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queenluaSometimes I wonder why I write prose when I am entirely too fond of language that calls attention to itself. Or too fond of snatches of handfuls of words, rather than whole paragraphs/sentences. Or something.
Let me explain.
So I dug up this old bit from a Jack Vance novel today, because little snatches of it were echoing around in my head, and because it was driving me batty that I couldn't remember the character's name (Navarth, my dear friend, how could I forget you?):
Like, I also have this pile of "writing prompts" on my computer, only that's a lie, sort of. Only rarely do they actually prompt me to write anything directly. Mostly it's just a magpie's collection of little phrases and word-snatches I hear and I particularly like and want to save forever because they are beautiful.
I'm scrolling through the list of prompts for examples...
Okay, this one, the title of a Mogwai album: "The Hawk is Howling." I thought that was so striking when I first heard it. You don't think of hawks as howling—wolves howl, dogs howl, sometimes people howl—but not hawks, they screech. Except here the hawk is howling, and though it's such a strange and unexpected turn, the sound comes to the mind at once, unbidden—a terribly mournful and wretched sound and oof there are the feelings. (Not that I thought "oh this is clever because..." when I first heard the phrase, mind. Like any beautiful thing one's first impulse is awe, or dizziness, or cheer—only in hindsight can one point at what precisely made them feel that way.)
Mogwai has a couple ones on the list, actually; I've noticed that a lot of indie-ish bands that have instrumental or mostly-instrumental music tend to do some really clever or quirky or breathtaking things with titles (some favorites—yes I have some favorite song titles shush—"The Major Cities of the World are Being Destroyed One by One by the Monsters", "I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood", "Goddam These Hands (I Let Them Touch You)"...). Here's another Mogwai one I like—"The Sun Smells Too Loud"—it's clever, unexpected on multiple levels (the sun smells? the sun has a sound? etc). But "The Hawk is Howling" strikes me because it can work in a prose way—that is, howling works in a way that is subtle and striking without being showy.1
(A musician who is too damn showy all the time: Aesop Rock. I really like listening to him because he's got excellent flow and his words have a pleasant aural quality, but the lyrics themselves are generally nonsense or nigh-nonsensical mishmashes of jumbled similes and metaphors. He does it so damn fast that he'll strike gold a couple times a song—like okay I just listened to "None Shall Pass" to remember what I liked and "It must've struck a nerve so they huff and puff / Till all the king's men fluster and cluster fuck" agh it sounds so delicious—and this bit's mostly in its delivery within the song itself but "he wouldn't play roll over, fetch, like a bitch"—like THESE ARE GOOD MOMENTS HOLY SHIT goddamn aesop you have such a good ear for rhythm and the sound of words, but then you blow it by discarding anything resembling a narrative impulse or a sense of climax/buildup/arc or just general coherence Aesop you could be so great why are you not so great)
And I love love love reading poetry and song lyrics in translation. Especially if it's a bad translation. Well, not bad—what I mean is, something that's rendered quite literally, or somewhat awkwardly, because a lot of the time you wind up with little words that don't normally wind up together in English, but now they're smashed together, brought to us from some other tongue, and it's different and strange and sometimes beautiful.
Random example: there's this song from the Chrono Cross soundtrack whose title, when I first read the translation, was rendered as "People Seized with Life." I'm not sure what the best translation is, other than I suspect the one's we've gotten more recently are more correct 2, but in any case it doesn't matter, because when I read that title I felt a little thrill, because we don't think of being seized by life, captives of life, but it's there and especially when combined with the song it's pretty striking.
Or just tiny things. I have "gushered together" written down here—it was in some story I found it, I think, something like "the raindrops gushered together as the storm blew overhead"—and that's such a crazy-unexpected but crazy-cool bit, because "gush" makes you think of water gushing, overflowing, and so on, and "gushered" isn't even a real word but now it is and is that not amazing.
