Ta(l)king photos in Japanese: a vademecum. It’s fun to snap a shot: cliché. A good companion read would be: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. [via un regard oblique / dirty beloved via pseudopodium]
I’ve been getting back into film (theory, praxis, and watching), and part of the fun has been diving into new websites (like—to me—Jumpcut online) and reading fun articles. (And as a result of which I watched a good little sci-fi flick last night, Cube.) This morning I came across a link for an artist I hadn’t heard of: Cindy Sherman. [via Feministing via Celluloid Summer (a film class blog) via Palimpsest] She’s recently been making clowns. (What is it about clowns, and people’s fear of them? And if you haven’t seen the Citizen Kane of drunken clown movies, you should!) Plus, this entry [at the Heart of Things], and more reading [at the 2 Blowhards] has convinced me that I haven’t been thinking criticially enough about film recently. And so I should.
A thing of beauty: nerd æsthetics at its best. [via Limon via rc3 dot org pace Jakob Nielsen contra PDF]
Urban folklore being what it is, I must say I was a little skeptical of this story of a German married couple who didn’t know what sex was. Seems that damnum absque injuria thinks so, too. It reminded me of a East Frisian joke about birth control that I heard when I lived in Bonn. [via Reflections in d minor]
Found this site in the inbox of my email the other day. Nice simple concept: gather information from folks online as to what they generically call soft drinks: soda, pop, coke, &c. There’s also a link at the bottom to a dialect survey at Harvard. (It’s closed sight now, but you can still browse the site and see some preliminary maps and results.)
I’ve prepared the second installment of Leivick’s The Wolf. First the transliteration:
iz er geshtanen un getrakht un gevaundert zikh,
vos im hot men oysgemitn un ibergelozt lebn.
un er hot ongeshtrengt di oygn un di oyern
tsu derzen, efsher krikht ver aroys vun unter di khurves,
un tsu derhern efsher a shos, vet er zikh lozn gayn ahintsu.
gor umzist hot er ongeshtrengt di oygn un di oyern,
vayl es hot zikh kayner nisht bavizn fun unter di khurves
un kayn shos zikh fun ergets nisht dertrogn.
un er hot ongeshtrengt nokh mer di oygn tsu derzen
khotsh vemen nisht fun di baziger: —
gor oykh di baziger zaynen nisht geven tsu bamerkn. —
kupes ash, koymens, tliendike flamen,
shtilkeyt — un mer gornisht.
iz er geshtanen un di zakh iz im geven zayer koshe,
un er hot nokh mer nisht gevust vos tsu ton.
hot der rov zikh gerirt fun ort un zikh avekgelozt
zukhn un sharn mit di hent in di kupes,
tsu gefinen kotsh di eyvrim fun di umgekumene
un brengn zay tsu keyver yisroel.
gor umzist hot er gezukht un geshart in di kupes,
vayl keyn zeykher fun kayn keyver iz nisht geven tsu gefinen,
vayl alts iz geven ash un koyl un mer gornisht.
hot der rov zikh avekgezetst oyf an ibergekertn koymen
un er hot oysgeton di shikh un gevolt zogn kines—
ersht er hot fargesn di verter fun di kines.
I found this part harder to translate and look forward to any suggestions that make it better. I may be striving too much for a literal but unstilted translation.
He stood and thought and was surprized
that he had been passed over and left alive.
And he strained his eyes and his ears
to see, perhaps, who creeped out from under the ruins,
and perhaps to hear a shot, he would let himself go back there.
But in vain had he strained his eyes and his ears,
because there was nothing at all under the ruins
and no shot was heard anywhere.
And he once more strained his eyes to see
at least one of the victors: —
but the victors were also not to be seen. —
heaps of ash, chimneys, glowing flames,
silence — and nothing more.
He stood and it hard for him for him to understand,
and he no longer knew what to do.
The rabbi moved from the spot and took himself away
searching and scraping with his hands in the heaps,
to find at least the limbs of those who had been killed
and bring them to a Jewish cemetery.
