Domingo no mundo (111)

Yann Rabanier, Tilda Swinton & John C. Reilly, 2011.

Domingo no mundo (110)

Florinne Stettheimer, Picnic at Bedford Hills, 1918.

And we have no more beginnings

Como dizia Jane Austen, estamos 24 horas por dia na vida.

Miguel Esteves Cardoso numa entrevista.

Domingo no mundo (109)

Éric Rhomer, Le genou de Claire, 1971.

Literatura e Tradução

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn’t really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there. 

What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Literature does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the little fascists who once more threaten to overrun the West. So what is it good for—all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation? 

I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 AM when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you’re absorbed in a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining. 

When I describe literature’s effect in these terms, I speak stubbornly in the singular. But I also know I am not alone in the world, and that none of us is. In a speech Albert Camus gave in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1957, he described the collective value of our seemingly disconnected lives: 

Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. 

And this ever-expanding power of a single life brings to mind a thought that has echoed through the ages. We find it for instance in a codex of the Mishnah written in Parma in the mid-thirteenth century: “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” Exactly the same thought is expressed in Surah Five of the Qur’an.  

Contrary to the general noise of the culture around us, writing has reminded me in some modest but essential way of things that people don’t want to be reminded of. Inside this modest thing called literature, I have found reminders to myself to negate frontiers and carry others across, and reminders of others who carry me, too. Imagine being in an emergency: a house on fire, a sinking boat, a court case, an endless trek, a changed planet. In such an emergency, you can no longer think only of yourself. You have to carry someone else, you have to be carried by someone else.

Teju Cole, aqui. 

O Tempo, corrida de estafetas

My father, George Isserlis, would have been 102 today. Curious to think that in a way he represents a link with musical history: he remembered meeting Josef Hoffmann, Josef Lhevinne, Medtner, etc — and, in a story I've told countless times, meeting someone who'd met Beethoven.

O violoncelista Steven Isserlis, no Twitter.

Mudar de ares

“At the beginning of the Sixties we had to go back to London, and not being able to find a house that we could afford, we settled for a boat; it was moored on Chelsea Reach, between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, so that we were in one of the very grandest parts of London. On the other hand, we were living on an old wooden barge which for many years had carried cargoes [of coal] up and down the east coast under sail, but was now a battered, patched, caulked, tar-blackened hulk, heaving up with difficulty on every rising tide. Her name was Grace, and she had never been fitted with an engine, so that there was plenty of room for us in the huge belly of the hold. There was a very old stove, in which we burned driftwood. Driftwood will only light when it has paint or tar on it, and we knew its bitter fragrance well from the foreshore at Southwold, just as we were used to a more or less permanent state of damp and to the voices, at first light, of the seagulls.” 

Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald, Random House Inc.

The quit lit

“The Adjunct Underclass” belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as “quit lit.” (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned “content providers” trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as “shock absorbers” and compares their situation to the “invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.” They are like migrant laborers, who “watch the weather, hoping that the next growing season looks promising, and wondering whether it’s time to move along themselves.”

Sobre o que é estar na academia hoje, aqui.

Domingo no mundo (108)

Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit, 1902.

Domingo no mundo (107)

Joaquin Sorolla Bastida, Paseando por el mar, 1909.

Domingo no mundo (105)

My taste for dead languages lay dormant until circa 1982 AD, at which point I had been working at The New Yorker for about four years, doing my best to master the Major Arcana of New Yorker style for a job on the copydesk. I had worked my way up to the collating department, where I basically got to see what everyone else did and study various editorial biases and skills. Collating, which has long since been replaced by the word processor, might be described as the liver of The New Yorker's editorial process. Proofs arrived from a piece's editor, the author, the editor-in-chief (then William Shawn), Eleanor Gould (The New Yorker's famous grammarian), proofreaders, fact checkers, and the libel lawyer, and we collators copied the changes the editor had accepted onto a clean proof for the printer, filtering out the dross, and sent the collated proof via fax (state of the art at the time) to the printer. Overnight, a revision appeared. The big excitement was being able to flag a mistake and save embarrassment. Once, coming back from lunch, I found the editor Gardner Botsford at my desk, taking refuge from a demanding author, who was just then on her way down the hall, calling, "Gardner?" 

One weekend, I saw Time Bandits in a theater on the Upper East Side. In the film, directed by Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and starring John Cleese and Michael Palin, a band of time-traveling dwarves plunder treasure from the past. One scene, set in ancient Greece, featured Sean Connery in a cameo as Agamemnon. He was dueling with a warrior who wore the head of a bull and looked like the Minotaur. The landscape was so stark and arid, and so enhanced by the mighty figure of Sean Connery in armor, that I wanted to go there right away. It didn't matter that the Minotaur was from Crete—his labyrinth was at Knossos, near Heraklion—and that Agamemnon was famously from the Peloponnese: he and his brother Menelaus were sons of Atreus, who was the son of Pelops, for whom the peninsula was named. The glory of Sean Connery blinded me to the screenwriters' twist on mythology. I was also unaware that the scenes set in Greece had been shot in Morocco.

The movie brought back to me some research I had done in grade school for a geography project. I was paired up with a boy named Tim, the class clown, and assigned a report on Greece. We (mostly I) made a poster that featured the main products of Greece, and I was impressed that a land so dry and stony—as in the movie, no grass, no green, more goats than cows—yielded olives and grapes, which could be pressed into oil and wine. It amazed me that such an austere land produced such luxuries.

The day after seeing Time Bandits, I told my boss at The New Yorker, Ed Stringham, that I wanted to go to Greece. Ed was the head of the collating department. He was famous at the office for his eccentric schedule and rigorous course of studies, and for his genius in suggesting books to people. He came in at about noon and held court from a tattered armchair by the window (kept firmly closed), smoking cigarettes and drinking takeout coffee. His friend Beata would come in—Beata had known W. H. Auden (she called him Wystan) and Benjamin Britten in Amityville. Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and translator of Borges, would stop by to talk. Ed typically stayed at the office reading till one or two in the morning. My little brother, who was studying music, had a night job cleaning the floors in the business department and would come up and talk to Ed about Philip Glass and Gregorian chant.

When Ed heard that I wanted to go to Greece, he got all excited. There was a map of Europe on the wall, and he showed me where he had gone on his first trip to Greece. He'd taken a cruise, he said, apologetically, to get an overview: Athens, Piraeus, Crete, Santorini (or Thira, on the inner edge of a caldera that tourists rode up on donkeys), Rhodes, Istanbul. He went back many times: Thessaloniki and Meteora, to the north; Ioannina and Igoumenitsa, to the west, on the way to Corfu; and the Mani, the middle member of the three peninsulas that hang off the Peloponnese, where blood feuds raged between clans for generations. He pointed out Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, a peninsula reserved for Orthodox monks, where no female, not even a cat, was welcome. Then he plucked a slim paperback off the shelf—A Modern Greek Reader for Beginners, by J. T. Pring—bent over it till his eyes were inches from the page, and started to translate.

Mary Norris, Greek To Me.

Domingo no mundo (104)

A Lourdes saiu pela primeira vez da Ilha da Madeira com vinte anos. Em Lisboa, frequentou a escola superior de belas artes, que deveria abandonar passados cinco anos após o resultado de uma prova que lhe valeu a irrevogável menção: excluída. Fortemente escrito a giz sobre o óleo, pela mão do mestre que não tolerou a insubmissa lucidez, quando a regra era pintar o modelo-nu-de-cor-de-rosa, tal como se estava a ver, e ela pintou-o verde, pintou-o amarelo, pintou-o roxo, pintou-o como ela o VIA. (E lá porque na repressiva menção se encontra implícito um elemento libertador – segundo a confissão herética – e não um depressivo vale de lágrimas – evaporado pelo fogo, nela -, nada, mesmo nada, pode justificar a existência desses anfíbios diplomados que servilmente e em todas as épocas alimentam sistemas, ignorando as moradas da resistência à alienação. Ou até talvez mesmo ignorem, pura e simplesmente, como se barra o pão com a manteiga.) Mais tarde, a heresia esteve exposta para todos os colegas verem. Dito isto, o que importa é acto. Postura sem inferência, face ao que se vê e ao que não se vê, incessantemente, momento a momento. Daí, a diferença entre o que vem da revolução e o que vai para a evolução. Da revolução: vêm altos e baixos, fins a atingir (mesmo estimáveis), dualismo, dependências, tensões, passados, futuros... Para a evolução: vai, energia profunda, corrente em cascata, movimento contínuo sem ruptura nem limites, fluidez, unidade, desapegamento, presente... Enquanto a primeira condiciona, repito, mesmo com estimáveis razões, e anuncia "outra vida" ou "vida melhor", a segunda é descondicionamento até ao fim e proclama: "morte à morte". Todas as tradições, verdades, sistemas, histórias, ideologias, dogmas, silêncios, tudo, tudo o que está pré-estabelecido, institucionalizado, sistematizado, associado, socializado, etc... tem que forçosamente ser clarificado pelo próprio homem, experimentado directamente à luz do 'seu' presente. Sair até ao fim, debaixo de qualquer espécie de canga, seja ela feita de pau ou de jade. E isto para quê? Para que viver nunca se torne um vício. Mesmo com o seu admirável cérebro, o seu polegar oponível e a sua postura bípede, é no entanto a força da insubmissão que faz a grande diferença entre o humano e o bovino. Ainda por cima é ela que preside a essa metamorfose, com ela, ele constrói-se a si próprio. O inventor dos ready-made disse-nos: "um quadro que não choca não vale a pena". Que choque é este senão o acordar, o despertador do conveniente sono em que todos fomos metidos e ainda nos encontramos? Sono engodado e letárgico que começa exactamente no começo, no primeiro dia, quando o demiurgo fez o céu. Céu da terra ferida por convenientes palavras, gestos e objectos que condicionam e perigosamente levam à temível modorra... Sendo grave, a violência desse choque é o que há de mais pacífico, pois é nele e só ele que conheceremos o nosso verdadeiro estatuto terrestre, consequentemente o caminho que de facto percorremos. Compete-nos alimentá-la com a indispensável e apropriada energia. E isto diz respeito tanto ao que "faz", como ao que "vê". Uns fazem porque vêem, outros porque vêem, fazem. Mas aqui estamos a falar de quem faz, ou melhor, da que 'faz o não fazer', trabalho esse que reduz a distância entre uns e outros, deixada em aberto pela virtude da sua transparente produção.

Manuel Zimbro, aqui.