...and I'm going to stop myself there because I just got to the "James Tiptree story titles" section of this list and I'm never going to be able to shut up at this rate SERIOUSLY I CAN FREAK OUT LIKE THIS ALL DAY IT'S LEGITIMATELY A PROBLEM.3
Perhaps I sound a bit mad like Navarath. Which begs the question why am I not writing poetry. (Probably because I just like noticing these things more than I'm actually effective at writing them, heh.)
1As I typed this I realized I was probably just channeling the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin, guys you don't even know how much I've internalized her book Steering the Craft. For the sake of due credit, here's a relevant citation from that book: "[The sentence's] rhythm is part of the rhythm of the whole piece; all its qualities are part of the quality and tone of the whole piece. As a narrative sentence, it isn't serving the story well if its rhythm is so unexpected, or its beauty so striking, or its similes and metaphors so dazzling, that it stops the reader, even to say, Ooh, Ah! Poetry can do that. Poetry can be visibly, immediately dazzling . . . But for the most part, prose sets its proper beauty and power deeper, hiding it in the work as a whole. In a story it's the scene—the setting/characters/action/interaction/dialogue/feelings—that makes us hold our breath, and cry... and turn the page to find out what happens next."
2The original is "運命に囚われし者たち". I'm actually not sure what the most correct or natural-sounding or literal translation would be; all I have to go on are the various translations I've seen. I've seen "People Imprisoned by Fate," "People Seized with Life," "Those Imprisoned by Fate," "Prisoners of Fate"... so the fact that everyone else converges on "fate" makes me suspect that the life-translator muffed something.
3 This is only tangentially related to the fangirling, but—honestly this is sort of why a small, private part of me things every young writer ought to go through a purple prose phase at some point in time. Yes, with saffron orbs and stygian darkness and pulchritudinous glebes and everything—my middle-school-RPing purple-prose phase was ridiculous and dumb and involved me swallowing thesauruses and using words that literally do not exist in English because evidently "bruja" is cooler or something—but it was fun, reveling around in words for no other aim than "what looks/sounds cool." And it made you stretch your idea, just a bit, about the wonky things language can do.
Let me explain.
So I dug up this old bit from a Jack Vance novel today, because little snatches of it were echoing around in my head, and because it was driving me batty that I couldn't remember the character's name (Navarth, my dear friend, how could I forget you?):
"See me! I am Navarth, called the mad poet! But is not every poet mad? It is inevitable. His nerves are conductive and transport uncontainable gushes of energy. He fears—how he fears! He feels the movement of time; between his fingers it is a warm pulsing, as if he grasped an exposed artery. At a sound—a distant laugh, a ripple of water, a gust of wind—he becomes sick and faints, because never in all the extent of time can this sound, this ripple, this gust recur. Here is the deafening tragedy of the journey which we all undertake!"That is such a glorious introduction. I mean it's great in part because of its subject matter, but I think so much of it has to do with its form—the way the words are chosen. Read it again now, notice those words—conductive nerves, which make us think at once of electricity—but then we get uncontainable, which is striking because ordinarily we don't think of nerves as containing anything—but here they contain, they contain the electric-life force, and just as we feel that rushing through his nerves we feel ourselves rushing through his words, a stuttering staticky ecstatic rush. Not a dash or an exclamation or a comma is misplaced. Read it aloud; feel it.
Like, I also have this pile of "writing prompts" on my computer, only that's a lie, sort of. Only rarely do they actually prompt me to write anything directly. Mostly it's just a magpie's collection of little phrases and word-snatches I hear and I particularly like and want to save forever because they are beautiful.
I'm scrolling through the list of prompts for examples...
Okay, this one, the title of a Mogwai album: "The Hawk is Howling." I thought that was so striking when I first heard it. You don't think of hawks as howling—wolves howl, dogs howl, sometimes people howl—but not hawks, they screech. Except here the hawk is howling, and though it's such a strange and unexpected turn, the sound comes to the mind at once, unbidden—a terribly mournful and wretched sound and oof there are the feelings. (Not that I thought "oh this is clever because..." when I first heard the phrase, mind. Like any beautiful thing one's first impulse is awe, or dizziness, or cheer—only in hindsight can one point at what precisely made them feel that way.)
Mogwai has a couple ones on the list, actually; I've noticed that a lot of indie-ish bands that have instrumental or mostly-instrumental music tend to do some really clever or quirky or breathtaking things with titles (some favorites—yes I have some favorite song titles shush—"The Major Cities of the World are Being Destroyed One by One by the Monsters", "I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood", "Goddam These Hands (I Let Them Touch You)"...). Here's another Mogwai one I like—"The Sun Smells Too Loud"—it's clever, unexpected on multiple levels (the sun smells? the sun has a sound? etc). But "The Hawk is Howling" strikes me because it can work in a prose way—that is, howling works in a way that is subtle and striking without being showy.1
(A musician who is too damn showy all the time: Aesop Rock. I really like listening to him because he's got excellent flow and his words have a pleasant aural quality, but the lyrics themselves are generally nonsense or nigh-nonsensical mishmashes of jumbled similes and metaphors. He does it so damn fast that he'll strike gold a couple times a song—like okay I just listened to "None Shall Pass" to remember what I liked and "It must've struck a nerve so they huff and puff / Till all the king's men fluster and cluster fuck" agh it sounds so delicious—and this bit's mostly in its delivery within the song itself but "he wouldn't play roll over, fetch, like a bitch"—like THESE ARE GOOD MOMENTS HOLY SHIT goddamn aesop you have such a good ear for rhythm and the sound of words, but then you blow it by discarding anything resembling a narrative impulse or a sense of climax/buildup/arc or just general coherence Aesop you could be so great why are you not so great)
And I love love love reading poetry and song lyrics in translation. Especially if it's a bad translation. Well, not bad—what I mean is, something that's rendered quite literally, or somewhat awkwardly, because a lot of the time you wind up with little words that don't normally wind up together in English, but now they're smashed together, brought to us from some other tongue, and it's different and strange and sometimes beautiful.
Random example: there's this song from the Chrono Cross soundtrack whose title, when I first read the translation, was rendered as "People Seized with Life." I'm not sure what the best translation is, other than I suspect the one's we've gotten more recently are more correct 2, but in any case it doesn't matter, because when I read that title I felt a little thrill, because we don't think of being seized by life, captives of life, but it's there and especially when combined with the song it's pretty striking.
Or just tiny things. I have "gushered together" written down here—it was in some story I found it, I think, something like "the raindrops gushered together as the storm blew overhead"—and that's such a crazy-unexpected but crazy-cool bit, because "gush" makes you think of water gushing, overflowing, and so on, and "gushered" isn't even a real word but now it is and is that not amazing.
...and I'm going to stop myself there because I just got to the "James Tiptree story titles" section of this list and I'm never going to be able to shut up at this rate SERIOUSLY I CAN FREAK OUT LIKE THIS ALL DAY IT'S LEGITIMATELY A PROBLEM.3
Perhaps I sound a bit mad like Navarath. Which begs the question why am I not writing poetry. (Probably because I just like noticing these things more than I'm actually effective at writing them, heh.)
1As I typed this I realized I was probably just channeling the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin, guys you don't even know how much I've internalized her book Steering the Craft. For the sake of due credit, here's a relevant citation from that book: "[The sentence's] rhythm is part of the rhythm of the whole piece; all its qualities are part of the quality and tone of the whole piece. As a narrative sentence, it isn't serving the story well if its rhythm is so unexpected, or its beauty so striking, or its similes and metaphors so dazzling, that it stops the reader, even to say, Ooh, Ah! Poetry can do that. Poetry can be visibly, immediately dazzling . . . But for the most part, prose sets its proper beauty and power deeper, hiding it in the work as a whole. In a story it's the scene—the setting/characters/action/interaction/dialogue/feelings—that makes us hold our breath, and cry... and turn the page to find out what happens next."