But in vain had he searched and scraped in the heaps,
because not a trace of a corpse was to be found,
for all was ash and coal and nothing more.
The rabbi sat himself down on an overturned chimney
and he took off his shoes and wanted to sing a lamentation for this catastrophe —
but, he had forgotten the words of the lamentation.
The toughest passage to translate by far was the last. The Yiddish word I’ve transliterated as kines is the Hebrew word qinoth: a lamentation on the destruction of Jerusalem or other Jewish catasrophe. My translation makes it short of a footnote and perhaps more vague, but I think I caught this word’s connotation. But I have no idea what to do with un er hot oysgeton di shikh, which means something like he took off his ___. But what is that blank?
Addendum: Thanks to Zackary Sholem Berger, the answer to the shikh problem is shoes: der shukh, di shikh. He has also caught some other errors and suggested emendations which I have incorporated into the translation.
I spent the past five days in the Pittsburgh and Youngstown areas back East and Midwest respectively, and at the last moment I decided not to take a laptop. On our return, I’ve been weeding out the comment salty chopped pork product from this blog, and today I’ll be trying to read and respond to the accumlated email. I ought to have the next installment of der volf up today or tomorrow.
Here is the first installment of roughly 23 of the H. Leivick poem:
der volf
(1920. a khronik.)
... un es iz geven oyfn dritn frimorgn,
ven di zun iz oyfgegangen in mizreykh-zayt
iz fun der gantser shtot shoyn nisht geblibn kayn zeykher.
un di zun iz geshtign alts hekher un hekher,
biz vanen zi iz tsugekumen tsum mitn himl,
un ire shtraln hobn zikh bagegnt mit dem rovs oygn.
un der rov iz gelegn oyf a barg ash un shtayner
mit a tsenoyfgefrestn moyl un oysgeglotste shvartsaplen,
un in zayn neshome iz geven shtil un fintster un mer gornisht.
un ven zayne oygn hobn derfilt oyf zikh di hayse shtraln
hobn zay zikh fanandergeshprayt un gekukt un gekukt,
biz vanen zayn guf hot ongehoybn zikh rirn un oyfkumen.
un ven der rov hot zikh oyfgeshtelt un derzen,
az er iz ibergeblibn eyner aleyn in an oysgehargeter shtot
az shuln un az yidn un az vayb un kinder—
hot der rov nisht gevust vos tsu ton.
First draft translation:
The Wolf
(1920. A chronicle.)
... and it was on the third morning,
when the sun arose in the East
there remained of the whole town not a trace.
And the sun climbed higher and higher,
until it had come to the middle of the sky,
and its rays met with the rabbi’s eyes.
And the rabbi was lying on a mountain of ash and stones
with a ravenous mouth and staring pupils,
and in his soul there was silence and darkness and nothing more.
And when his eyes sensed the hot rays
they opened wide and looked and looked
until his body had begun to stir and awaken.
And when the rabbi had stood up and saw
that he was the only one left in the massacred town
synagogues and Jews and women and children—
the rabbi did not know what to do.
I have been interested in the Yiddish language and its literature since the day I heard John Simon declare on the Dick Cavett Show that Yiddish was not even a language because it lacked a literature. Even then I knew tha Simon was full of it, and his later pronouncements on the state of the English language and his wishy-washy movie reviews did nothing to change my mind. So for quite some time I have been collecting Yiddish books and have been slowly teaching myself the mame-loshn. This weekend, Gabriel, a friend from Southern California, visited and took a look at some of my yidishkayt haul. Our mutual friend, Cliff, dropped by and since Cliff is finishing his masters in English, and Gabe is an ABD in comparative literature (with an emphasis in modern Hebrew literature and a minor in Yiddish), the talk naturally turned to literature. I have been toying for some time now with translating a longish poem, der volf, by one of the great American Yiddish poets, H. Leivick. I knew that Gabriel is a fan of Leivick’s poetry, so I got him to read the first couple of stanzas out loud and we all did a quick translation. I had picked up a copy of Leivick’s two-volume ale verk from the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. They have been saving Yiddish books from neglect and destruction for quite a while now, and via a generous grant from Steven Spielberg and friends they have been digitizing every Yiddish book they laid their hands on and offering them through a print on demand system. My edition of Leivick was not one of the modern reprints but a duplicate original which they have been selling off.
