphs why an American reader should care about the
places and events they were describing.

I still have the same trouble with the foreign news, and at New
Republic meetings, I often ask my neighbor Richard Just what official
from what country, or what town in what part of the world, my
colleagues are discussing. I was thinking about my problems this
morning as I tried to read the stories about Barack Obama's visit to
Seoul, South Korea. I read three newspapers, the Washington Post, The
New York Times (on-line), and The Financial Times. They each have
their strengths in foreign news, but I prefer The Financial Times. And
this morning was a good illustration why.

If you are like me, you can't name the second largest city in South
Korea, you're not within five or ten million of how many people live
there, and you're not sure how South Korea is currently getting on
with China and Japan. So you need help. Both the Post and the Times
focus not on South Korea per se, but on Obama's taking a "stern tone"
toward North Korea in his discussions with the South Koreans. The
Post suggests that the two sides have agreed to a "new approach,"
which will reject "endless, inconclusive disarmament negotiations"
with the North. OK, pardon me if I yawn. Haven't I read this story
about forty-two times since 1995 or so. Having read the two stories I
came away with exactly nothing.

Now let's look at the Financial Times story by Christian Oliver and
Edward Luce, which is about one-third the size of the other pieces.
The headline reads, "Seoul trades on better ties with Beijing than
Washington." Hmm. That's interesting and says something important
about the balance of power in Asia and the world. Now here are the
opening paragraphs:

"When George Bush senior visited Seoul as US president 20 years ago,
things were simple – the US was the undisputed main ally and trade
partner. Astonishingly, there was only one weekly flight from South
Korea to China, the communist foe.

Barack Obama on Wednesday visits a South Korea where the US is no
longer the only show in town. China is now the main trade partner,
with 642 flights each week. While the US is still the chief political
ally, Mr. Obama's cheery soundbites on Korean issues are not
convincing Seoul that Washington is dedicating enough thought to the
peninsula."

One flight versus 642 flights – that's a small detail that tells a
large story about South Korea and China. And what of the rest of the
story? In the other newspapers, I learned that the U.S. is going to
"satisfy" the demand of the North to send a "high-level" envoy by
dispatching Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang. But in the Financial Times,
I learn that China is sending its premier Wen Jiabao and that
diplomats in Seoul are not convinced that Bosworth, "a part-time
diplomat, keeping a university teaching job in the US," is the "right
man for the job." Hmm. Interesting. There's more, too, about Obama
making trade promises to South Korea that Congress is unlikely to let
him keep. All in all, you get in one-third the length three times more
interesting information than in the Times and Post articles, and it's
epitomized in the lead paragraphs comparing the number of flights that
now run weekly between China and South Korea.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-plank/obama-seoul-my-problem-foreign-news

I would also add that the British Guardian and Independent, though politically more to my liking, are even worse than the Trib when it comes to covering the world.

Gabo's dictionary

From an article by Enrique Krauze on Garcia Marquez:

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García
Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in
Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said,
"Not only does this book know everything, it's the only one that's
never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of
them," his grandfather replied.

Anywhere in the world, if a grandfather presents his grandson with a
dictionary, he is giving him a great instrument of knowledge; but
Colombia was not just anywhere. It was a republic of grammarians.
During the youth of García Márquez's grandfather, Colonel Nicolás
Márquez Mejía, who was born in 1864 and died in 1936, a number of
presidents and government ministers--almost all of them lawyers from
the conservative camp--published dictionaries, language textbooks, and
treatises (in prose and verse) on orthology, orthography, philology,
lexicography, meter, prosody, and Castilian grammar. Malcolm Deas, a
scholar of Colombian history who has studied this singular phenomenon,
claims that the obsession with language that was expressed by the
cultivation of these sciences--their practitioners, Deas notes,
insisted on calling them "sciences"--had its origin in the urge for
continuity with the cultural heritage of Spain. By claiming "Spain's
eternal presence in the language," Colombians sought to possess its
traditions, its history, its classic authors, its Latin roots. This
appropriation, preceded by the foundation in 1871 of the Colombian
Academy of Language, the first offshoot in America of the Royal
Spanish Academy, was one of the keys to the long period of
conservative hegemony--it lasted from 1886 to 1930--in Colombian
political history.

