Catching Up: Der Nister, and more books

Illness, family obligations, and miscellaneous dramas have limited my time and energy for writing. Here are some quick updates:

Der Nister

The first of my Der Nister translations to be published is "Walking," my translation of the story "Geyendik." I've been able to trace the story's bibliography to the 1929 Kiev edition of Gedakht; if anyone knows of earlier appearances, please share the bibliographic information. Its appearance is thanks to the excellent Samovar project by Strange Horizons. You can read my translation here, and if you have Yiddish, here is the original text.

There is even more exciting Der Nister publication news pending, but I have to keep it embargoed for now.

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Other People's Books

I have continued my project of reading books off my shelves that are as-yet-unread by me. (Some days, it was all I had the energy for.) These are the ones that I consider worth commenting on, for reasons good or bad:

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon did not come to my attention until The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which I loved. Since I read it, I have made a point of buying any copy I encounter of one of his books, even if I do not immediately have time to read it. So this is one of those books that I did not read until well after seemingly all my friends--the Jews, the lefties, the queers, the comic book nerds, and the overlapping intersections of those sets--had read it and loved it. If you are a member of any of those sets, then you will probably like it, though the strongest correlation for loving it appears to be an appreciation for comic books, which are not my thing. Chabon's loving descriptions of its evolution as an art form, through the actions of his fictional characters and the cameos of their historical counterparts, left me with more appreciation for it. The fictional comics penned by the characters that I wish were real, so I could read them, are Luna Moth, the Citizen Kane-inspired pre-war editions of The Escapist, and various works by Rose Saxon.

Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello. Coelho is an author who, when I hear third-party descriptions of his works, I think, "I should read him." Fabulist, literate, etc. My delay had largely to do with the fact that Portuguese is one of my languages, and I tend to be undecided about reading works in translation when it is theoretically possible for me to read the book in the original. Apparently, I should not have worried about it, since if his other novels are anything like this one, he is a waste of time, in English or Portuguese. I'll sum up why in two words: Mystical gypsies. (Yes, that is the word he uses.)

Charles Dickens, Hard Times. Forced high school readings of Dickens' most popular books--Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and, egad, Oliver Twist--ruined him for me well into my twenties. We have a fair amount of Dickens on our shelves because my wife, at an earlier time of her life, aspired to become a scholar of Victorian literature. So from time to time, I resolve to give his lesser known works a chance. Previously, with his collected short fiction, and with Bleak House, the resolution has been worth it. Bleak House, in particular, I suspect may be one of the best English-language novels of the 19th century. But Hard Times, though worth reading for its almost Engelsian depiction of "the condition of the working class in England," is not, overall, a good novel. It has a message, and every character interaction must bend before its implacability. And that message is awful. It boils down to, "Hey, um, fellow rich people--maybe we should teach the poor some feeble sentimentalism, because if they get as calculating as we are, they might decide to eat us."

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. This is a painfully sharp, fact-based novella by one Egypt's best known feminists. Content warnings: FGM, CSA, rape, sex work, and murder, but the murder is the least offensive part because it's a pimp who gets killed.

Seeing Ramallah

Can poets be great prose writers? Can a writer's quality be judged in translation? After having read I Saw Ramallah by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, my answer to the first question is, "Why not?" And to the second, it is clearly yes if one is fortunate to have Ahdaf Soueif as one's translator.

The experience Barghouti describes--a displaced person is allowed to return to the hometown from which he was forcibly separated, not in conditions of freedom, but in an awkward power-sharing arrangement wherein the conquerors retain power--is not unique to Palestinians. And it is far from universal among Palestinians, being a privilege reserved to a minority of the displaced, and now effectively closed to nearly all. Prolonged statelessness is now a condition of being for Syrians, Rohingya, Somalis, Sri Lankan Tamils.... It does not seem likely that the now growing list of groupings will begin to diminish any time soon. Worldwide, there are more refugees and other displaced persons than there are Britons.

Nor is Israel the only agent of oppression. It was the police of Anwar Sadat who saw to it that Barghouti would be separated from his wife, the Egyptian novelist and literary scholar Radwa Ashour, and their son Tamim for most of the latter's childhood. In another generation, Ashour might have dutifully followed her husband in his wanderings, but Barghouti's feminism leaves traces throughout his narrative and seems sincerely felt--better to let her have a career, and for their child to grow up in a place that is at least partially home, than to make her into a camp-follower. He is critical throughout, not only of states and powers, but of political parties, social movements, and not least of all, himself--his old poems, his fateful choices, his rages, and his responses to feelings of loss.

The memoir is powerful, but leaves one with a desire to read him in his preferred medium, and that is something I should do soon.