I first learned of Leivick while reading Sol Liptzin’s A History of Yiddish Literature which I picked up remaindered a decade or so ago. Here’s what he had to say:
In another long poem, The Wolf (Der Volf, 1920), Leivick has a rabbi arise from a mound of ashes as the sole survivor of a masacred Jewish community. Looking about him the rabbi sees neither victims nor victors. The victims have perished and the victors have moved on. Only ashes, smoldering chimneys, and uncanny silence surround him. He burrows in the mound to find the limbs of the perished Jews so that he could bury them in the Jewish cemetery. In vain! Nought is left of them but coal and ashes. When night descends upon the ravished, deserted town, the Rabbi creeps away to the forest and is gradually transformed into a werewolf. Later on, when Jews expelled from other communities, find their way to this town and seek to rebuild the devastated houses and the synagogue of which only bare walls remain standing, they ask the rabbi, when he reappears, to resume religious services. But he insists that the ruins be retained as a memorial for his dead generation and that the synagogue be not rebuilt. He himself does not want to live on. He howls as a wolf through the nights and terrorizes the new inhabitants. On Yom Kippur he invades the synagogue as a werewolf and finds release from his suffering when he is beaten to death. Then the newcomers need no longer fear this last survivor whose existence was bound up with murdered generation. They can resume the reconstruction of a new communal life. This poem was regarded, after the Hitler catastrophe, not as Leivick’s reaction to Petlura’s pogroms but as a prophetic vision of the later and greater extermination of Jews by their Christian neighbors.
[pp.301f.]
I have decided over the next month or so to transliterate the poem and post it here along with my first attempt at a translation.
Great DVD double bill last night: Girls Will Be Girls and Hundstage (Dog Days in English). The former is to All About Eve as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. I admit I’ve always had a soft spot for duelling drag queens, but this movie pushes into some hyperstrange areas of the hollywoodian psyche. Three guys playing three girls in search of fame and stardom à la Schwabs counter discoveries. It proved a good antedote to all those reality TV show commercials. Dog Days is one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long while. It’s an Austrian road movie on the road to nowhere. Six stories in search of closure. A whole bunch of pudgy sweating dialect-speaking Jedermänner have mechanical sex and unfulfilling arguments in a di Chirico sun-drenched Viennese suburb that looks like some middle European’s nightmare vision of America: strip-malls, empty parking garages, and stagnant ponds of dangerous chemical laced water. The only time standard High German is spoken is during a brief weather broadcast on a car radio. Even the Greek dysfunctional divorced couple (still living together in their single family house) speak thick Lower Austrian dialect. Not since Prospero’s Books have I seen so much unerotic nudity. I highly recommend both films.
While searching for an online text of Hamlet, I came across this fun site: Hamlet the Text Adventure.
A slow week of blogging coming soon ...
Maybe it had something to do with the documentary on the Vikings in Greenland and the mystery of where they went. Or, perhaps, it was discovering some blogs and sites which’d linked to me, but were not discoverable via Technorati. (Yes, I was looking at my web server’s log files for referrers.) Like: the intriguing and Icelandic Örvamælir and a Dutch page of links. But nothing much prepared me for the geeky weirdness of the intertangled webworld of Kukkurovaca, especially his Unlikely Glossary Project. And finally, clicking on all of this and some more, I came across James Tauber’s blog filled with techy nuggets. As a blogging buddy, Roger, wrote yesterday, it’s nice to get out and about on the less well known paths of the web again.
