Translations: Carlos Skliar

Carlos Skliar (© Copyright Fasinarm 2009)

I'd thought that a large shipment of materials was wending its way east, but a snafu meant that it instead was sitting patiently in Evanston for me to discover it and call upon the good people of United Parcel Service to discharge...and so, now, it is on its way, and there is one less thing to think about on this end. I still am not able to blog as I'd like, but in lieu of a full post, here is a translation of four of the poems in Carlos Skliar's book, No Tienen Prisa Las Palabras (The Words Are In No Hurry), published by Candaya Abierta earlier this year, which I mentioned the other day. I found it in a bookstore in Barcelona and after browsing a few of the pieces, which range from sentence-long aphorisms and aperçus to paragraph length prose pieces shot through with observation and cogitation, I grabbed it. It helped that Spanish was playful but not beyond me ken.

Reading the book on the plane, I found Skliar's poems full of wry wit and keen perspective, offering a clear sense of a mind always moving, turning images or ideas or moments around to see every facet and angle, but also utilizing the resources of Spanish to successful effect.  To put it another way, David Roas writes in his introduction that Skliar, like his mind, is a "a viajero," or traveler, a "un extranjero perpetuo que, como tal, contempla la realidad con ojos nuevos, que mira (verbo esencial en la poética del autor) y nos revela lo que ve y siente" ("A perpetual stranger who, as such, contemplates reality with new eyes, who looks (an essential verb in this author's poetry) and reveals to us what he sees and feels.") (Skliar, 5, my translation). Also noteworthy is his concision and subsequent condensation of meaning, allowing him to do a great deal with very little. Some of his playfulness is hard to capture in English. To give one example, he uses the verb "despedir," which means to "say goodbye to, see off," but also to "discharge, discard, emit, fling," and so forth, the two valences fused in the word. Had he written "Me despedi para siempre de tu vida," that would have been a relatively straightforward "I said goodbye forever to your life," but he retains that rhythmic second-person singular preterite ending "-iste" (which becomes almost incantatory, as "you" in English prose and poetry often does), saying "Me despediste para siempre de tu vida," which turns the address and tone in a different direction. The random person is bidding him farewell--far too formal phrasing for here--forever from his life after basically bothering him relentlessly, so what English verb would suffice. I thought about "discharge," and of course the more benign "say goodbye," but "discard," like that burnt-out "cigarillo" felt appropriate. Perhaps it isn't, but for now it seems to work.

According to the book jacket's brief biography of Skliar, he was born in 1960 in Buenos Aires, he works as a researcher at Argentina's National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, and in the program in Education at the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty.  Since 2005, with Diego Skliar (who may be his brother? Son?), he hosts a radio program in Buenos Aires entitled Preferiría no hacerlo (I would prefer not to do it). I said he was witty.  He is the author of of the collections Primera Conjunción (First Conjunction, 1981), Hilos después (Threads After, 2009), and Voz apenas (Voice Only, 2011), and of the book of aphorisms and essays La intimidad y la alteridad (Intimacy and Otherness, 2006). He has written a number of important essays, published in his own critical volumes such as The Education of the Deaf: A Historical, Cognitive and Pedagogical History (1997), and Intimacy and Alterity: Experiences with the Word (2005), or ones he's edited, among them Derrida and Education (2005), Between Pedagogy and Literature (with Jorge Larrosa, 2007), Experience and Alterity in Education (with Jorge Larrosa, 2009); and The Said, The Written, The Ignored (2011). [Title translations are mine.]

What his brief bio doesn't say--and why should it?--is whether despite the differences in the spelling of their last name he is any relation to the late, brilliant Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011), who was born and grew up in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in that country, which direct abuts Argentina and Buenos Aires Province. Perhaps they share common roots in Bessarabia, where Scliar parents were from, or closer ones still, depending, with Moacyr his uncle. This online biography, which points out that he received a doctorate in Phonology, with a specialization in Human Communication and has been served as an adjunct professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, thus suggests close ties to the Gaúcho state, so perhaps the familial links are clear enough.

