Translators can be any number of things: imaginative remakers, clever conduits. They are invariably people who try to share the sense of the original but do so wrongly, in goodbad faith. Such is Antigonick, Anne Carson's new translation of Sophokles's Antigone, a version for people who don't read Greek, don’t veil themselves in the manner of the ladies of antiquity, are not eligible members of the nonsensible chorus, but have read Hegel’s remarks on unmatched justices and (snotty children) assume some things about matching them right.

Antigone, the character, is a hard target. She’s moved so much that she no longer moves at all, undead but buried and constantly dug up again, a fixture of antiquated academic culture obsessed with dust. There are paintings in Antigonick on nice vellum pages that overlay the text—which seem to be handdrawn by Carson herself. Bianca Stone drew them in fact, while Robert Currie made text and image look nice together.

What information from the Greek source text is relevant? How can we relate to Antigone, who chanted a strange language and opposed her city's laws?

The problem of translation is the problem of meaning is the problem of wanting to share some sense in a world where, oh sweet gnarly luck, sharing said sense is like kissing a salt lick. Understandably, translators translate in distinct ways, but always to differing levels of failure. They can be faithful, trying hard to render, fideliciously, the flesh of the text body they're working. Or they can do as Carson does for Antigone: Paraphrase Beckett. Tell Kreon to fuck himself. Do what’s right. Then, die.

I’m sorry, there was something about justice?

Image: Black and WTF

1.

It’s an old story: Antigone decides to bury her dead brother and break the city’s law; for her contravention she is immured in a cave. And soSophocles’ Antigone mesmerized its Grecian audiences—so much that he was made a general in Athens’s battle against Samos.

2.
It’s a new story: Nizam pushes a cart across miles and mountains to recover and bury her dead brother and rescue him from the American militarymen who think him a Taliban figure; during her struggle she is left in a desolate stretch of the desert. And so Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch calls forth the old story in a different guise, bringing to life lieutenants and captains on the battlefront.

3.
But of course Nizam is not quite Antigone, nor is Masood, the interpreter, exactly Ismene. In the new story, Creon is generalized from a lone figure to the entire military-industrial complex. The soldiers struggle to support the system into which they were indoctrinated, and their all-too-human experiences overwhelm their dispassionate training. As they watch Nizam, they worry for her, and realize they cannot see things in the black-and-white, allegorical terms they’re supposed to.

4.
“He walks over to Masood and says: Please convey to her that our business with him is not finished.
She replies: He is dead. What business can you possibly have with a dead man?
Tell her that her brother was a terrorist, a Talib, and a bad man.
That isn’t true! My brother was a Pashtun, a Muhajid, and a freedom fighter. He fought the Talib. And he died fighting the Amrikâyi invaders. He was a man of courage.”

Good and bad are hard labels to affix, and even harder when all you know are us and them.

5.
“The decade-long war in Afghanistan is America’s longest war, Britain’s most expensive war since World War II, and NATO’s first major war outside Europe,” Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya writes, before detailing the casualties per Western country. Where are the statistics on the local people who died? The Pashtuns, the Talibs, the many other peoples who live oceans and deserts away from the United States? How are they recognized in our media, if at all?

6.
Sometimes, the chorus in Greek plays would come onstage by walking down the steps of the amphitheaters, as if they had up until then been a part of the audience. In the same vein, the American men speak from their homeland as well as the theater of war. Their past memories mix with the present moment; the First Sergeant moves in his thoughts between his family in Louisiana and his platoon in Afghanistan. If they can call themselves part of the audience, then should we readers call ourselves part of the chorus?

7.
“It's about as cogent an analysis as anything you'll find about where we are today,” the Lieutenant says to the Captain of Antigone, handing him the play to read. I felt within Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s pages a carefully attuned mind examining and analyzing all sides of the Afghanistani debate, an attitude found less frequently in fiction than in drama. It is a relief to hear it again in this novel, as the boundaries blur between good and bad, between new and old, between audience and actors, between them and us.

image credit: boston.com/bigpicture/

Tin House has an excellent post up with many fantastic writers confessing their pre-writing rituals. From Jim Sherpard’s even numbered emails to Janice Erlbaum’s horse porn, I can’t help but grin at the perfect bedlam of obsessive compulsions and pure superstition in the attempt to drill productivity and inspiration into one’s head. Of course, such habits and rituals can’t help but extend into the day beyond when the writing’s done, so I thought it might be useful to compile a small exposition on how writers behave beyond the desk.