Thanks to Laura over at Limon, I read this funny story of a man [Vincent Eaton] and his tapeworm. I learned that tapeworms are called ver solitaire in French, and it distracted my mind from the American horrors over in Iraq for a minute or three.
Thanks to cannylinguist, I read a poem (in translation) by Anna Akhmatova. (When will I learn Russian?) And then had the great pleasure to hear the poet herself reading it.
The Last Toast
I drink to the ruined house,
To the evil of my life,
To our shared loneliness
And I drink to you—
To the lie of lips that betrayed me,
To the deadly coldness of the eyes,
To the fact that the world is cruel and depraved,
To the fact that God did not save.[Anna Akhmatova, June 27, 1934, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer]
Oh, we have memes, lots of memes. The current one to catch my fancy is the following list of books and which ones I’ve read.
Anonymous—Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua—Things Fall Apart
Agee, James—A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane—Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James—Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel—Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul—The Adventures of Augie March
Brontė, Charlotte—Jane Eyre
Brontė, Emily—Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert—The Stranger
Cather, Willa—Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey—The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton—The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate—The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph—Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore—The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen—The Red Badge of Courage
Dante—Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel—Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel—Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles—A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor—Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore—An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre—The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George—The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph—Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo—Selected Essays
Faulkner, William—As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William—The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry—Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott—The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave—Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox—The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von—Faust
Golding, William—Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas—Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel—The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph—Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest—A Farewell to Arms
Homer—The Iliad
Homer—The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor—The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale—Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous—Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik—A Doll’s House
James, Henry—The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry—The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz—The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong—The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper—To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair—Babbitt
London, Jack—The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas—The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcķa—One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman—Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman—Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur—The Crucible
Morrison, Toni—Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery—A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene—Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George—Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris—Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia—The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan—Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel—Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas—The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria—All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond—Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry—Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.—The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William—Hamlet
Shakespeare, William—Macbeth
Shakespeare, William—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William—Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard—Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary—Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon—Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles—Antigone
Sophocles—Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John—The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis—Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher—Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan—Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William—Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David—Walden
Tolstoy, Leo—War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan—Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire—Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.—Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice—The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith—The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora—Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt—Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar—The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee—The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia—To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard—Native Son
Thanks to some commentary over on padawan dot info, I’ve been enjoying a French language blog written by a displaced Californian in Lyons. In one entry, Damelon poses the question: what is the French for meme? And since a homographous word même ‘self; same’ already exists in French it’s not a trivial question. (Not to imply that any lexical question in French is.) Laurent, over at Embruns, has provided us anglophones with an answer: mème. He writes:
Le plus amusant est que l’idée même de mème est le mème par excellence. Et cette ‘idée virale’ n’a pas fini de contaminer les esprits.
Besides discussing translations of Douglas Hofstadter and Richard Dawkins, he also points to an interesting article by Francis Heylighen, called: “Evolution of Memes on the Network: from chain-letters to the global brain” (Sticklers, no doubt, will point out that an accent grave is hardly a circumflex, and they’d be right, and that’s just fine by yours truly.)
Thanks to Qov over at bo logh I've just found out about Earthlings a documentary of a gathering of Klingon speakers last year in Philadelphia. Alexandre O. Phillipe, the director, has another film that sounds intriguing, Chick Flick: The Miracle Mike Story about a headless chicken. Maybe a trip to Cannes is called for. Of course, being slashdotted can only help publicitywise.
Lynne Rutter, a decorative artist and friend in San Francisco, has posted a goodly glossary of architectural terms. It is a necessary for anybody who knows her as she is constantly using these terms in her everyday speech. It’s also a handy collection for everybody else. She’s included a set of links at the end of the page to other online sources of architectural terms. When I worked briefly for the Office [now Division] of the State Architect back in the last century, I was constantly amazed at my coworker’s specialized vocabulary. My personal favorite at that time was fascia. What can I say. We were reroofing a 19th century carriage barn out on Olompali State Park.