Here then are several pieces from the book. These are first passes at translation, so the faults are mine; you can read his Spanish directly to gauge the full effect of his work. Also, Mr. Skliar did write a comment on my earlier post, so perhaps he will see and offer corrections--and anyone else should feel free to do so--with this one. Enjoy!

Four from No Tienen Prisa Las Palabras

Me pediste que me detuviera en medio de la calle. Me pediste que te diera un cigarillo, que te lo encendiera. Me pediste que te dijera la hora, que te orientara acerca de un sitio que yo desconocía. Me pediste que olvidara la pregunta. Me pediste otra vez la hora. Me dijiste qué frío hace. Me preguntaste si yo era de aquí. Me pediste otra vez fuego porque el cigarillo se había apagado. Te fuiste. Me despediste para siempre de tu vida.

You asked me to hold up in the middle of the street. You asked me to give you a cigarette, to light it for you. You asked me for the time, to direct you around a place I was unfamiliar with. You asked me to forget the question. You asked me the time again. You told me how cold it was. You asked me if I was from here. You asked me once again for a light because the cigarette had gone out. You left. You discarded me from your life forever.

***

Detrás de un ventana entreabierta, un niño castigado mira incansablemente el juego de otros niños. Acompaña con su cuerpo los movimentos de cada uno, goza y padece cada una de las vicisitudes ajenas, aunque nadie lo vea. Será un buen hombre. Si lo dejan salir al mundo.

Behind a partially-opened window, a little boy on punishment tirelessly watches other children playing. With his body he shadows the movements of every one of them, enjoys and suffers every one of the others' vicissitudes, even though none of them sees him. He will turn out to be a good man. If they allow him to go out into the world.

***

El sonido de un idioma extranjero que te abre los oídos, pero no te deja abrir la boca.

The sound of a foreign language that opens your ears, but doesn't let you open your mouth.

***

La vida es la diferencia entre el tiempo que pasa y lo que pasa en el tiempo. O, quizá, la diferencia que hay en el interior del tiempo que pasa. La diferencia como intensidad. El tiempo que hondura. Tiempo anciano y tiempo niño, a la vez. Podríamos llamar "de travesía" a esos segundos que no quieren pasar, aun pasado. La percepción los detiene, los retiene, los recuerda. El pensamiento podría dedicar sus mejores horas a esos segundos que ni se van ni se quedan.  A esa serpiente enroscado, verde y negra, que al morderse la cola parece que siempre retorna.

Life is the difference between the time that passes and what passes in time. Or perhaps, the difference that exists within passing time. Difference as intensity. Time's depth. Ancient time and youthful time, at the same time. We could call "crossing" those seconds that do not want to pass, even as they're passing. Perception detains them, retains them, recalls them. Thought could dedicate its best hours to those seconds which neither leave nor stay. To this coiled serpent, green and black, which, in biting its tail, always seems to return.

Copyright © Carlos Skliar, all poems from No Tienen Prisa Las Palabras, Prologue by David Roas, Barcelona: Candaya Abierta, 2012. All rights reserved. Copyright © John Keene, translation, 2012. All rights reserved.

Iraq War (Finally) Over + Hitchens Passes

Panetta, in Iraq

This is the way the war ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.  And though American troops are still there, though in severely reduced numbers, the Iraq War, one of the US's worst foreign policy and political blunders, has finally wound down to its sad end.  The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, yesterday traveled to Iraq to declare the military mission officially over.  Most of the troops and much US equipment and matériel are finally departing that shattered country, as per schedule (and through the haplessness of this current administration, a small favor in all its irony), after nearly a decade of tumult. I won't recite the litany of the war's costs, its destructiveness over its lifespan (or deathspan), and what it has bequeathed, to the US, Iraq, Iran, the rest of the Middle East, the globe, but the costs have, by most measures, been astronomically high, whether one cites the number of US and coalition troops killed or wounded, the toll on Iraq's citizens and the sea of refugees it has provoked, the political crisis that now plagues Iraq's government, the regional empowerment of Iran and destabilization of neighboring states, and on and on.