It Mek

I have bookshelves. Many shelves, full of books, and then there are the books that do not fit on the shelves. After more than five years in this house, the gradually increasing entropy of tsundoku had gotten to be too much, even for me. In the last few weeks, my wife and I--on my initiative--have alphabetized the books by author's last name, re-shelved them, and purged the collection of duplicate copies and other things we do not want. The books from U-Z are still unshelved, and I estimate we need at least another 8 linear feet of shelving to accommodate them. But more importantly, the process reminded me that I own a lot of good books that I have yet to read, and that perhaps I ought to do that.

So what I am doing is choosing an as-yet-unread-by-me book off each shelf, sequentially, and reading it. Thus far I have read It Begins with Tears by Opal Palmer Adisa and Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks. Today I started I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti. It was only as I was making my way through the Barghouti that I realized it would be worthwhile to blog about each such book I discover, or rediscover. Rather than do two separate posts about the Adisa and the Banks, I will post about their unexpected commonalities.

Banks is a writer who gets inspired by places. The novels and stories of his that I have especially enjoyed are those which peer into the wickedness of two of the stranger places I have lived, which he and I share biographically--southern Florida, and the Adirondack region of upstate New York. The stories work because, no matter how marginal the characters whose lives they trace, the places seem true, recognizable, and therefore uncanny. Rule of the Bone is not one of Banks' best works, I suspect precisely because it takes a lengthy detour into a place that Banks clearly does not know as intimately, Jamaica.

Adisa knows Jamaica very well, as it is her home. She tells the story of a village by interleaving the stories of those who have stayed, those who have returned, and the supernatural neighbors whose joys and tears wreak opposite effects upon the human world. While the book is written in literary Standard English, the characters speak in Jamaican creole, rendered on the page through the device of "eye dialect." Banks does the same, for a major character in Rule of the Bone is "I-Man," a Rastafarian who becomes a kind of spiritual guide to Bone, the teenage stoner dropout from Au Sable Forks who gives the book its name. There seem to be a lot of things that Banks does not understand about Jamaica, and a Jamaican could do a better job than I of picking them all out. I will focus on one symptomatic word: "mek".

"Mek" sounds like the Standard English verb "make," and that is how Banks has I-Man use it, as an eye dialect marker in places where make would have been used by an American or British speaker. In the mouths of Adisa's characters, "mek" reveals the wider ranger of grammatical functions and meanings that it has taken on in everyday Jamaican language. Yes, there are plenty of examples where it is used like make. But also: "Me dance wid all de boys cause me did love dancing, but me neva mek no boy touch-touch me breast or put dem hand unda me dress." (222) Here it functions more like "let" would in Standard English. As also in this folk saying, which Adisa uses as a chapter title: "Stand steady mek ant crawl over you." (180) In other places, "mek" functions more like an exclamatory "why?" For instance: "God, Marva, mek you use so much pepper! De children can't eat dis!" (130)

The last usage relates grammatically to one that can be found in texts that both Adisa's novel and Banks' reference, the corpus of Jamaican folk and popular music, with the latter coming into the awareness of North American culture vultures like Banks and me by way of ska and reggae. So for example, I have long puzzled over the lyrics to Desmond Dekker's classic "It Mek". The full refrain, and various interpretations of it on the internet, suggest a meaning along the lines of "That's why!" (As in, that's why you'll get what's coming to you.)

You think I never see you when you jump over de wall
You think I never see you when you accidentally fall
Me said a it mek - mek you pop your bitter gall
A it mek - while you accidentally fall
A it mek - hear she crying out for ice water

And now that I've puzzled that out with a bit of help from Adisa's rendition of everyday Jamaican speech, it occurs to me that the song carries the same note of glee at misfortune foretold that I would hear when my grandmother, translating Yiddish speaking ancestors, would gloat "God got you" at my misbehaving younger brother.

The levels of meaning to "mek" would have required more time and care for Banks to discern, just as it would have taken more time and care for him to sort out some of the apparent disjunctions in his narrative. (For example: Why would I-Man, seemingly a respected ganja wholesaler in Mobay and a prosperous smallholder in his home village, have ever left Jamaica to cut cane and pick apples on a migrant farmworker visa in the States? Reasons there may be, and are even suggested in the text, but he is too much the one dimensional "magical Negro" figure for them to ever hold.) In his narration, Bone refers throughout to Jamaican creole as "their Jamaican language," not recognizing the words he hears and eventually learns as English, and while this seems to be intended an indication of a northcountry crust-punk's lack of sophistication, it is something that linguists would regard as perhaps naively accurate, in comparison with the homogenized tolerance of treating all linguistic differences as matters of "accent." Creoles are languages in their own right, and can support not only the everyday speech of the village and the market, but carry the weight of literature and statecraft as well. That they are denigrated and held as lesser by their own speakers, regarded as "bad English" (or French or Portuguese or...) derives from social facts that make themselves felt within, but go far beyond, language.