2The original is "運命に囚われし者たち". I'm actually not sure what the most correct or natural-sounding or literal translation would be; all I have to go on are the various translations I've seen. I've seen "People Imprisoned by Fate," "People Seized with Life," "Those Imprisoned by Fate," "Prisoners of Fate"... so the fact that everyone else converges on "fate" makes me suspect that the life-translator muffed something.
3 This is only tangentially related to the fangirling, but—honestly this is sort of why a small, private part of me things every young writer ought to go through a purple prose phase at some point in time. Yes, with saffron orbs and stygian darkness and pulchritudinous glebes and everything—my middle-school-RPing purple-prose phase was ridiculous and dumb and involved me swallowing thesauruses and using words that literally do not exist in English because evidently "bruja" is cooler or something—but it was fun, reveling around in words for no other aim than "what looks/sounds cool." And it made you stretch your idea, just a bit, about the wonky things language can do.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-14 03:00 pm (UTC)Today is a vanilla ice cream day.
First thing sold: Blackberries in a farm to North African when I was sixteen
This probably reflects my pretentious hipsterdom something something.
Though okay there is one line I like that's sort of like the stuff in this post:
then the tigers come at night
with their voices soft as thunder
(From that too-famous song I Dreamed a Dream)
Fwiw I'd render that Chrono Chross song title as "The Prisoners of Destiny." Life is probably a mistranslation off the fact that the second kanji of destiny/fate, by itself, is "life force" -- and even then it means life in the sense of "vitality" rather than "stuff that happens to you" (that kind of "living" would be more in the vein of 生きて, I think?). As for the "imprisonment" word, the dictionary does suggest a "seized with" translation and I think it can probably be used in the metaphorical English sense of "this has captivated me," but I don't think any reasonably fluent speaker would parse it that way here.
"Those Imprisoned by Fate" is most syntactically literal, but I think the vibe is more like "Prisoners of Fate," though there's a certain pointedness to its reference, hence I think I'd add a "the" to the start.
I agree that there's a certain beauty to other languages translated literally, and I'm cool with acknowledging that so long as it doesn't get chalked up to being a property of the original. Personally, when it doesn't come from mistranslation1, I find it a kind of beauty stemming from the variance of languages. You become aware of how differently ideas are expressed and how many different nuances a word in your language or theirs might express.
1 And I once mistranslated a line from Ike/Soren B as "I'll forever bear your anguished state" so believe me when I say I see the appeal.
That all said, I'm with Le Guin when she suggests implicitly that sentences do have a right rhythm, one that blends perfectly. And knowing how hard it is to make them blend together right and feel smooth and flowing, I appreciate a passage that's written so well that it does feel smooth.
I have a feeling you'd like Andre Aciman better than I do presently. He's full of odd spastic wordy phrases that kind of bore me with their constant excitement.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-16 02:25 am (UTC)and yes the point about exoticism is a good one—I'd never want to chalk up an awkward translation as being somehow inherent to the original work, and generally when I'm reading a piece, I want it rendered smoothly so I can enjoy it in my language in as much the same way as those reading the original language enjoyed the original
alas, with English as my only language, I don't think I can enjoy the variance of language thing as much as others, save from very generously footnoted translations (which I appreciate very much! it's neat to read about how the original had different connotations or constructions or whatever). (also I find it sort of amusing how different people take to these variances—I have two native-Spanish-speaking friends here, and one of them loves Spanish poetry and gushes about how much prettier and more flexible literature is in that language, whereas the other friend loathes Spanish literature and thinks a lot of the Spanish classic novels just sound ugly and she prefers translations. Go figure.)
also I will add that Aciman guy to my list, danke