And still we have never had a thorough investigation of how the country ended up in this disastrous war; no investigation, let alone prosecution, of those behind it, despite the revelations of their lies and duplicity; no censures of any of the many ancillary dramatic personae, the Perles and Wolfowitzes and Chalabis and Judy Millers and on and on; no reprimands in or of the Congress that lay prostate before the war's architects; and no bulwarks to prevent another such disaster. Instead, the US has barreled forward into even more treacherous territory: wars without any Congressional oversight; bloated and rising military budgets; increasing privatization of military services and a strengthening of the military-industrial complex; and creeping un-Constitutional laws and alegal structures, such as wiretapping of US citizens without need of warrants, indefinite military detentions, extrajudicial killings of suspected "terrorists," including US citizens deemed such by the President or secret tribunals, and on and on. War without end is the permanent condition of our politics and polity.

As much as we might criticize many awful moments in US history, we also should recognize that where we are today is perhaps among the worst places, in terms of a complete mockery of the rule of law, as we've ever seen. And worse it gets, day by day, under a president who ran a campaign of changing the disasters this war not only symbolized, but embodied. His challengers are as bad or worse. Meanwhile, the soldiers are coming home, but to what?  And why were they ever over there in the first place?  Really? Beyond the "sea of oil" and the fanatical plans of PNAC, and the undying neoconservative dream of perpetual war against enemies near and far, so long as the neoconservatives themselves never have to go into combat, never have to witness their children being slain on foreign soil or sand or seas, never have to do much beyond rant into prose or a microphone, in coddled ideological seclusion, while the results of their febrile passions unfold in gory spectacle continents away.  The Iraq War has been a tragedy we have only begun to reckon; we won't know its final accounts, there, and here, for years to come.

***

Christopher Hitchens (David Levenson/Getty Images)

Speaking of ironies, on this very day, one of the Iraq War's staunchest supporters, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), died of esophageal cancer at the age of 62. The encomia for the British-born, American-naturalized former far-left, neoconservative-turned, Oxford-educated essayist and critic have, I noted from the time I signed onto Twitter yesterday, been steadily mounting. I was not and am not an admirer. Glittering prose and wit always have a place in my heart, but used to such devices as Hitchens did, especially over the decade of his life, left me cold.  His prodigiousness is worthy of citation; his charm, even when he was at his most repellent, was undeniable; his fearlessness at challenging the media's commonplaces, touchstones and darlings, like the silence around atheism, or the public characters known as Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Diana, Princess of Wales, was peerless, among his media set and many others.

Yet I also recall how awful he became on political matters in the United States, how he went after Bill Clinton and how he slavered over George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. What comes to mind is Paul Johnson's slashing description of the Young British Artists, adapted and shorn of Johnson's gross homophobia, to Hitchens, during his neoconservative state, which deepened into something much more and worse than a phase: brutal, horribly modish and clever-cunning, exhibitionist, loud-voiced and stone-fisted, aiming to shock and degrade, arrière-garde, and, as with those he so deeply championed, arrogantly, utterly and indefensibly wrong.  Hitchens, a self-described "Marxist" who made deep peace with global capitalism and its depredations, was unfortunately still unwilling to apologize for having championed the Iraq disaster even at the end of his life; fast as a magnet he held to his convictions. What awaits him is anyone's guess. It is no guess, however, that he probably knew by heart the following lines, and with them may he rest, wherever he's headed, in peace:

...But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.
 Richard II, Act 5, Sc. 5, William Shakespeare.

Quote: Binyavanga Wainaina

"Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

"Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country."--from Binyavanga Wainaina, "How to Write about Africa," in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing 92: The View from Africa, Winter 2005.

