Nightstand! Of! STEEL!!!

Look, I've already said this to two people tonight, so I'm going to post it here, and I won't have to repeat it again: No, I have not read the Alex Ross book. I'm sure it's great. I know everyone's read it but me. I can't wait to pick it up. But I have not even bought a copy, and I will not buy a copy until I have finished reading Now, Voyagers by James McCourt (of Queer Street fame). If you haven't heard, Now, Voyagers is the sequel to Mawrdew Czgowchwz, the opera-queen novel as unpronounceable as it is indispensible. (Actually, it's pronounced "Mardu Gorgeous," so maybe just call it "the opera-queen novel" and we'll leave it at that.) If you are a faggot, like myself, and care enough about classical music to be reading this blog, you should probably be reading Mawrdew Czgowchwz right now instead of anything I have to say. And even if you are just a homo and do not care about classical music in the slightest, and have stumbled across this website through one of those crazy internet accidents, you should definitely be reading Queer Street instead of anything I have to say, because that book is the user's manual that they should have handed out with your homosexuality. Anyhow, I've only read the first few, insane pages of Now, Voyagers, because I've decided I'm not going to start reading it in earnest until I finish War and Peace. Yeah, you heard me. See, I've never read it, and here it is in this new translation from Pevear and Volokhonsky, our two most faithful guides to Russian literature, and check out how beautiful, just to look at! Now take off the dust jacket--still beautiful! Gorgeous. I smile to see it on my shelf. And there it sits. Because of course, before I even start in on War and Peace, I'd better finish reading Sodom and Gomorrah, because otherwise that would be one enormous novel too many--Sodom and Peace, War and Gomorrah, I'd get it all mixed up. But I've taken a short break from Sodom and Gomorrah to read La Colmena (The Hive), an astonishingly vicious novel of life after the Spanish Civil War by Nobel-laureate Camilo José Cela. Cela was an interesting character: a nobleman, an officer and, later, spy for Franco (betraying his fellow writers to the Fascist government), he was also famous for having claimed, in a televised interview, to be able to take a liter of water into his body through his asshole. (He offered to demonstrate for the cameras.) This translation is terrible, though, and so I've stopped reading it except as a crib to the original Spanish, which I'm reading in a beautiful scholarly edition, except that I've paused to read the most charming little thing: You're an Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa. A novel, kind of, it tells the story of Viskovitz, everyschlemiel, as his soul wanders from beast to beast--snail, dung beetle, chameleon, elk, parrot--looking for love. I hate to say, "Think blank meets blank," but maybe it'll help if I tell you to think, What if Woody Allen wrote Invisible Cities? Not as deep as Calvino maybe, not as funny as Allen at his best, but still a terrifically funny, insightful, remarkably sustained performance. Each chapter is a self-contained fable on the animal in man (and woman). And look, Roz Chast did the cover! It's great! You love her! Yeah, you'd better read this book, too. Anyhow, I'm delighted to add Alex Ross to the list. I'm just sayin', it might take a while. Bear with me, people.

Sortes Proustianae

Sometimes, readers of English, you see the Latin poet Vergil's name spelled "Vergil" (as in Publius Vergilius Maro, his actual name), but more often you see the traditional "Virgil" (as in virga, or "wand"), due to the medieval belief--and I am not making this up--that he was actually a wizard. The idea was that you could use the Aeneid like a Magic 8-Ball, opening it to whatever page you wanted and reading a line out of context for the purposes of divination. You still hear about people who do this with the Bible, although I wouldn't recommend it. I do recommend trying it with Proust. I am certain he was possessed of powers far beyond the reach of mere muggles. The other day, I attempted to explain to a Spanish friend the difficulty of approaching Proust as an anglophone--at every moment, one senses that something is missing. C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation is exquisite, but weirdly idiosyncratic. He called Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past, which is not at all an accurate translation of Á la recherche du temps perdu, and the titles of individual volumes were also translated a bit too freely, even bowdlerized: À l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs (something like, "shaded by young girls in bloom") became Within a Budding Grove, and Sodome et Gomorrhe became Cities of the Plain. Some of these lovely quirks are smoothed out in the revised version by D.J. Enright, and some are not (Sodome et Gomorrhe becomes Sodom & Gomorrah, though Within a Budding Grove, inexplicably, endures--maybe because it's such a musical turn of phrase, and maybe because saying the words "young girls" in English makes you feel like a pervert). Not having the French, myself, to read the original, I try to cruise through Enright, comparing the phrases that wrinkle my nose to the same lines in Moncrieff's rendering, and then perhaps to later English translations, and finally, maybe, to the French (with a dictionary). Thanks to Enright, the novel is now known as In Search of Lost Time, even in those new translations, but I would argue that even this is unsatisfactory. Remembrance of Things Past is lovelier (it should be--it's Shakespeare), and while the phrase "lost time" has echoes banal (LOST CAT) and portentous (Lost Ark), it fails to invoke the obvious model for Proust's title--another English poem! He writes of "paradises lost" in his novel; why not say "time lost"? It's less idiomatic than putting the adjective first, but not so unidiomatic that you wouldn't say Time Regained for the title of the last voume, Le Temps retrouvé. Francophones and Miltonists reading this--and I know you're reading this--am I nuts, or is In Search of Time Lost just a better title? A few days later, when JoJo and I took a short trip to Vermont, I--inspired by that conversation--tossed a copy of (ahem) Sodom & Gomorrah into my bag, having left off halfway into it months and months ago. The afternoon of our second day on Lake Champlain, I said, "Let's take out the rowboat, and read for a while on the water," and JoJo was foolish enough to agree, not realizing that he would be doing all the rowing, and I the reading. Here's where I opened up the book. Marcel's mother has asked him if he would like to read anything while he is on vacation. He asks for the Arabian Nights:

As, long ago at Combray, when she gave me books for my birthday, so it was in secret, as a surprise for me, that my mother now sent for both Galland's version and that of Mardrus.

An endnote in my edition explains that "Of the two French versions of the Arabian Nights, Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-1717) is elegant, scholarly but heavily bowdlerised, and Mardus's Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit (1899-1904) coarser and unexpurgated."

Happening upon certain of the tales, she had been revolted by the immorality of the subject and the coarseness of the expression. But above all, preserving like precious relics not only her mother's brooch, her sunshade, her cloak, her volume of Mme de Sévigné, but also her habits of thought and speech, invoking on every occasion the opinion that she would have expressed, my mother could have no doubt of the unfavourable judgment which my grandmother would have passed on Mardrus's version.

The narrator then reflects aloud on the outlandish pedantry of a classicist friend:

I told her what my grandmother had thought of the Greek names which Bloch, following Leconte de Lisle, used to give to Homer's gods, going so far, in the simplest matters, as to make it a religious duty, in which he supposed literary talent to consist, to adopt a Greek system of spelling. Having occasion, for instance, to mention in a letter that the wine which they drank at his home was true nectar, he would write "nektar," with a k, which enabled him to titter at the mention of Lamartine. Now if an Odyssey from which the names of Ulysses and Minerva were missing was no longer the Odyssey to her, what would she have said upon seeing corrupted, even on the cover, the title of her Arabian tales, upon no longer finding, exactly transcribed as she had all her life been in the habit of pronouncing them, the immortally familiar names of Scheherazade or Dinarzade, while, themselves debaptised (if one may use the expression of Muslim tales), even the charming Caliph and the powerful Genies were barely recognisable, being renamed, he the "Khalifa" and they the "Gennis." However, my mother handed over both books to me, and I told her that I would read them on the days when I felt too tired to go out.

See what I mean? Proust has the answer to every riddle, even the riddle of his own translation. Which is better: the familiar, beautiful rendition, or the "correct" rendition? Ulysses, or Odysseus? Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time? Virgil, or Vergil? And Proust demonstrates here that to choose one approach universally, to the exclusion of the other, is the fallacy of prudes and pedants alike. You and I, we can choose both.