I don’t remember ever having laughed out loud when reading Kafka. That is, until yesterday.
It may have had to do with the fact that while reading the following passage, and before reaching K.’s hilarious punchline, I was thinking of the most recent of my own encounters with the Bureaucracy, with stories of which I have bored many a friend in the past. Earlier this summer, soon after I got home, I learned that I could no longer travel on my current passport, since it’s now only valid for less than six months. So I had to get a new one, better yet, a machine-readable one, now that the government has finally started issuing these after missing several international deadlines over the past decade or so (Yay! We’re finally catching up with the rest of the world–when I guess they’re actually moving on, with biometric passports and whatnot). Anyways, since due to lack of technical resources they’re apparently still having to outsource production overseas (Yes, they make our nationality documents in another nation!), the process takes some time, and there was some concern I might not have a new passport in hand before I had to get back…to my other home.
It turned out, however, that I was not even eligible to get one of these new passports (more…)
Yesterday I found myself thinking about ships, as I sat at the very back of a packed lecture hall listening to a professor who happens to be the biggest figure in a major school of literary theory and criticism. I was there both for who he was and for what he was teaching: a course exploring mobility and culture through a literary/historical mapping of three particular oceanic voyages in the mid-17th century. As he made his introductory remarks on this first day of class, the projector screen next to him displayed an array of fascinating visuals, including spatial simulations on Google Earth–an impressive use of technology in the classroom (and this was not even a science class!). At one point, his PowerPoint slides held up a very neat computer-modeled diagram of a ship, marked with labels for every mast, sail, and corner of the deck that has a name in English.
My mind drifted off to a talk by Amitav Ghosh several months ago at a local bookstore, where he was reading from his latest novel, Sea of Poppies. As he discussed the colonial and remarkably cosmopolitan context of 19th century Calcutta, Ghosh described his fascination with sea travel and what he considers a most intricate “machine,” the ship. His interest in language led him to wonder how sailors of diverse cultural/linguistic backgrounds communicated in order to make this machine function. Ghosh talked about cultural contact and the immense hybridity of languages–often to an extent that most native speakers of a language don’t ever realize. Many of us never really think of the influence of Portugese, for instance, on Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, and other Indian languages precisely due to those Iberian ships that brought European commerce to India. I was quite surprised to learn of the Portugese origin of such a mundane word as balti, referring to that ubiquitous bucket that no desi household can do without. But of course, the word balti is now officially an English word, at least in England, thanks to such culinary delights as balti chicken, reportedly the English people’s favorite take-out. And thus language travels, from the buckets on board 15th c. Portugese ships to the cooking-pots of 20th c. Indian restaurants in England. (more…)
–Good-bye, sir.
–Where to?
–Madness.
–Which madness?
–Any madness, for I have turned into words.
[Mahmoud Darwish, in Memory for Forgetfulness, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), p. 51]
I have been completely out of touch with Arabic poetry for over a year, but I was quite taken aback and saddened yesterday afternoon to learn through a Facebook friend’s “status message” about the passing of Mahmoud Darwish–unquestionably one of the greatest Arab voices of our time, also hailed as the Palestinian “national poet.”
The poet has left, but has left behind an indelible legacy of words.
Filed under: Littéraire
Prière d’un petit enfant nègre
Guy Tirolien [1917 - 1988]
Seigneur
Je suis très fatigué
Je suis né fatigué
Et j’ai beaucoup marché depuis le chant du coq
Et le morne est bien haut qui mène à leur école
Seigneur je ne veux plus aller à leur école,
Faites je vous en prie que je n’y aille plus.
(more…)
I didn’t know about Obama the poet. Well now I do, thanks to a short piece in The New Yorker, which even consults good old Harold Bloom for commentary on two poems from Obama’s college years. In the words of a blogger at bookninja.com, Bloom is “surprisingly gentle” on Barack. Indeed he is:
Harold Bloom, who in fifty-three years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him said, when reached by telephone in New Haven last week, that he was not familiar with Obama’s oeuvre. But after studying the poems he said that he was not unimpressed with the young man’s efforts—at least, by the standards established by other would-be bards within the political sphere. “At eighteen, as an undergraduate, he was already a much better poet than our former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who keeps publishing terrible poetry,” Bloom said. . . . “And then there is Jimmy Carter, who is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States.”