How writers navigate the grocery store. The writer doesn’t know which piece of paper has the grocery list on it. Or there’s more than one list on several different pieces of paper and the stress of finding these pieces of paper is just too much, so the writer proceeds to the store without such a list. The writer chants what he/she believes to be the list in his/her head while wandering the aisles. In the produce section, the writer becomes distracted. Slightly euphoric but nervous. There are items here the writer lusts after that are not on the list. But they are shiny. It is here the writer thinks, "Fuck. Look at this piece of fruit. Nothing I will ever create compares to the perfect beauty of this pomegranate. I can’t even afford pomegranates. Fuck." The list is forgotten and the writer leaves with one can of tuna and tomato paste, loose almonds rattling in the writer’s pocket that he/she has no intention of paying for.

How writers decide which clothes to wear. If the writer is only sitting at a desk and writing, then the writer wears whatever the writer went to bed wearing the night before. If the writer has to go out—to the grocery store, for example—the writer will simply put a coat on over these work-slash-bedclothes. If it is too warm to wear a coat, the writer might go so far as to put on a bra. If the writer has a special occasion, like a night on the town, the writer will apply deodorant and sniff around for a clean shirt with a minimal amount of holes and stains. If the writer has to attend a job interview or a wedding, clothes will be borrowed from a friend.

How writers behave at restaurants. The writer will order a beverage in a prompt manner, knowing beforehand what he/she likes to drink. The writer does not deviate in the selection of beverages, though will order different beverages depending on the time of day. The writer is probably alcoholic. Ordering food is a far more complicated and drawn-out affair. The writer will smile and fall slightly in love with his/her server, as the server quickly becomes the writer’s navigational savior in all matters. It is only when the writer has had too many beverages to see clearly and yet senses the server’s impatience that the writer will beg the server to decide what the writer should eat. The writer will tip extravagantly. If the writer happens to sit at the bar, the writer will not accomplish the task of eating but will stay until the bar closes and then go home with the bartender, whom the writer is now deeply in love with.

image: dria.org

Mid-May through end of June, graduation presents are flung to young people like so many palm fronds under asses’ feet. It's been a while since I've had a successful encounter with an institution of booklearnin', but I remember getting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I finished high school. Never mind that subsequent studies disinclined me to take Pirsig seriously; I read his book when I got it and dreamt of cycling across the plains with nothing but a tent and my meager late-teenage wits.

People like to wrap books up for grads. There's something about it that’s less crass than a sappy card padded with cash or stiffened with an Applebee's gift card. Books enrich, even if they were purchased off a display table with a GIFTS FOR GRADS placard on it. And booksellers love to promote graduation books: they’re part of a spring giving trifecta, along with Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, that gives a major boost to sales. Way back in ’97, Publishers Weekly noted that this growing “holiday-ization” of book sales—employed mostly by chains, but also by your beloved indies—had helped make May and June the best sales months behind the Christmas season.

Which is only natural. We purchase because we love, y’know.

Now, fifteen years after the industry woke up to its own practices, bookshops are bursting with that vanilla version of graduation gifting, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Dr. Suess's book is supposed to be whimsical, apt, indicative. This cynic doesn’t much think OTPYG is much of the latter two, but it does jiggle with whimsy. And cliché. Because (some) folks take graduation as a cultural milestone that suggests a future wide open with potential greatness and achievement. It’s a token way of saying, "You're destined for great things!" And all the while it affirms the aspirations of a generation of egotists assured they will get exactly what they want, cuz they deserve it. (Never mind if we’re all that way from eighteen to twenty-two.)

But let’s talk about the grad on your list. Let’s say you want to let them know that you actually have given some thought to the unique qualities that make them a human being, qualities that will deepen over the course of their life and make them as pleasant and savory as pi dan. In that case, get them a book that fits with those traits! Not one that was intended for five year olds!

If you haven’t given thought to your giftee's unique qualities, don’t despair. The trick is to not aim at producing easy happiness or honing in on whatever they’re enthusiastic about this year; that shit fades. Instead, giveMiddlemarch. Or Moby-Dick. By the time they get around to reading your book (if they ever do), its emotional complexity and portrayal of life's twisted course will make the sweetest sort of sense it can—that it doesn’t have to.

And in the interim, the book's spine will make your loved one look that much more intelligent whenever their houseguests are looking for the bathroom.

Image: flickr user David Bivins

The Millions' Bill Morris may wax poetic on one-word book titles, but I don't love 'em. Irvine Welsh triumphed with his drug-fueled, dialectically impenetrable debut Trainspotting. But then the one-worders kept coming, like a never-ending belch, from Filth and Glue to Crime and the spanking new Skagboys (available to us Yanks in mid-September).

Why? Morris notes “at their best, one-word titles distil content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind.” This suits Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk's Snow, whose austere title foregrounds its melange of political discussions and cultural tensions in a northeast Turkish town. By Morris' reckoning, Snow might be filed under “Place Names That Drip With Atmosphere” or “One Little Word That Sums Up Big Consequences” (a blizzard shuts down the city, sparking dialogues between the narrator and various revolutionaries that nudge the plot to full throttle).

