Beck, performing "Modern Guilt" in Los Angeles (June 9, 2008):

It's hard to know where the little flakes of white ash are from--trees, houses, fields? They have been slowly falling since yesterday and again today. They pretty much vanish when they hit the ground, but there are minor accumulations in the curb gutters and even in the green and yellow (dead) lawns. It was supposed to be 110 to 115 yesterday, but the fire clouds blocked the sun enough for us to be at a less unpleasant 104. A co-worker drove home early yesterday in the event that she might have to evacuate her home once again--fires have been going on for over a month here in Butte County. She called the office to tell us that she had gone to the hospital to pick up some air masks for her family of four people, but the officials explained that she could only have two free masks. She explained to them that she had two children, to which the official responded, "Well, they're too large for children, really, anyway."

Watched:

Semi-Pro
Interview

Semi-Pro contains extremely tired writing, with Farrell sleep-walking through the movie with his usual character traits: oblivious and obnoxious.

Interview contains perhaps the most contrived romantic setup seen in some time. That Buscemi actually wrote this and then didn't tear it up is pretty unsettling. Both Miller and Buscemi can act, but this is dismal stuff.

Of special importance for both movies: the fast-forward button on the remote control.

*

We will try again, with The Page Turner.

Clayton Eshleman, the major translator and co-translator of César Vallejo's Trilce made some comments here about translating. Within the comments he says:

"I do not believe in so-called “free translations,” Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” or homophonic translations (with the exception of the Zukofskys’ rendering of Catullus). I see the poet-translator as being in the service of the original, not attempting to improve on it or to outwit it.

By adding to, subtracting from, and/or re-phrasing the original, the translator implies that he knows more than the original text does, that, in effect, his mind is superior to its mind. The “native” text becomes raw material for the colonizer-translator to educate and to re-form in a way that ends up instructing the reader to believe that the foreign poet is aping our literary conventions. All translations are, in varying degrees, specters or emanations. Spectral translations haunt us with the loss of the original; before them, facing the translator’s inabilities or hubris, we feel that the original has been sucked into a smaller, less effective size. Like ghosts, such translations painfully remind us to what extent the dead are absent. Emanational translations, on the other hand, are what can be made of the original poet’s vision; while they are seldom more potent than their prototypes, good ones hold their own against the prototype and they bring it across as an injection of fresh poetic character into the literature of the second language."

*

I can't stomach the assumptions being made above, mainly because I am one of those non-Zukofsky homophonic translators. The difference between other homophonic translators and the Zukofskys is not even explained--why are the Zukofskys extended an olive branch? I find the above insinuations ridiculous, actually--that because I decided to translate a work the way I sought fit, that I am somehow trying to outwit it, or worse, more personally, trying to outwit the author, Vallejo. I have never had that thought in my head--that's purely an Eshlemanian concoction. I was never trying to outwit Vallejo. I don't even know what that would mean. My interests were in meeting at the sounded fields between languages, in the dissonance, in the breaking down, in my own inhabitations, my cohabitations with the text. I wanted to give voice to the forays my mind makes, however tangled and smooth, and to do this by using a method that most closely matched what my mind tends to do by itself. And nowhere do I suggest that I know more than Vallejo, or more than his text does, by simply engaging with a text differently than Eshleman does. It is not only the translator who is dealing with spectral translations, but the original author as well. I don't see the homophonic translator as performing some obscene, unholy surgery on a "pure" text. I don't believe in "pure" texts. I see Vallejo's Trilce as a translation itself, of all the nebulae of his life and surroundings, using a language he was born into, or imprisoned into, to explain it. I see, in my case, someone deeply interested in Vallejo's writing and his life, by extension, and who has benifited from the various English translations available, the chief among them Eshleman's. Finally, I'm really tired of the "colonizer" metaphor being applied to writing. Someone should hand out tickets for these types of things, for such erroneous and overly dramatic uses of metaphors.