Heh, this last remark definitely sounds like Bloom! Apparently: “Poetry aside, Bloom has formed a good impression of Obama—’Though if Mayor Bloomberg runs, I am voting for him,’ he added.” Read the whole thing here.
I’ll be spending a considerable amount of time this season studying the Thousand and One Nights, not least because I have enrolled in an evening class on it at our famed institution in the neighborhood. We already had the first meeting last week, and it was wonderful to be back in the classroom after so many months! But I’m also hoping to devote some time to the history of medieval Arabic literature in general, as well as to other related topics, such as Bocaccio’s Decameron. What inspired me now to blog about this, however, was the following amusing quote:
whether the tales be really Arabick, or invented by Mons. Galland, I have never been able to learn with certainty. If they be Oriental, they are translated with unwarrantable lattitude; for the whole tenor of the style is in the French mode: and the Caliph of Bagdat, and the Emperor of China, are addressed in the same terms of ceremony which are usual at the court of France. [James Beattie in "On Fables and Romance" (1783), quoted by Robert Irwin in The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 2005), p. 17]
We may laugh (as I do!) at this allusion to the possibility that the 1001 Nights was entirely a creation of Antoine Galland, but truth is there are grounds for such skepticism. Galland, by the way, was the Frenchman who produced the first European translation of the Nights in 1704; his was also the first printed edition of the Nights in any language (the first Arabic print did not appear until over a century later, in Calcutta!). The textual history of the 1001 Nights, as well as the history of its European translations, is sometimes as remarkable as the stories themselves. Indeed, as one writer notes: “Essentially, everything you think you know about the Arabian Nights is probably wrong. Even the number of nights and stories. The history of the tales is itself an enormous puzzle.”
It is to Galland’s credit that the manuscript he used for his translation happens to be the earliest extant text of the Nights: a 14th century Syrian manuscript that now resides in Paris, and which eventually became the basis for Muhsin Mahdi‘s more recent “authoritative” edition of the Nights. There are two points to be made: first, Galland didn’t quite produce an “accurate” translation, and second, that manuscript was not his only source for the stories. With respect to the first point, let me quote Husain Haddawy, who argues that “instead of following the text faithfully, Galland deleted, added, and altered drastically to produce not a translation, but a French adaptation, or rather a work of his own creation.” The second point, however, is probably the more interesting, and below is why.
It may surprise many to learn that neither of the two most popular or well-known stories of the Nights, that of Aladdin and Ali Baba, existed in written Arabic before Galland. That is, they were never a part of the “authentic” corpus of the Nights! (And I say that despite realizing that authentic is a very problematic term that we should refrain from using in the context of the 1001 Nights). Galland himself mentions in his diaries that he heard the story of Aladdin from a man named Hanna Diab, a Maromite Christian Arab of Aleppo, who was brought to Paris by a friend of Galland, and who personally narrated 14 stories to Galland (Apparently, seven of these fourteen later appeared in Galland’s edition of the Nights, says Irwin). Now, the first written Arabic account of the story of Aladdin appears in 1787, “in a manuscript written by a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, named Dionysius Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis” (Haddawi). A second account appears between 1805 and 1808 in a manuscript written in Paris by another Syrian, Mikhail Sabbagh, who “claimed to have copied it in turn from a Baghdad manuscript written in 1703.” But guess what? It turns out that both Chavis and Sabbagh had “fabricated the text by translating Galland back into Arabic”!
Imagine the twist: from oral Arabic into written French and then back into Arabic! But wait, there’s more. These Arabic manuscripts then became the source of later translations into English, such as by John Payne and (the in/famous) Richard Burton! According to Irwin, “Burton adopted such a catholic attitude that he strayed quite a distance into the Nights Apocrypha. Finding no Arabic originals for some of Galland’s ‘orphan tales’, he adopted the bizarre procedure of translating them from Hindustani translations of Galland” (p. 30).
But of course, none of this should imply that the stories of Aladdin or Ali Baba did not exist before the 18th century. Rather, it would seem that they were a part of the oral tradition. This reminds us then, that to overly insist on “text” and “authenticity” is in some ways tantamount to betraying the spirit of the 1001 Nights, which have been transmitted over centuries through popular narrative. Indeed, scholars agree that many of the stories in the Nights actually predate the “frame” tale, i.e. the story of Scheherazade and Shahrayar. And much of what we call the “Arabian” Nights is hardly Arabian: the origins of many of the stories lie in India, Persia, and even China.
