Vino, sentimiento, guitarra y poesía
hacen los cantares de la patria mía.
Cantares…
Quien dice cantares dice Andalucía.All experience is "lived." The added adjective is tendentious, as though to say that this particular way of seeing experiencing is sacrosanct. "Lived" puts a kind of frame around the word, a halo of reverence.
So the narrator, we don't know his name, but he lost his sister when the sister was twelve, he fifteen. He marries his wife, Yuzu, in part because he reminds him of the dead sister. He gets claustrophobia after seeing the sister in the coffin.
The wife leaves him, and is involved with other men. The narrator wanders a bit, stops being a portrait painter, and then goes to live in the house of a painter who has dementia and is now in an institution. This is where he finds the Don Giovanni painting, painted by the painter with dementia. A man, with a youthful face but white hair offers him a great sum of money to paint his portrait, and he agrees. But meanwhile he hears, at night, a bell ringing on the property. He goes outside and finds the ruins of some kind of temple. The rich man hires someone to help dig up the ruins, and they find an antique bell. Some kind of spirit has been ringing the bell, of a Buddhist monk (monjo).
So the mystery of the painting, and the mystery of the bell. All these talismanic objects found in the house. The rich man might have a daughter (paternity is unclear) who is about the age the narrator's sister was when she died. Does the rich man have some hidden motive?
I find the narrator telegraphing the sense of mysteriousness in a somewhat contrived way. We have two unexplained objects. There is some idea that the painter with dementia spent time in Austria in the 1930s, and so there is some Nazi theme that's going to enter. They are constantly listening the Germanic music, left there by the elder painter.
I'm eager to see how it will pull all together: the incest theme with the Don Juan archetype and the historical guilt.
In terms of the Catalan, the language has not disappeared for me yet. I still am seeing the language, not seeing through it. Maybe that's why I like reading in this language? Unlike other people (some other people) I like looking at language, not just through it. This harder to do the more one knows the language.
The novel by Murakami is the Death of the Comendador. The painting that appears in the novel is a scene, painted in a Japanese style, of a scene from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. This opera is adapted from the Spanish of Tirso de Molina (El burlador de Sevilla) and features the Don Juan archetype. The narrator of the novel is a painter, who finds this painting and begins to study; he starts copying it in pencil sketches. Unlike the Japanese painter he is imitating, the narrator is a Western style painter, so this is a work of adaptation or translation:
No es pot dir que fos una feina d’«adaptació», però sí que havia d’interpretar el quadre i «traduir-lo» a la meva manera, i per fer-ho primer havia de copsar la intenció que hi havia en el quadre original. Dit d’una altra manera, jo poc o molt—havia d’entendre el punt de vista d’en Tomohiko Amada com a pintor o la seva manera de ser com a persona. Fent servir una metàfora, havia de ficar els peus a les seves sabates.
Murakami, Haruki. La mort del comanador 1 (Catalan Edition) (p. 99). Grup 62. Kindle Edition.
You can't say it was a work of adaptation, but that I had to interpret the painting, translate in my own way, and to do it first I had to capture the intention that was in the original painting. Put another way, I a little bit or a lot, had to understand the point of view of Tomoiko Amada as a painter or his way of being as a person. To use a metaphor, I had to put my feet in his shoes.
My internet wasn't working too well. I got new router, then a new modem. It still wasn't working well, so they fixed the wiring into my apartment. I was nervous because I was going to give a zoom talk, but, ironically enough, the talk went great from my end, but the host was doing internet from home and could not be heard in her introduction of me. I spent more money on the equipment than I was paid for the talk.
Then, this morning, it cut out again, and I didn't have it most of the day. The technician came, and said the outside wiring needs work, so that will be done tomorrow. Then, we will have replaced my equipment, the inside and outside wiring. I'm quite sure another problem with the connection will arise after that.
I notice that the colleague is on a panel about how to be a public intellectual. I just reread her piece on Tolstoi and "me too." I just don't get it. Apparently Tolstoy is a "gender theorist."