García Márquez's grandfather is a prominent figure in the writer's
early novels, and he was no stranger to this politico-grammatical
history. Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía fought in the ranks of the
legendary Liberal general Rafael Uribe Uribe (1859–1914), one of the
few caudillos in Colombian history. His story in turn inspired the
character of Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of
Solitude. A tireless and hapless combatant in three civil wars, Uribe
Uribe was also a diligent grammarian and a soldier in the civic
battles between conservatives and liberals. During one of his stays in
prison he translated Herbert Spencer, and in 1887 he wrote the
Diccionario abreviado de galicismos, provincialismos y correcciones de
lenguaje, or Abbreviated Dictionary of Gallicisms, Provincialisms, and
Proper Usage, which seems to have been a moderate success....

<http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-shadow-the-patriarch>

And in the original Spanish:

Muchos años después, frente a la redacción de sus memorias, Gabriel
García Márquez había de recordar la tarde remota en que su abuelo le
puso en el regazo un diccionario y le dijo: "Este libro no sólo lo
sabe todo, sino que es el único que nunca se equivoca." "¿Cuántas
palabras tiene?", le preguntó el niño. "Todas."

En cualquier lugar del mundo, si un abuelo regala a su pequeño nieto
un diccionario le está dando el instrumento del saber. Pero Colombia
no era cualquier lugar: era una república de gramáticos. Durante la
juventud del abuelo, el coronel Nicolás Márquez Mejía (1864-1936), no
menos de cuatro presidentes de la república, un vicepresidente y otros
magistrados –todos del bando conservador– habían publicado compendios,
tratados (en prosa y verso) sobre la ortología, ortografía, filología,
lexicografía, prosodia y gramática del idioma castellano. Malcolm
Deas, el historiador oxoniense especialista en Colombia que ha
estudiado el singular fenómeno, aduce que la obsesiva preocupación por
el idioma que revelaba el cultivo de estas ciencias ("sus practicantes
–acota Deas– insistían en llamarlas 'ciencias'") tenía su origen en
una vocación de continuidad con el tronco cultural español. Al hacer
suya "la eternidad de España en el idioma" buscaban asegurar, por
decirlo así, el monopolio legítimo de sus tradiciones, su historia,
sus autores clásicos, sus raíces latinas. Esta apropiación, precedida
por la fundación en 1871 de la Academia Colombiana de la Lengua
correspondiente a la Española (la primera en América), fue una de las
sorprendentes claves en la larga hegemonía conservadora en la historia
política de Colombia (1886-1930).

El abuelo de García Márquez, figura de sus primeras novelas (La
hojarasca, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba), no fue ajeno a esta
historia político-gramatical. El coronel Márquez Mejía había militado
en las filas del legendario general liberal Rafael Uribe Uribe
(1859-1914), uno de los pocos caudillos de la historia colombiana, y
cuya trayectoria inspiró a su vez el personaje del coronel Aureliano
Buendía. Incansable e infortunado combatiente de tres guerras civiles,
abogado, pedagogo, librero, periodista, diplomático, Uribe Uribe había
sido también, previsiblemente, un esforzado gramático. Era la forma
cívica de disputar el poder a los conservadores. Aprovechó una de sus
estancias en prisión para traducir a Herbert Spencer y escribir un
Diccionario abreviado de galicismos, provincialismos y correcciones de
lenguaje (1887) que tuvo, al parecer, regular suerte....

<http://www.letraslibres.com/index.php?art=14090>

Hattip:

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003691.php#more

Fire in the wood

In A.D. 1011, the Vietnamese Buddhist Khuông Viêt (匡越) spoke a verse to Da Bao:

木中原有火

有火火還生 

若謂木無火 

鑽遂何由萌

The fire was already there in the wood,
Fire was there, then it came to life again.
If you say there is no fire in wood,
How could flames spring up when we drill for fire?

Having spoken, Khuông Viêt died, seated in the lotus position.

Translation in Cuong Tu Nguyen, Zen in medieval Vietnam: a study and translation of the Thiền uyển tập anh, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997, p. 113.

Borges, speaking

Excerpts from two of the six Norton Lectures that Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard in the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968.

On metaphor:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/audio/chauntzu.mp3

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/audio/sleep.mp3

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/audio/cummings.mp3

A poet's creed:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/audio/whenibegan.mp3

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/audio/notunderstand.mp3

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/audio/advice.mp3

Source:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bortcd/

Borges once said: "If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library." An eventful life, his.

Tea Masters Blog

If you love tea:

http://teamasters.blogspot.com/

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Eine darstellende Kunst

12. September 2009, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Mein Stil
Lauschen, denken, dienen
Von Christa Schuenke

Als ich vor 32 Jahren anfing zu übersetzen, warnte mich ein befreundeter Autor: Ein Schriftsteller entwickelt seinen persönlichen Stil und muss dann nur noch Geschichten erfinden. Der Stoff suche sich seine Form ganz von alleine. Für den Übersetzer entfällt zwar das Erfinden einer Handlung, aber dafür muss er sich wie ein Chamäleon immer dem Stil des jeweiligen Originals anpassen können, muss, je nach Bedarf, schreiben können wie Thomas Mann, Dostojewski, Faulkner oder Kenzaburo Oe.

Schreiben muss der Übersetzer können, genau wie der Schriftsteller, nur hat er es bloss mittelbar mit den bedeutungsstiftenden Elementen des Ausgangstexts zu tun, bloss insoweit, als er das Original zunächst einmal verstehen muss, damit er es den Lesern verständlich machen kann. Seine eigentliche Domäne aber ist die vom Autor gewählte Art und Weise der Darstellung. Insofern zählt das Übersetzen zu den darstellenden Künsten, obschon, im Unterschied zum Schauspieler, das Material beim Übersetzer allein die Sprache ist und nicht der ganze Körper.

Wo gehen Übersetzer in die Lehre? Sie lesen Bücher, und zwar vor allem Bücher in der eigenen Muttersprache, die in der Regel auch die Sprache ist, in die sie übersetzen. Das Spektrum reicht bei mir von A wie Améry bis Z wie Zuckmayer, wobei, rein handwerklich betrachtet, ich persönlich, speziell für meine Neuübersetzungen klassischer Autoren, Adalbert Stifter wohl am meisten zu verdanken habe.

Dass literarisches Übersetzen an der Universität gelehrt wird, ist ein recht junges Phänomen, dessen Nutzen sich wohl erst noch erweisen muss. Denn eigentlich ist Übersetzen kein Beruf, sondern eine Lebensweise. Man tut es 24 Stunden am Tag. Man zermartert sich auch abseits des eigenen Schreibtischs, bei den banalsten Verrichtungen, das Hirn nach dem treffenden Wort, dem rechten Ton, schiebt im Kopf Satzteile hin und her und muss bisweilen, wenn man die ideale Lösung für eine vertrackte Stelle geträumt zu haben glaubt, ernüchtert feststellen, dass der geträumte scheinbare Geniestreich schon längst so im Computer steht. Man ist immer «im Dienst», auch wenn man mit dem Bus fährt, über den Markt bummelt, wo Kunden in den verschiedensten deutschen Mundarten mit türkischen, ecuadorianischen oder iranischen Händlern palavern und ein Urberliner Original die Leute mit flotten Sprüchen unterhält. Bei jeder nicht ganz normgerechten Verbstellung, jeder unbewusst jambischen Tirade blinken im Übersetzerhirn die Lämpchen, alles wird abgespeichert und kann bei Bedarf wieder abgerufen werden.