My first albeit cursory introduction to the textual history of the Nights was Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West, which I read just over a year ago in college for a class on Orientalism. Mernissi’s book is a confluence of many themes, but primarily she follows the journey of Scheherazade to Europe, through the translations of Galland, Lane, Burton and others. In trying to uncover the roots of Western fantasies about the harem, she offers an intriguing feminist reading of the European reception of the 1001 Nights.
But to meet your more immediate curiosities, if any, about the textual history of the Arabian Nights, I can refer to two articles that I have found online: one here by Gregory Frost, and another longer one here by Daniel Beaumont.
This passage in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss made me chuckle:
”It is strange the tutor is Nepali,” the cook remarked to Sai when he had left. A bit later he said, “I thought he would be Bengali.”
”Hm?” asked Sai. How had she looked? she was thinking. How had she appeared to the tutor? The tutor himself had the aspect, she thought, of intense intelligence. His eyes were serious, his voice deep, but then his lips were too plump to have such a serious expression, and his hair was curly and stood up in a way that made him look comic. This seriousness combined with the comic she found compelling.
”Bengalis,” said the cook, “are very intelligent.”
”Don’t be silly,” said Sai. “Although they certainly would agree.”
”It’s the fish,” said the cook. “Coastal people are more intelligent than inland people.”
”Who says?”
”Everyone knows,” said the cook. “Coastal people eat fish and see how much cleverer they are, Bengalis, Malayalis, Tamils. Inland they eat too much grain, and it slows the digestion — especially millet — forms a big heavy ball. The blood goes to the stomach and not to the head. Nepalis make good soldiers, coolies, but they are not so bright at their studies. Not their fault, poor things.”
”Go and eat some fish yourself,” Sai said. “One stupid thing after another from your mouth.” (pp. 81-82)
Stereotypes! I don’t know if I should blame my parents for trying to make me believe that eating fish makes people smart! I had to face much rebuke all my life for hating fish (the way they cook it in the motherland) — for which I apparently didn’t deserve to call myself Bengali!
I heard Peter Cole speak yesterday at a lecture entitled “Real Gazelles in Imaginary Gardens: Art and Scholarship in the Translation of Medieval Hebrew Poetry from Spain.” I believe this was the second time I had the chance to see him, because he had come for a reading two years ago, the same year that I learned of him through the readings for a class. Cole, himself a poet, is mainly known for his remarkable translations of Hebrew ‘Golden Age’ poetry, and I totally think he’s a genius, even though poetry is hardly my thing. Peter Cole alone can be credited, to a large extent, for the contemporary revival of works by the great Jewish poets from medieval Spain — such monumental figures as Samuel ibn Naghrilla and Solomon ibn Gabirol. This page at Words Without Borders provides a short but great compliation of poems by and information about three well known Andalusian poets. But Cole’s translation-mastery isn’t limited to the Medieval period, or to the Hebrew language: he has translated works by a number of contemporary poets, including the excellent Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali.
At the talk, Cole shared some of his ideas on translation, specially the translation of poetry, which is unquestionably quite complex, if not impossible. It was quite fascinating, particularly since I think the act of translation is something of a linguistic paradox, if not nearly a miracle.
A friend of mine asked me last week what the deal was with John Updike‘s latest novel, Terrorist. I told her I hadn’t read it, except for about a 20-minute study of the hardback at the Bookstore‘s New Fiction corner. There was no particular reason I picked it up, as opposed to the many other flashy 9/11-inspired books, but of course there was the author’s name printed in bold, confident sans-serif. I did find it somewhat interesting — the plethora of transliterated Arabic phrases throughout the pages, the stream-of-consciousness windows into the protagonist Ahmed’s thoughts on ‘devilish’ American popculture — but I did not feel compelled to buy/read it. Nontheless, I thought the novel (in spite of the cover art) seemed more nuanced than aforementioned other books.
The problem, however, is when an NPR webpage claims that Updike explores “the tension between Muslim immigrants — and the culture that surrounds them.” How much of Ahmed, born of an abandoner Egyptian father but raised by an Irish-American mother, is an ‘Arab immigrant’?
In any case, that’s not why I’m posting this entry.
