sunny side up + pico

Breakfast / lunch yesterday and today was like huevos rancheros but without tortillas. I made two eggs sunny side up and covered them with homemade pico de gallo, which I didn't heat up, because why would you heat up pico de gallo? My pico has tomatoes, onions, jalapeños, cilantro, salt, pepper, red wine vinegar. I spooned it on the eggs with a fork so as not to have too much liquid. One of the tomatoes was yellow so it gave a nice multicolored approach to the dish.   
 

Yau v Weinberger

 I was looking up Weinberger and came across his response to a review by John Yau of his (Weinberger's) anthology of poetry in 1994. The anthology itself seems absurd, with a negligible number of women, for example, and the inclusion of the awful Rexroth Mariko poems. Yau critique is also absurd, wanting Weinberger to have included oddly specific things, like Gertrude Stein, who wrote nothing after 1950 (Weinberger's cut off date.) Weinberger's response is also over the top, calling Yau a "scumbag" and pointing out that Yau as art critic is mostly concerned with white painters, etc... 

It seems to be a case of a gunfight between blind men. Each is blinded by his own biases, despite the fact that they are virtually in the same club. For example, Yau criticizes the inclusions of too many writers associated with Sulfur, and EW points out that Yau himself was associate editor of this journal for 8 years. Weinberger attended Yau's wedding, etc... 

A few others pipe up to defend Weinberger, and Yau answers their critiques also. 

The victims of this gun fight of the blind are everyone else, everyone who wants a more reasonable perspective. Yet the revisiting of these polemics is salutary and amusing.  

Arevolo

I used to buy these cassettes of jokes by the Spanish comic Arévolo. That kind of dates me.   

One of them has a little boy saying "'Franco is an idiot. Franco is an idiot." The Guardia Civil stops him and says you can't say that! The little boy says there are a lot of people named Franco!  The Guardia Civil says, "Yes, but only one of them is an idiot!"  

He had jokes about "pasotas" or people were super cool and just said "I pass..." opting out of everything. Gangosos, or people with twangy voices, and some jokes about gays too that haven't aged very well. 

A gangoso is in the police station, and asks why there are pictures on the wall? They explain that those are the most wanted, the people they are looking to arrest. The gangoso say: 'why didn't you arrest them when you were taking their pictures?"  

It was a challenging to understand the jokes and the difference voices that he did. Often times I would understand the entire joke but not be able to hear the punch line. 

Foreignizing

 Maybe people like non-idiomatic translations because they make it seem like they are experiencing something different and foreign. After all, there is a whole movement in translation toward foreignizing translations, with the idea that "domesticating" is suspect.  

But the supposedly foreign element often has no real relation to the source text.  Awkwardly switching between singular and plural or mixing up transitive and untransitive verbs has nothing to do with the Chinese language. They are often just translation by-products, accidental effects produced by the process of translation itself.  

Idiomatic

 I think A.C. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang is a landmark of a sort. It was reprinted as a New York Review of Books classic. I return constantly to this book with renewed interest. 

I do wonder about the rather unidiomatic quality of the English:

Sadness at the hairs in the mirror is new no longer,

The stains of my coat are harder to brush away.

I waste my hopes by river and lakes, a fishing rod in the hand

Which screens me from the Western sunlight as I look towards Ch'ang-an. 

Nothing says "translation" like translationese, or phrases that sound like an attempt to get at something in the original by twisting around the target language. But the twisting here has nothing to do with the original, I would hazard to guess. A lot of it is in the little words, like the and my, that aren't even in the original, and in the capricious use of singular / plural nouns.  

The first line sounds bizarre, but the second sounds normal, though we don't typically brush a stain away on clothing.

 The translator wants to avoid the first person pronoun in the first line, but not in the second. Why? The idea seems to be that, looking in the mirror, I'm no longer surprised by the white hair of the man I see there. Why is the word hair in the plural? (Chinese doesn't have number in nouns.) Why "river and lakes" instead of "river and lakes"?  Is there just one river and multiple lakes? That seems oddly specific. Why "the hand" rather than "my hand" or 'in hand"?  I have a hard time picturing how a fishing rod, typically a thin object, can shade one's eyes from the bright sunset. The verb screen suggests an object of a different shape. "I waste my hopes" is not horrible, but not particularly idiomatic either.  

There is no consistent voice that emerges, no consistency in stylistic choices. 

More jokes

 I'm kind of interested in the structure of jokes. Here are a few I've seen recently:

The KBG knocks and a guy answers the door. "Does Rabinovitz live here?"  "No." Who are you then?" "Rabinovitz."I thought you said you don't live here?"  "You call this living?"

In the gulag, some guys are talking about why they were sentenced. 

"I got 10 years for defending [insert Russian name]

I got 15 years for attacking [same Russian name.]

I am [same Russian name.]

A drunk in a bar shouts:  all the people on the left hand side of the bars are idiots, and all those on the right are motherfuckers.  A guy stands up and says, hey I'm not a motherfucker! and the drunk shouts back, then go to the other side of the bar!  

The joke has to work by misdirection, but the punch line still has to follow logically, just go in another direction.  

Sunflower Squalor

 My aunt and her collaborator used this title to refer to Sunflower Splendor.  This is a 1000 poem anthology from the 70s whose translators were scholars, not poets. The book itself is physically repulsive. There are no sunflowers in Chinese poetry.  The translations by Chinese professors (Professors of Chinese, who may or may not be Chinese) are just kind of clunky.   

The tradition of translating from Chinese poetically starts with Wale, Pound, and Bynner and goes through Rexroth and Snyder and Merwin. There is a confluence between modernist poetics and Chinese and Japanese poetry, with the imagist movement. In other words, our idea of good poetry, inherited from the imagists, is a lot of concrete imagery in economical language. 

Chinese poetry is written in rhyme in lines of 5 or 7 monosyllabic words, with complex prosodic rules that nobody cares about in English.  Usually, American translations do not rhyme and downplay parallelism. It's kind of the opposite of English haiku, where people know how many syllables there are (even though the units in question are not really syllables).  

A few other Howe stories

 There's another one about a man whose two ex-wives still live with him and his current wife. Another woman attempts to break into the group and is rebuffed. She is a bad poet writing formalist verse and the three wives mock her poetry. The man rebuffs the new woman and then she writes a poem that's in free verse and rather surrealist. 

A young black man steals a young white woman's purse. Later, they meet through mutual friends and develop a relationship. He sees her as a ticket to improve his life. 

A woman and her estranged husband have to endure a time-share pitch in order to get a prize. They are working class and the prize is a cheap computer, not the Cadillac they wanted. 

A man reflects back on a woman he met when he was 19 and she was 13. He foolishly promised to marry her when she was older. They drift apart and he marries someone else, and she puts a curse on the marriage, making it fall apart. There are many other things that happen over the years, and finally, when he does want her, she is going to go to a convent. The story ends with the idea that meaning of a story is not in its end, but in its middle.   

One, "The Cold War," I don't really understand. Some people are in Ireland and have a random conversation.  

One about two women, they were liberals together in the 60s, working on RFK's campaign. One, now on welfare, visits the other in Boston after many years, and asks her now wealthier friend for $1000 for medical care for her son. She says no, and doesn't even ask what child's medical condition is.  She thinks to herself that the poor deserve to be poor. 

A secretary is asked to research a mistakenly changed grade. She defines herself as an "office slave" and has some understanding of Marxism. She is eager to please the professor and ends up finding a sordid tale of sexual harassment.    

 

Fanny Howe

 Fanny Howe died last week or around then. She is the sister of Susan Howe, another prominent poet. I am a devoted reader of her work, as my bookshelves attest. Her books of short stories Economics is brutal. The first story, "The Weather," is about a white couple adopting a black child, and it starts off without pulling any punches:   The white couple who adopted the black child was not happy with what they got."  Things go down hill from there. The couple is "socially aware," ostensibly non-racist enough to adopt the kid, but in the end just flat out racist both in their motivations and in their behavior. 

Normally I don't even like morality tales like this, but this one is breathtaking. The contrast between the "social justice" advocated and the actual results is chilling. Every detail in the story is a motivated sign, nothing is arbitrary. Their dog is named Mozart. The mother never bonds with the black male baby she gets, as a kind of pet for their daughter Jessica, and turns the care over to the father, who did not really want the kid either. She only brings the baby to events "involving the issue of race." Malcolm (a name she would never give to a white child) is a kind of virtue signaling accessory. She goes to a therapist to discuss her lack of maternal love. She blames Boston, as a racist town, for what is essentially her own racism. She contemplates divorce, with custody given to the father.  

Now she begins tormenting Malcolm when nobody else is around. He develops a skin condition which the family treats ineffectively.  The family is going to move to California, and it gradually becomes clear that Malcolm is not going to go with them. They lie to Jessica and tell her Malcolm is going to be with is "real mother." 

It becomes clear at some point that the story takes place when busing began in Boston.   

This was the only story I remembered when I took the book off the shelf. I read the second and don't recall it.  

Peach cave

 There is a Chinese poem, maybe more than one but I am thinking of one by Wang Wei, https://www.cn-poetry.com/wangwei-poems/peach-blossom-journey.html based on a legend of a fisherman who finds a cave on a river bank, with peach blossoms falling into the water and entrancing him. He goes into the cave and finds people who have old fashioned clothes and speak an old fashioned dialect. They are peaceful farmers and welcome him warmly.  Apparently they took refuge in this hidden part of the world many years ago, escaping some war or political turmoil, and haven't had contact with the outside world. The fisherman stays a while, but eventually decides to go back. His idea is that he can find the entrance to the cave again. But the landscape shifts shape and he can never find it again. 

The poem takes you to this place. The poem itself is that place. Poetry itself is this world where you can go. The poignancy is in the idea that the return is impossible. The poem can be read again, though. 

The world where the community lives is not magical in and of itself. The people living there are just normal farmers. The magic is in the separation from the outside world, and nothing more. The old fashioned garb and language suggests a kind of nostalgia or quaintness, with an element of time travel. The Qin dynasty is 221 BCE, and the legend arises 500 years later, and is still alluded to centuries after that, in the Tang dynasty.  

The magic portal is one that can be found, in theory. It seems both magical and literally possible at the same time. The shifting landscape is literally possible as well: rivers change their course over the years and human memory is fallible. Peaches actually exist, and the blossoms of the tree might fall into a river, but peaches also symbolize immortality.  

Chinese poetry is all about state craft and war. The poets are government functionaries, and the examination to be a functionary consists of writing poems. Even a recluse fishing in a river in a little boat is likely to be a retired mandarin, or perhaps one who has fallen out of favor. There's one poem where someone wonders whether he can afford to be a recluse, so it is more like voluntary austerity, not impoverishment. 

Maybe the magic, then, is the escape from political turmoil.  In some versions of the legend, the farmers live in peace and "pay no taxes." Utopia is just normal life, then, kind of like how Tolkien envisions the Shire, self-sufficient and peaceful.  

There's another few poems that allude to this:

A bridge flies away through the wild mist,

Yet here are the rocks and the fisherman's boat. 

Oh, if only this river of floating peach-petals

Might lead me at last to the mythical cave!

(Chang Hsu)

Though you think to return to this maze of mountains,

Oh, let them brim your heart with wonder!

Remember the fisherman from Wu-Ling

Who had only a day in the Peach-Blossom Country. 

(Pai Ti) 

The story could have a thousand variations, depending on how the emphasis falls. This is how I envision poetic thinking. That the poem draws you in with a particular kind of cognition that is not exactly like anything else. It reminds me of my idea about music: that it evokes another reality, something that belongs to another world, but that its magical quality is that it does so in our own world.  

