Dated

I am watching these jazz videos while I do other work.  Black and white footage of the musicians all wearing suits in the 1950s looks good. Colored footage of the early 80s, with musicians wearing casual clothes in mismatched colors and long hair (on men) looks very dated.  Something much older still looks stylish, whereas the late 70s early 80s style looks horrific (to my eyes).  This is really the nadir of men's fashion.  My own admittedly biased value judgements aside, the paradox here is that something more recent can seem more "dated." Perhaps the effort to appear more contemporary backfires, because that contemporary style is more ephemeral?  

I'm watching one now with Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck with Paul Desmond. Brubeck has these bellbottom plaid pants and a green shirt with a weird collar. His brown belt is worn high above his hips, old man style.  Paul Desmond at least has a suit on, though I don't care for his orange tie. The drummer has a bright red shirt and purplish pants.  

The music, of course, is great.  

[UPDATE: It is actually from 1971. I was way off.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcMPxonimUo

Hallmarks of a certain style of translation

 I'm not saying it's bad, but it's bad for me.  It might be bad for you too. If you turned all this inside out, you'd get what I think of as "good" translation. (A lot of my thinking here is based on Antoine Berman, as applied by me to the translation of the Suites by Jerome R.)

1.  It's "creative," but its creativity tends not to produce anything of actually creative value. The translator feels the need to "show his work," by putting in things irrelevant to the original.    

2. It adds and subtracts.  It tends to be wordier, more pleonastic and redundant than the original (do you see what I've done there?), but also inexplicably leaves things out. Rothenberg, for example, will often leave off the definite article when both Spanish and English need it idiomatically.  We would say "The river is high," not "River is high." 

3. It is unidiomatic in the target language, but often not in any way that serves the original either. 

4. It obscures the structure of the original. It has enjambment that seems gratuitous, for example. Couplets will become tercets.  

5.  It is not a respecter of tropes. If the original uses chiasmus or asyndeton, the translation will simply ignore the tropes and translate the meaning. 

6. It is insensitive to the poetics of the original.  It standardizes everything, makes everything sound the same.  

7. It lack real conviction or consistency.  

8. It justifies a lot of this by appeals to sophisticated theories of translation.  Any complaints will be dismissed as an adherence to outmoded theories, excessive literalism, or the denial of the rights of the translator to be "creative" or "free."  The translator might cite Walter Benjamin or Lawrence Venuti.  

Sure, translation theory is valuable and interesting in its own right, but there is not one overarching theory that should govern all practices.  

I wrote this poem in a dream:   

Clean beneath the desk!  

I'll arouse reminiscences

 Saying Goodbye

I will be saying goodbye

at the crossroads,

heading off down that road

through my soul.

I'll arouse reminiscences,

stir up mean hours.

I'll arrive at the garden spot

in my song (my tiny white song),

& I'll start in to shiver & shake

like the morning star. 

I've italicized the elements Rothenberg introduces here that might be seen as redundant, or absent in the original, of this poem from Lorca's Suites.  Every decision seems to lead towards a greater wordiness. It's as though the translator had forgotten English. Who says "start in to..." instead of "start to"?  Or "arouse reminiscences" instead of "awakening memories"?  The future progress is really weird here: "I will be saying goodbye."  Who talks like that?  

Exceptions to the prosodic rules

 Suppose there is an exception to the rule that strong metrical beats will fall on beats 1 or 3.  

For example, I found in a Taylor Swift song a phrase in which there is a strong beat on 1 2 3 4 of a single measure. Or you could anticipate a beat, singing it on the and of 4 of the previous measure, or delay an emphasis to later in the measure.  

A subsidiary of this rule would be that breaking it involves syncopation or a special kind of phrasing.  The breaking of the rule is felt to be different. In practice, where the accent fall is more fluid, but that does not prevent 1 and 3 from being the strong beats in principle.  

I'm not quite sure what to do with the practice of certain vernaculars in which the 2 and 4 receive emphasis.  For example, you don't clap your hand of snap your fingers on 1 and 3 in gospel or jazz. A jazz player will set a metronome, but treat that as a hi hat, on 2 and 4, not as a downbeat.  

 I would say that they are still the 2 and 4: otherwise they would just be the 1 and 3!  

enjambment in Lorca: a hypothesis

 Here's my hypothesis.  Lorca is a poet attuned to song, and there is no enjambment in song. He will enjamb, but not in a way that affects the (hypothetical) musical phrase. In this example, the enjambments occur between stanzas, and each stanza is a phrase.  Leaving aside the refrain, we have rhyme with the last words of each stanza, first volver, amanecer, ayer, and then retornar, manantial, mar.  The enjambment is emphatic, but doesn't interfere with the intonational phrase.  Groups of two or three lines form single phrases.  Stanzas of four are binary, with two groups of two.  

    Yo vuelvo

    por mis alas.

    

¡Dejadme volver!

¡Quiero morirme siendo

amanecer!

    Yo vuelvo 

    por mis alas.

¡Quiero morirme siendo

ayer!

    Yo vuelvo 

    por mis alas.

¡Dejadme retornar!

Quiero morirme siendo

manantial.

Quiero morirme fuera

de la mar. 

A dream the night before classes start

 I was to perform at some literary event, and had no idea what to do. I was holding a large book in my hand. I had a few ideas, but the other performers went before me and I had forgotten what I was going to do. So when my turn came, I began a monologue, which I improvised almost perfectly, with no ers or ups or hesitations, something like

"Once  upon a time there was a man with a book. He carried it everywhere he went, and it became associated with him like a hat or cigarette with certain film characters. He didn't always read it, but he always had it with him. I don't mean to imply that he didn't read it. At times he would read entire 50 page chunks of it at one sitting...."  

I woke up and then the dialogue could not continue.