I’ll quote from both sources. First, the passage from the book, regarding a comment by Updike on the great modern Arab novelist Abdur Rahman Munif:
When Arab writers, like the superb critic of the Middle Eastern oil based societies Munif, are translated into English, critics either ignore or denigrate their writings. Dallal [1998] quotes a John Updike remark about Munif’s outstanding Cities of Salt: “It is unfortunate…that Mr Munif…appears to be…insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel.” Such an attitude stems from the one-sided, still current stereotypical ideology based on universalism, unitarism, and the homogeneity of human nature. This ideology marginalises and excludes the distinctive and unique characteristics of Arab societies and satisfy itself that it knows its natives: it is others who should adopt to its culture and literature. The Western centric assumptions about others – races, nationalities, literatures – has provided the site for critiques of representations, language and ideological control towards writers from places like the Arab world. These assumptions return time and again to haunt the production, reception and circulation of Arabic texts, and in turn complicate the issue of translation. [~ p.5, Said Faiq, "The Cultural Encounter in Translating from Arabic," in Cultural Encounters in Translation from Arabic, ed. Said Fariq (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000)]
The learned blogger at “From Clay” responds to a remark made by Updike on the appeal of the Qur’an to a ‘Westerner’. Updike says:
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. There’s a lot of hellfire — descriptions of making unbelievers drink molten metal occur more than once. It’s not a fuzzy, lovable book, although in the very next verse there can be something quite generous. . . . Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. My feeling was, ‘This is God’s language, and the fact that you don’t understand it means you don’t know enough about God.’
You’ll have to follow the link below for the entire response to this, but here’s a sneak peek:
what begs the question is this: why would a man of obvious intelligence (an intellectual according to some score cards) make a public statement about the Quran’s appeal (or lack of) to the Western reader, which, even on the surface, is subject to stretch marks? The Quran is Semitic in language and, one may say, its élan. So if the Quran does not appeal to the Western reader (a floater of some vague Judeo-Christian-Hellenic soup), then certainly biblical literature would have a far worse time at it, given its age and setting in a less “historical” time than the Quran’s advent.
Click here to read the entire post: “John Updike: Quranic Exegete.” And let me know what you think!
Last weekend I finally finished reading Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I’ve had the book for just about two years now. When Lahiri came here for a reading last year, I had only read one of the stories in the collection: “A Real Durwan”, the one that most reminded me of home.
When Lahiri was here, I got her to sign the book. The room was packed beyond capacity, and after the reading a lot of people queued up to get autographs. I was glad I remembered to bring my copy of the Interpreter with me. While I was waiting in the line, Lahiri’s little baby started crying. She took the baby over from another woman who I think was a relative, and held it with one hand while continuing to sign books with the other. I felt a bit sorry, and wondered for a minute about the balancing of the public and private lives.
When it was my turn, she held her pen on the book and asked for my name so she could address me personally. But I told her it was alright, it wasn’t necessary. I felt guilty taking up her time: the baby was still wailing. People should be considerate and let her go, I thought. I believe she had asked if I was sure. Yes, I was. So she scrawled just her signature, further down the page, but there was a big blue dot where she’d first put down the pen. I murmured a faint thank you, and left. I had actually wanted to say thank you in Bengali, because I knew she would understand. But in that split moment, I forgot all the Bengali I know. But then again, ‘thank you’ in Bengali is a rather formal expression, hardly used in the everyday. Oh culture, so baffling! In many of her stories, Lahiri wonders, for example, why Bengali couples never kiss, never hug each other.
Immediately after that reading, I had to go to a meeting where I showed the book to a friend, who exclaimed, “Oh, she didn’t write you a little personal comment?”. I always regretted not getting that personal thing. If anything, that big dot kept being a bad reminder: after all, it would’ve only taken a few more seconds. But now that I’ve actually read the book, I realize that what really matters is what the stories tell. The issues explored by Lahiri are ones very pertinent to our times, issues that I am thinking about all the time and even facing every day in real life. There is, of course, the bit of universality in Lahiri’s writing that everyone can relate to. But then there are the particulars that struck at the very core of my being. The abundant Bengali imageries are all too familiar, all too laden with nostalgia. Lahiri copes with existence in a grey area, somewhere between Bengal and America: the same grey area that I must inhabit.
Lahiri’s writing is beautiful, and I’ve felt amazingly content after each story. Content, but sad. Well, sadness is existence. There are too many maladies, too many things to think about. How stories create contentment amidst all this, truly baffles me. Well, it may be baffling, but I am still grateful.