French Essay/l'essai français + Art & Project Bulletin @ MoMa

Recently I finished and sent off a draft of an essay I'd been working on for a good portion of the summer. I don't actually write that many essays, especially because I find the process very time-consuming and difficult, no matter how rewarding the final product, but what was significant and different this time was that the Canadian journal I wrote it for publishes in French only, and so after I was asked to submit something, based perhaps on my praise of and fascination with Taïa, I decided and then agreed to write it in French rather than in English, to be translated by me or someone else later on. It was, to put it simply, a challenge, or rather a series of them, and that, I think, more than anything else, made me determined to complete it.

The first involved reading and taking notes on the book, Abdellah Taïa's Une mélancolie arabe (Seuil 2009, Taïa at left, from thehumpdaycrew.blogspot.com), which hasn't been translated into English yet. (One of his earlier books, L'armée du salut is now available in English as Salvation Army. If I had the time, I'd be willing to attempt it.) Taïa's French fortunately is fairly straightforward and contains little slang, so getting through the book wasn't hard. Moreover, the novel, though sometimes exasperating in its protagonist's sentimentality and self-dramaticization, was nevertheless engagingly provocative and broached a lot of issues that would serve further discussion. The second involved constructing an argument in relation to the journal issue's theme, which was the Théâtre de la Cruauté, which I read as referring directly back to the original version proposed by French visionary playwright and activist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I'd read a little of Artaud's work before, and enough about him, primarily I believe via Susan Sontag, and I knew something about his successors, such as Peter Brooke, to have a general idea of what his two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty were saying, but I figured I ought to read the actual texts themselves, in basic scholarly fashion, before I began trying to tease out a relationship between Taïa's novel and Artaud's ideas. I did so, first in French and then in English, to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding them, and what struck me as always was the slippage in meaning between the original and the translation, though the gist remains. In Artaud's case, I think the gist is what's most important, since he was trying to get away from texts in and of themselves, towards a more experimental, gestural and visual theatrical experience, one in which a deeper metaphysics, and thus, he believed, an authenticity, might be accessed.

I saw several routes into this connection between Taïa's novel and Artaud's (at right, Guardian UK, Getty/Martinie/Roger Viollet) theories, and worked through them, particularly around the frequent deaths and almost-deaths that occur in Taïa's book, every major crisis portending or transforming into a confrontation with la mort, and their links to la cruauté as Artaud defines it. But it wasn't until I came across some commentary by the critic Peter Sloterdijk that I was able to formulate a way of reading Taïa's work, via's Immanuel Kant's 3rd critique readings of the sublime (though Sloterdijk reroutes the Kantian reading, as Jacques Rancière does, via Jean-François Lyotard), to suggest a melancholic ethics of becoming that the protagonist was engaging in. Then there was the third challenge, which was the most difficult of all: writing an essay in French. I have to make clear that I haven't written anything beyond letters or email in French since I was in high school. In fact, the last time may have been one of those French essay contests that the local Alliance Française sponsored, and I believe I wrote one describing Marseille, a city I have still never set foot in. The gulf between a high school essay and one written for an adult journal, however, is vast, so I did take the added step of reading some contemporary French journal and magazine essays, in order to get a grasp of essayistic idioms, and I realized that it was going to be an uphill climb. For just as it is often a struggle for most native English speakers who find themselves at someone's college to write a coherent and convincing essay on a given topic in English itself, so it is in French, especially for someone who is not a native French speaker and who in fact when encountering French mainly is translating it into English. What I especially strove to do was think in French, as much as possible, so as to be able to put those thoughts, in idiomatic French syntax, on the page.

A challenge that arose out of this one was vocabulary, and in particular, the difficulty of selecting certain words that had differing shades of meaning in the two languages, or that did not exist at all in French. To give one example, French has two words for knowledge, la connaissance (from connaître, to know someone, to be familiar with, from the Latin cognoscere, to know, akin by root to English to know, but also the noun, ken, a vista) and le savoir (from savoir, to know something, know how, from the Latin sapere, to taste of, have the scent of, be wise, discern, akin to the English words "savor" and "savory," both of French (Norman) provenance) At several points, I had to decide that it was la connaissance, based in part of la reconnaissance (recognition) that the protagonist Abdellah had gained, rather than le savoir, even though my initial tendency was often to choose the latter term, in part because of past readings of Michel Foucault (such as his 1988 interview, titled "Le Gai Savoir," for example, with its ironic, double-entendre riff on Nietzsche). Abdellah's knowledge is a knowledge of himself, rather than a learning or a knowing how, though when the latter is salient, I use the latter term.

