on words

Truth is elusive.

Truth avoids institutional control.

Truth tugs at conventional syntax.

Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field.

Truth is relational.

Truth lives in the library and on the subway.

Truth is not two-sided; it's many-sided.

Truth burrows in the body.

Truth flickers.

Truth comes on little cat's feet, and down back alleys.

Truth doesn't always test well.

Truth invites you back for another look.

From the Hebrew proverbs: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver." 

In the book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, which I found at my sister-in-law's house and also contains the above list describing truth, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre says

A felicitous word choice is one that so precisely names an idea or experience that it produces for the reader or hearer a shock of recognition, a surprised "Yes! That's it!" and a gratifying sense of having put two interlocking pieces of a puzzling world perfectly in place.

My father-in-law loves to do jigsaw puzzles, it's his way to unwind. And when all of the siblings go back for a visit, he loves when we join him around the card table, the pieces splayed across a felt mat. One time he packed a puzzle in his suitcase when he visited our house, and we spent our spare time over the four days of his visit assembling a picture of Mickey Mouse, a mosaic of screen shots from Disney movies.

There's a rush of satisfaction almost like adrenaline when out of thousands of pieces I find the one that perfectly fits the shape and picture. It's the same with words. My friend, who just read Nabokov for the first time -- Lolita -- described one of the reasons she loved the book: the author's turns of phrase were both surprising and perfectly apt.

A word fitly spoken is truth.

I don't always do this well, and I know in these blog entries I rarely do it well. This kind of fitness takes time. Lots of time. Fit words are a gift whenever and wherever they occur, a gift to both the one who hears or reads them and to the one through whom they pass. But they won't be found if we won't listen for them. They're just off to the side, near our blind spot. They're deft paws on dry asphalt.

There's a lot of noise today, a lot of words flying around our atmosphere, and most of them are cheap, unfit, flabby words. They're 25-piece children's puzzles. They're quick and easy. Easy to make, easy to digest. That's why good words require us to do the work, the work of taking time to listen.

I hope that today we all get a chance to hear and perhaps give a word fitly spoken, a true treasure.

Quandary

Some days I love tutoring. Some days I dread it.

My 10th grade student has just finished a literary analysis paper on Julius Caesar, and we've worked on it together for an hour and a half at least two days a week for the past several weeks. I've never read the play in its entirety. And, unfortunately, neither has she. By the time we began working on her final draft, I knew the play better than she did.

This is how our sessions go:

Me: So Brutus had good intentions when he killed Caesar but comes to realize that he'd brought upon Rome the very thing he was trying to prevent--tyranny. Right?

Student: [opens her eyes] Uh-huh

Me: So you can write that kind of thing as the "take-home lesson" for your final sentence.

Student: [stares into space for several moments]

Me: Are you going to write yet?

Student: I don't know. This is hard!

Me: What do you mean hard? I've practically just told you... Okay, we've been talking about Brutus' intentions, right?...


I've been tutoring for over five years now, and I'm still figuring out how to walk the tightrope between leading a student through the learning process and teaching her how to learn for herself. This particular student is "normal" scholastically. The problem which worries me is that the "new normal" seems to mean giving up when actual work is involved and sliding through on curved grades, barely passing.

If students don't like what they're doing, they don't put any effort into it. We all did this to some extent, I'm not gonna lie. No generation of kids has been predominatly and virtuously hard-working.

But this new normal scares me. I'm a tutor. I'm supposed to be there to give my student extra attention and instruction where the teachers of large classrooms can't. But what if the student won't accept my extra attention and instruction? What if in her eyes I'm just an extra person to spoon-feed her what she needs to get by?

School hasn't been about the skill of learning for quite a while now. It's been about passing state assessment tests, SATs, and graduating. I don't blame the teachers, the parents, or any particular entity. I'm really not sure where the root of my frustration lies.

I'm sure anyone who cares about helping this generation learn feels the same way at times. I wonder, too, whether I'm guilty of romanticizing my youth in comparison with today's generation. Like, you know, how as one generation gets displaced by a younger one they think the bunch of whippersnappers will carry the world to hell in a handbasket. Am I one of those?? God, I hope not.

But I feel better venting about it.

Translating Humility

From Granta.com

One of my projects this semester is translating a contemporary short story from Spanish to English. The author of the short story "En la Estepa" is Samanta Schweblin, an emerging young writer from Argentina. I found her work through Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Novelists.





I've only ever translated a poem before, "el Octubre" by Juan Ramon Jiminez, when I was in college. Because I'm not very experienced, I wanted as straight-forward a project as I could make it while still being challenged. There are many reasons translating "En la Estepa" should be a straightforward task: 

• The author is in my generation, and in this globalized world, that ought to mean something. 
• The Spanish is contemporary rather than archaic. Imagine a native speaker of another language trying to translate Shakespeare versus trying to translate Nicholas Sparks. What I'm getting at is it's hard enough for some English-speakers to understand Shakespeare. The more modern the dialect, the easier to translate.
• Spanish and English share a ton of Latin-based words, though Spanish is a Romance language, and English is primarily West Germanic and Anglo-Saxon.
• The story's language is spare and exact; think Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, or one of my favorites, Lydia Davis.

But in spite of these ground-leveling facts, I found out for certain that translating is never, not ever, straightforward. Take this Google Translator literal translation, or "trot," of the opening paragraph from "En la Estepa." 


First the original:

No es fácil la vida en la estepa, cualquier sitio se encuentra a horas de distancia, y no hay otra cosa más para ver que esta gran mata de arbustos secos. Nuestra casa está a varios kilómetros del pueblo, pero está bien: es cómoda y tiene todo lo que necesitamos. Pol va al pueblo tres veces por semana, envía a las revistas de agro sus notas sobre insectos e insecticidas y hace las compras siguiendo las listas que preparo. En esas horas en las que él no está, llevo adelante una serie de actividades que prefiero hacer sola. Creo que a Pol no le gustaría saber sobre eso, pero cuando uno está desesperado, cuando se ha llegado al límite, como nosotros, entonces las soluciones más simples, como las velas, los inciensos y cualquier consejo de revista parecen opciones razonables.

The Google literal translation:

No easy life in the desert, anywhere is just hours away, and there is nothing else to see that this big clump of bushes dry. Our house is several miles from town, but it's good: it is comfortable and has everything you need. Pol goes to town three times a week, sends magazines agro notes on insects and insecticides, and the shopping lists prepared following. In these times when he is not, carried out a series of activities that I prefer to do alone. I think Pol would not want to know about that, but when you're desperate, when it has reached the limit, like us, then the simplest solutions, such as candles, incense and any advice magazine seem reasonable choices.

Say what??


And here is my very first, very rough, halfway literal halfway literary draft:

It’s not easy, life in the steppe, when anywhere else is hours away, and there isn't anything more to see than this field of dry shrubs. Our house is several kilometers from town, but it’s OK: the house is comfortable and has everything we need. Pol goes to town three times a week, sending the farming magazines his articles about insects and insecticides, and going shopping, following the lists that I prepare. During these times when he is not around, I carry out a series of activities that I like to do alone. I don't think Pol would like to know about these, but when one is desperate, when you have reached your limit, like we have, then the unsophisticated solutions, like candles, incense, and whatever the advice columns say, seem like reasonable options.

You can see where I had to make changes to the literal, exact translation just to make it make sense and to match the spirit of the text. 


I venture to say that even when we read or hear something in our own language, we translate. The "meaning" adapts through each person's filter of experiences and imagination, for better or for worse. We've all experienced mis-translation: anyone who's been married, in a serious relationship, worked in an office, dealt with kids. You say something like, "Next time you do X, make sure not to forget Y again," and they hear, "You failed the last time you did X, so try to be smarter next time." When they slink off crying, you're left wondering what you said. 


Working on this translation has reminded me of the value of humility in the way we communicate, read, form and share opinions. I'm a spiritual person, most familiar and involved with the Judeo-Christian tradition, so when I hear people say things like "The Bible says it, so I believe it," my heart starts beating faster and my scalp starts itching. 


I hate confrontation, but I want to ask which Bible words they're basing their unshakeable dogma upon. A modern English translation, of which there are upwards of 30 major distinct versions, some word-for-word literal, some paraphrased? (And even the "literal" have major differences between them.) An old standby, especially in the South, the King James Version, which was translated from a translation (and in some places, poorly)? The Latin Vulgate? The Greek Septuagint? The multifarious Hebrew texts? 


I'm not putting down any of these translations, per se. Whatever we read, be it in the newspaper, a magazine, a blog (yes, even this one!), or the Bible itself, inspired as I believe it may be, we must retain humility, taking the words with a grain of salt, knowing that after all, words are transmitted through humans, and humans make mistakes in the delivery and in the interpretation. 


Nowadays, mathematicians use "approaches" instead of "equals," knowing that even in terms of quantifiable, exact numbers, we can only try to come close. I hope to "approach" an elegant and faithful translation of Schweblin's work, but in process, I am learning the importance of dogged humility. 


I'm sure my husband will appreciate better translation in our communication, too!

Poetry in Web Video

The other day I wrote about the innovative power of web video, especially the potential for writers and other creative voices.

"There's something electric about hearing the author's voice in the words they wrote. There's something intimate about publicly sharing words that were written in private."

You can't listen to a well-wrought story without being engaged.


I proposed that more emerging writers should record themselves reading their work and share the videos on the web, reconnecting the written word to the stream of our oral story-telling past.


My good friend Georgia has already done just that. This is just one way to share words, but I love the way the rhythm and pacing and tone of Georgia Pearle's poem, "Lil' Allen," falls in step with original music by Marcella O'Connor. Visit Project Words and Music for more videos like this. But first, sit back, listen, and enjoy.

Web Video Revolution

Web video is nothing new. People have known how to post their home videos to YouTube, Vimeo, VideoEgg, etc. for years now. But what if we look at how web video can fuel innovation? I love TEDTalks videos. You could say I'm a junkie. The curator of the TED Conference himself, Chris Anderson, shares what he believes is the force for positive change behind video sharing. (FYI: It's nineteen minutes long, but worth every second.)



Some highlights:

• Cisco estimates that in four years, 90% of the world's web data will be video. 
• Video is more powerful than text or pictures because of our innate connection with face-to-face communication.
• Potential innovators in developing countries can feed their ideas from the web and share their ideas through the web. 
• "The dark side of the web is allergic to the light."

As a writer I asked myself how I can use video. Traditionally speaking, a writer's medium is print. There's beauty to that--the one-on-one exchange when the reader sits down with your book. But there's also the public side of a writer's life, when they travel and read selections from their work to an audience.

I've been to several readings, and I've even read once. There's something electric about hearing the author's voice in the words they wrote. There's something intimate about publicly sharing words that were written in private. Now, there are such things as poorly done readings, but in general, I can't leave a reading not engaged with the author's story, even if I wouldn't have engaged had I read it.

What if more emerging writers recorded themselves reading their work? And shared it with the world? There's less risk of someone on the web copying and pasting the work as their own (unless they went through the effort of transcribing every word). And there's more chance that the stories and poems would reach the souls they were meant to touch. Plus you've added that spark of face-to-face communication, the relic of our oral story-telling past.

You might see me try it--though I need practice with video making and editing before I'd post anything. Why don't you try taping yourself sharing something you are passionate about, something you want to put out in the light? Just make sure it's coming from a true place inside yourself, and you'll do it excellently, and the world just might be changed.

(Related Post: see Taste Life: Poetry in Web Video)