A quick scan of my bookshelves yields another category: made-up words. Jam several novel-related concepts into one tasty idiom, linguistics be damned. Cyberpunk is notorious for this, though I give props to William Gibson's Neuromancer. It's a perfect amalgam for protagonist Case's virtual-reality hackings and...well, the book is totally romantic. Not just razorgirl Molly Millions, but the grimy, metallic, neon future itself. Tokyo on steroids.

Franz Kafka's Amerika deftly encapsulates a young European emigrant's warped stateside wanderings by distorting the title's spelling. This was actually literary executor Max Brod's doing: the working title was Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared). Kafka's other novels, The Trialand The Castle, require their definite articles: the former personalizes Josef K's prosecution and subsequent tribulations—his “trial”—while the latter makes that inaccessible fortress physical to the alienated land surveyor.

This grave importance of “the” and “and” prevents further whittlings down of other titles. I might shorten Fyodor Dostoevsky's final classic The Brothers Karamazov to simply Karamazov, considering the notoriety of that name. As Makarov explains early on: “The whole question of you Karamazovs comes down to this: you're sensualists, money-grubbers, and holy fools!” But Crime and Punishment requires that “and”, balancing cause and effect. LikewiseThe Idiot, as excising that “the” might cast it the way of habitual singularizer Chuck Palahniuk (see: Choke, Rant, Pygmy et al.).

Fine. One-word titles can work, but something must be said for wordy ones. Isn't there charm within Douglas Adams' Britishly prolix The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and—my personal favorite—The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Even the briefest, Mostly Harmless, requires both words for the Guide's cheeky description of Earth. In this sense, Adams' debut “could” be truncated to The Guide, but that pesky “the” is mandatory. It's not justany guide, after all.

Image: courtesy the author

Virgina Woolf lives on in strange ways. She and Leonard Woolf startedHogarth Press in 1917 to publish themselves as well as their colleagues in the Bloomsbury group. Woolf published some of her most radical and explicitly feminist titles, including Mrs. Dalloway, under this aegis. By the 1940s, however, the press was defunct. And now, Lazarus-like, Hogarth has returned, thanks to Chatto & Windus in the UK and Random House in the US. So will this new incarnation, with such a loaded name and history, be able to shine a light on contemporary gender issues the way Virginia Woolf did almost a century ago?

I decided to read the first two books published by the new Hogarth to find out. And, as a male reader, I was surprised by the different ways Anouk Markovits’s I Am Forbidden and Stephanie Reents’s The Kissing List illuminated the experience of being female in our time.

I Am Forbidden is the story of two sisters within one of the most deeply Orthodox sects of Hasidic Judaism, Satmar. In this world, religion dictates which books they may read, which men are qualified to marry them, when they are permitted to have intercourse. As one sister decides to leave the fold, I waited for the author to take sides. But Markovits does not choose; she simply tells the story of both sisters, focusing on the complications and strains of each path. How can a barren Satmar woman ever hope to bear children if her husband is not permitted to spill seed outside her body, even for the medical tests that could determine the cause of their infertility? Somehow, Markovits is able to show how each character’s outlook prevents her from accepting the facile solutions I might have offered as an uninformed outsider. If fiction is about helping us understand other people, Markovits has succeeded brilliantly.

The Kissing List, on the other hand, is wholly urbane, following a group of four girls through years and cities in a set of linked stories. Like a Sex and the City for twentysomethings fresh out of college, the stories circle around failed relationships, imperfect jobs, and the enduring value of friendship. In each story Reents adopts a different style, from straight first-person narration to email memos and multiple-choice questions. Virginia Woolf would have applauded both their sexual freedom and Reents's stylistic liberties, but I finished the book confused by how these women couldn’t solve their own problems. They were self-made, yes, but they hadn’t found a stance to champion. "Is this what it’s like to be a female today?" I asked a few of my girl friends. I hoped my befuddlement wasn't just due to differences in plumbing. Sadly, they all nodded.

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf discusses androgyny in the mind of the author: “it transmits emotion without impediment...it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” I may have seen that incandescence more clearly in I Am Forbidden than in The Kissing List, but the fact that these books breathe new life into these questions makes me optimistic for the future of Hogarth Press.

image credits, L to R: modernlitclub.blogspot.com; goodreads.com; goodreads.com

Something weighing you down? Why don't you come to Ayn Rand for help?

It may help you more than all those self-help books you got after graduating.

Though if one of those books happened to have a one-word title, you may want to give it a second chance.