Then there are English words for which there are no direct French equivalents (and vice-versa, of course, such as double-entendre, which English imported wholesale). French, from what I could tell, does not have an exact term for awe, one of the emotions produced by the sublime (or the Kantian sublimes to be exact). French has words that combine fear and reverence (la crainte, fear, apprehension from the verb craindre, to fear, be apprehensive about, being one), and astonishment (l'étonnement, astonishment, surprise, quite close to English), but not one that captures the melding of the two. So I used a compound term, la crainte mêlé d'admiration, which doesn't exactly capture the condensed power of "awe," but approaches it. But then it wasn't so much the response generated by the sublime as the recognition in life of sublimity creating a deeper sense of our mortality and the consequent sense of the aesthetic and the ethical that I was after, so the exact translation was less important, perhaps, especially since the sublime is le sublime and the ethical and ethics are both l'éthique in French.

All of which is to say that I have finished the French essay (or at least a draft), sent it off to the editor, and now have a deepened appreciation for anyone who does this sort of thing regularly, as well as for Taïa's book and the French language. When the essay is published, if there's a link, I'll provide it, so that you can read it yourself. And perhaps I'll send it to Abdellah Taïa as well.

***

While I didn't manage to get to the pricey Museum of Modern Art before the In & Out of Amsterdam conceptual art show was there--the Monday I and a friend had planned to go, MoMa was closed, so we ended up at the Met--I did finally get up there, on Columbus/Peoples of the Americas Day, no less, and saw the tinier, residual Art & Project Bulletin show. The exhibit presents the Art & Project Gallery Bulletin's entire 156-issue run, stretching from 1968 to 1989, as well as artworks by the European, American and Japanese artists who'd appeared in its pages and within, without or on the gallery's walls, literally or figuratively. Some, like the controversial performance artist-photographers Gilbert and George (above right, Sydney Morning Herald) are now quite well known, though I hadn't realized how they'd begun their careers, staging live durational performances as human statues and causing a sensation as a result. Others, like Robert Barry, are less well known but should be central to any discussion of contemporary art practice, which draws heavily from the conceptual well. What the show makes clear is that Art & Project's founders, Dutch artists Gert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, created a vital nexus in the translantic conceptual art movement, putting Amsterdam on the map alongside New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and other important sites in the development of an important vein of artmaking that remains central to contemporary practice.

I should add that reading the In & Out of Amsterdam show catalogue, which picked up after the show, I learned that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that city's major venue for 20th century art and one of my favorites, was a key institutional site in the trans-Atlantic late 1960s conceptual revolution, much as MoMa, in its earlier years, had been for a much earlier generation of artists. I also hadn't known that it was MoMa's legendary black curator, Kynaston McShine (what a name!), whose 1970 "Information" show introduced conceptual art as a major contemporary trend, and later curated shows on Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol, among others. He is still there, now as Chief Curator at Large, and co-curated the 2007 40-year-retrospective show of sculptor Richard Serra's work. Some photos and a video.


The explanatory plaque

The bulletins on display

A Daniel Buren striped strip--seeing this made me smile with glee. Buren once covered large sections of the interior of the uptown Guggenheim Museum with these, and also placed them all about Paris, London, and other sites. This is the first time I'd ever seen one up close.

Lawrence Weiner piece

David Robilliard drawings (the ones on the right show Gilbert and George)

And a video of David Askevold's "Catapult" (1970), Super8 film transferred to video

And, as I said, I passed the parade, so here's a photo: