A Bolaño audio story at the New yorker

Here is a link to a short story by Roberto Bolaño, read by Francisco  Goldman.

Bolaño on short stories

Here, from the Paris Review, is Roberto Bolaño's much reprinted and too much interpreted advice on the art of writing short stories:

Homer for the weekend

A little Homer (trans. mine)

Iliad 1.33 – 1.42

ὣς ἔφατ᾽, ἔδεισεν δ᾽ ὃ γέρων καὶ ἐπείθετο μύθῳ:

βῆ δ᾽ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης:

πολλὰ δ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἀπάνευθε κιὼν ἠρᾶθ᾽ ὃ γεραιὸς

Ἀπόλλωνι ἄνακτι, τὸν ἠΰκομος τέκε Λητώ:

κλῦθί μευ ἀργυρότοξ᾽, ὃς Χρύσην ἀμφιβέβηκας

Κίλλάν τε ζαθέην Τενέδοιό τε ἶφι ἀνάσσεις,

Σμινθεῦ εἴ ποτέ τοι χαρίεντ᾽ ἐπὶ νηὸν ἔρεψα,

ἢ εἰ δή ποτέ τοι κατὰ πίονα μηρί᾽ ἔκηα

ταύρων ἠδ᾽ αἰγῶν, τὸ δέ μοι κρήηνον ἐέλδωρ:

τίσειαν Δαναοὶ ἐμὰ δάκρυα σοῖσι βέλεσσιν.

So he (Agamemnon) said, and the old man was afraid and heeded the warning.

And he (the old man) walked in silence along the strand by the resounding sea.

Fervently then, having departed, the old man prayed

To lord Apollo, whom lovely-haired Leto bore.

Hear me, god of the silver bow, who bestrides Chryse

And holy Cilla and powerfully rules over Tenedos,

Smintheus, if ever I roofed a temple to your liking

Or if ever I roasted to you the thigh bone fat

Of bulls and goats, answer this prayer for me:

Repay to the Greeks your arrows for my tears.

This passage pretty much has it all. 

Let’s start with my favorite, the second line.  I like it because of structure.  Almost at the beginning we have the word ἀκέων, which I have translated as ‘silently.’  Almost at the end we have the word πολυφλοίσβοιο, meaning “much sounding,” a description of the sea (the last word).  In the middle we have the word θῖνα, which can be translated as “strand” or “beach.”  And so, between the silence of the old man and the rumble of the sea, we have the strand, which syntactically poses an accurate picture of a physical manifestation.  Also, say the word πολυφλοίσβοιο aloud.  On a modern tongue, it would sound something like ‘poluphloisboiyo.’  I imagine the movement of water when I hear this word.

‘Smintheus’ is a hapax legomenon in Homer, or a word that appears only once in a corpus, though it does make a few appearances other places, most notably in Strabo.  Strabo states that the term, which probably means ‘mouse-killer,’ is exemplified by the fact that at the temple of Sminthian Apollo, there is a dead mouse under the statue’s feet.  I personally think Strabo is just pulling something out of his ass, but that’s just me.

Finally, there is the last line of this passage.  The first words are of vengeance and mean ‘repay to the Greeks.’  That sentiment is followed by the expression of sorrow, ‘for my tears.’  And the last two words, ‘your arrows,’ are reserved to flavor the whole passage.  A gorgeous passage, if a little cruel (and honest?).

2014 tentative Redonda reading and viewing list

Redonda reading and viewing list for 2014

Xavier I and his court (Primary reading list, 12 books)

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Disgrace by J.M. Coatzee

Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes

Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza

Danube by Claudio Magris

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas LLosa

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Your Face Tomorrow (3vol.) by Javier Marías

8 Films

Don’t Tempt Me

Alatriste      by Agustín Díaz Yanes

Tetro

The Godfather

Apocalypse Now      by Francis Ford Coppola

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down

Volver

The Skin I Live In by      Pedro Almodóvar

A Parra poem

Acacias

Strolling many years ago

Down a street taken over by acacias in bloom

I found out from a friend who knows everything

That you had just gotten married.

I told him that I really

Had nothing to do with it.

I never loved you

— You know that better than I do —

Yet each time the acacias bloom

— Can you believe it? —

I get the very same feeling I had

When they hit me point-blank

With the heartbreaking news

That you had married someone else.


— translated by David Unger

Nicanor Parra

Five characters for literary tea

Five characters for literary tea

The Everyman:  Maqroll.  His optimistic fatalism, his steady course through the ceaseless tides of fate, his nobility, his scoundrel heart.

The Genius:  Don Quixote.  To inhabit his world, to turn literature into a haze of absurdities, or perhaps to escape from literature, which can be a haze of absurdities, takes nothing short of genius.

The Muse:  Ophelia.  Hamlet was a fool.  His salvation was there all along. 

The Classical:  Achilles.  Honor, glory, pride, the joy of battle, all the old crap that just keeps coming back.    

The Modern:  the fleeing warrior in the shield poem of Archilocus who has no illusions about life and who, if needed and to borrow a phrase, knew how to run as only the truly wise and the truly cowardly can run.  He has his reasoning:

Ἀσπίδι μὲν Σαΐων τις ἀγάλλεται, ἥν παρὰ θάμνῳ

ἔντος ἀμώμητον κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων·

αὐτὸν δ' ἔκ μ' ἐσάωσα· τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκείνη;

Ἐρρέτω· ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω

some chess art

Having been schooled in a game of chess recently (due to my friend Matt’s skill, though I’ll claim if pressed that it was my mistaken judgment on the value of an exchange), I’ve decided my game could use much improvement.  To the chess books!  While searching through a few tomes on the end game, I came across the artist Samuel Bak, whose chess-scapes appear as the dreams and nightmares of a mad scientist still hung-over from the inhumane side effects of the industrial revolution.  The chessboards are broken, in decay, and sometimes sinister.  The pieces are often rough.  Sometimes, they are wounded.  Bak has used the game to illuminate life.

In The Game Continues, the book I had picked up, Lawrence Langer examines Bak’s chess paintings, proclaiming that “Bak provides us with a visual vocabulary for imagining the tension between fixity and fluidity” (p.11).  When I viewed the paintings in this context, I couldn’t help but notice that it appears very hard in the paintings to stop the force of fluidity, brought about by nature and human nature, and that it is human “civilization,” the rules and conformity by which we aim to check and order nature, that is trying to impose the fixity.  Nature is winning.

I also noticed that, even in their abstract arrangements, the chess figures in the painting are trying to behave according to the rules, with limited success.  As one would expect, there is a military aspect to many of the paintings, keeping in line with the nature of chess.

That said, I found a few touching personal pieces.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make my move.