Weinberger

 I looked again the Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. I think he is a little unfair with Witter Bynner and some of the other earlier translators, maybe too indulgent with O. Paz, who is also a co-writer of the book. He is right that Snyder's version is great; he is a bit too indulgent with Rexroth. He is harsh with Bill McNaughton, who translated several books with Lenore Mayhew, my aunt.  Maybe his version could have done with some more Mayhew influence, since this particular translation is signed by Bill alone.  

Sapir (2)

 Sapir is not actually Whorfian (in this early, 1933, essay on language.). He points out that both culture and language change, but at different rates of speed. So if a language and a culture are in synch, this will change as culture changes faster than language does. I will have to figure out at what point he becomes associated with the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis."  

His reflections on the relation between culture and language are very sensible and not at all deterministic. It is not the structure of language that is cultural, but the actual content.   

Sapir

 I've been reading Sapir with an open mind. It is important to understand something before criticizing it. I'm not so interested in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in itself, but with the implicit understanding of language that underlies a particular approach to language and culture.  

HIs first idea is that language is "perfect" as the means of cultural expression in any given culture, the "perfect symbolism of experience." Secondly, language is expressive and not merely referential.  For the native speaker, things have the names they ought to have. There is no real separation between language and experience because all experience, or imagined experience, is verbalized. The same word or phrase can have variable meanings depending on the tone of voice, the context, etc.... 

This is almost like the actor's intuition that we can say "Thanks" different ways to mean different things: sincerely grateful, sarcastic, perfunctory, dismissive, enthusiastic, doubtful, relieved... Pragmatics are more significant than the semantic meaning of the word. 

[The opposite perspective: language is arbitrary, not felt to be "perfect." Experience can be essentially non-verbal. Words are inadequate to express fundamental aspects of experience. I don't think there is a convincing refutation of the idea that language is expressive and not merely semantic.]

Dementia

 I'm having a hard time having lost my sister to dementia last summer (after a long time, after she was diagnosed still in her 50s) and now going back and seeing my mother with some of the same symptoms, and a rapid decline from last summer and Dec. of 2024.  It's manifesting itself in the same way as my sister 13 years ago, with a lot of problems with names and nouns, specifically, which is symptomatic of semantic dementia (my sister's ailment) rather than of classic Alzheimer's.  I cannot make the diagnosis myself, but I am dreading the inevitable decline that I will be seeing on my next visit. I think these things go in one direction only, getting worse and never better. The only variability is the speed of the decline, and that is not looking good either.  Everyone in my family (so far) dies long, protracted deaths. After my mom it will only be my brother and I left.  

Poem on a Misremembered Line of Frank O'Hara

At the bottom of my heart is some kind of bugle

or cymbal with surprisingly dark resonance

the cymbal brews me a cup of an herbal concoction

now I am in the room where the tea is being brewed

its aromas mingling with the textures of upholstery

instead of this echo chamber being in my heart, I am in it

the room is in a world, the real world in fact

I could go outside, greet the textures of the day

I am in this room now, my heart inside me

and at the bottom of my heart some kind of bugle again

this is what I think of stepping into the shower

remembering O'Hara's bugle but forgetting why he put it there


****

I found this poem on my blog from 2018.  I don't remember writing it.  The actual line is "At the bottom of the dump there is some sort of bugle."  

Uncle Frank

 I used to go this Chinese restaurant in St. Louis.  There was a server there who was an Anglo guy, who always reminded me of my Uncle Frank, the husband of my dad's oldest sister.   I went in there once several years later, and the owner told me that"Frank," (my uncle's doppleganger)  had died. 

Anti-joke

 Why did the kangaroo drive through the intersection?  

The light was green.   

10% of the brain

 I met a friend of a friend at a party who writes new-agey self-help books that are quite successful. One opens with the idea that we only use 10% of our brains, a very easily debunkable claim. 

On Andrew Gelman's blog, it is discussed that someone reported a chess player can burn 6,000 calories a day by playing chess. Once again, easily disproven.  

My work

 My work is "foundational and inspiring" according to a leading Lorca scholar whom I respect a lot (private message to me). I can live off of that compliment for months.