Was Luther «dem Volk aufs Maul schauen» nannte, ist ein ganz wesentlicher Teil des Übersetzerhandwerks. Und so entbehrt es nicht einer gewissen Logik, dass zumal in Europa, wo besonders viel übersetzt wird, die meisten Literaturübersetzer zwar über einen akademischen Grad verfügen, nicht aber über einen Universitätsabschluss im Übersetzen. Talent und ein empfindliches Gehör sind Grundvoraussetzungen für den Beruf. Gleichwohl können wichtige Aspekte des literarischen Übersetzens auch in einem Studiengang vermittelt werden, wie dies seit 21 Jahren an der Universität Düsseldorf und seit kürzerem auch an anderen Universitäten geschieht, wobei speziell in Lausanne neue, vielversprechende Wege beschritten werden.

Am Ende aber hat wohl der französische Schriftsteller und Übersetzer Georges Arthur Goldschmidt recht, wenn er sagt, dass Übersetzen und Schreiben einander sehr verwandte Tätigkeiten sind. Nur habe es der Schriftsteller mit der Angst vor dem leeren Blatt zu tun, der Übersetzer hingegen mit der Angst vor dem vollen Blatt. Und doch: Übersetzen ist a priori eine nachschaffende Tätigkeit, das Wort indes gehört dem Dichter, und ihm zu dienen, ist das Amt des Übersetzers.


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Die Übersetzerin Christa Schuenke gehört zu den renommiertesten Vertreterinnen ihres Fachs. Ihr Spektrum reicht von John Donne, John Keats und William Shakespeare über Herman Melville und Edgar Allan Poe bis zu amerikanischen Avantgarde-Autoren wie David Foster Wallace und Mark Z. Danielewski. Für ihre Arbeit wurde sie mit zahlreichen Stipendien und Preisen ausgezeichnet.

Doubt everything

And everyone.

From DIY Scholar:

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):

“De omnibus dubitandum.”

Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you wake. Every day of the semester say it before you go to sleep.”

What does it mean? Doubt everything. “And that includes me, because I’m going to lie to you a lot all semester long. Or, at least, somebody will accuse me of that I guarantee.”

A folio from P46, an early 3rd century collection of Pauline epistles. Image credit*

With his Texas twang and exhortations such as these, Martin’s speaking style has a passing resemblance to the cadences of a televangelist. Indeed Martin, a self-described “former fundamentalist” repeatedly emphasizes that it’s perfectly legitimate to read the New Testament through the eyes of faith.

But he has a different mission. He wants to teach his students to read the New Testament critically, as historical documents with a context and an agenda. He shows the class how it’s done in lecture 5, The New Testament as History, in which he contrasts the itinerary of Paul’s ministry in Acts of the Apostles with Paul’s own account of his travels in his letters. Then he asks the students to explain the many conflicts and contradictions.

Who is more likely to be telling the truth, Martin wants to know. Is it Paul or the author of Acts? They can’t both be right. And its the job of the doubting historian to try to pull apart each side’s likely motives to get at the truth.

Van Gogh Letters Project

Van Gogh's letters in the original Dutch and French and in English translation. How am I supposed to get any work done?

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Making a dictionary

Eat your heart out, Kindle:

"From the discovery of the 1898 International Dictionary to linotyping the entries to printing the last print on the vandercook to cutting the fingertabs of the deluxe edition, this video gives a quick overview of the process of creating the Pictorial Webster's fine press edition."

Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

What a labor of love.

Warp, Weft, and Way

"Warp, Weft, and Way is a group blog of Chinese and Comparative philosophy. Its primary purpose is to promote and stimulate discussion of Chinese philosophy and cross-tradition inquiry among scholars and students of philosophy, whatever their level of training."