Just don't go and feel entitled when your self-published one-word title fails to become a bestseller.

You don't want to find yourself turning into a psychotic fictional character over the ordeal.

Just try to calm down, perhaps by turning on some disco?

Don't be ashamed. Afterall, all writers have their own particular quirks.

Dan Brown's quirks are so hard-wired into his system that it can be explained via a handy flowchart.

Image source: USA Today

A recent Brain Pickings post on Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published children’s book, To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, has sent me on a journey to nonsense. Or rather, it has revived a kind of determination to spread an enthusiasm for reading with your guts and heart, not just your head.

In a press release for her first children’s book, Stein wrote something that could just as easily be applied to her grownup fiction:

Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words.

Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster. If you

have any trouble, read faster and faster until you don’t.

While it’s easier to calibrate your expectations of deliberately nonsensical writing, e.g. Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, reading for purposes other than understanding gets tricky in other areas. At least, in my mind, readers often resist writing that doesn't immediately make sense, that proceeds with a certain tension-filled ambiguity.

Last week, I came across an htmlgiant post that might be useful in terms of articulating a purpose for reading other than understanding. Before recommending five works of theory (touching upon such topics as "interassemblage haecceities"), Christopher Higgs writes:   

I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction,

which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate...

I read theory and fiction and poetry to experience, to consider, to become

other, to shift, to mutate, to change. I most certainly do not read those things

to understand them.

I was reminded of the first time I encountered Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan in an undergraduate literary theory course (which yes, meant that I was reading in order to understand what was being written). Part of my absolute joy at reading theory was the complete tizzy my head went through in its attempts to grasp or even contain the expanse of the ideas written down. The joy, for me, was the experience of reading it. At times I barely thought my feet were touching ground. In the end, I believe I understood less. And this is wonderful.

My point is not to bash understanding or encourage everyone to smoke pot and listen to whale sounds. I mean, go ahead and all, but what I’d like to promote here is an experience of reading that doesn’t insist on pinning something down. Do not be afraid. Try not to read with the goal of saying “Aha! I get it!” when you’re finished. Allow for uncertainty, for ambiguity, for mystery that resonates beyond the page. Let your senses experience a truth your mind can't get a handle on.

This is also not to encourage laziness; quite the contrary. This is to encourage a kind of pleasure in the sound of words and the power of words to bring you to an unrecognized place.

Don't bother about the commas.

image: guardian.co.uk

Old books! They smell so great! And they’re amazing aide mémoires! My old copy of Ulysses is not so easily coaxed into Wordle manipulation, but it’s got sand from Costa Rican beaches in the splitting glue of its spine, buttery fingerprints on its pages from being read while I ate croissants, and lots of embarrassing underlining, circling, and marginal “insights.” 

When you read other people’s old books, you get a similar window into their habits and states of mind. Another example from my shelves: an edition of Beckett’s short prose contained a handwritten note from one stranger to another. I know nothing about them—well, not nothing: one wrote with an exceptional hand and could doodle well. The other was named Tom.

But marginalia’s serendipitous discoveries are made possible only because modern books, codices, are more than merely the information they contain; they are also objects. With eBooks, objecthood becomes problematic. Insofar as they “exist” at all, eBooks are hardly objects. They’re an arrangement of bits on a storage device, hardly dissociable from the device the presents it. And, as we now know, eBooks can be taken from you without someone breaking into your apartment. Notes and highlightings you make on your device aren't really yours to keep, either.

None of this is new anymore. Neither is there much to be done about it, on the broad scale: eReaders and eBooks are here to stay. And the medium is not even a bad one, in and of itself. If we could resolve the privacy issues (when pigs fly), or deal justly with the monetization of your “private” habits (pigs don’t absolutely have to fly for that one, though it is unlikely), some of the data produced could be interesting to future historians studying the tastes of eReader users. Hint: as of today, Kindle-types really liked these sentences, and you can bet that Amazon is keeping records on it all.

But whither the trade in used books as the dominance of the codex withers? The pass-along book trade has never been popular with publishers. It has been seen as a loss of profits, quantified in a way much like the ridiculous amounts estimated to be lost on account of music piracy. (Protip accountant dudes: if consumers don’t have the money, in aggregate, to complete sales “lost” to piracy, those sales weren’t gonna happen in the first place!) So don’t expect a pass-along feature to be built into eBooks any time soon. Which means used bookstores will have to come up with a way to save themselves.

Perhaps they are doomed to employ twee, quirky efforts like Record Store Day. Perhaps we’ll see a Codex Day in the future, when small-run, high-value editions are acquired by ostentatiously self-fashioning consumers.

Perhaps (we might hope) said consumeristas will even leave sticky fingerprints all over their new objects.

Image: flickr user andy54321