Bill Porter (“Red Pine”). translator of Chinese texts and poetry, and author of the 1993 book Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits
(click image to read the article; found via The Hermitary — see also: Lion’s Roar article)
All posts in category writers
a profile of the translator ‘red pine’
Posted by sean on October 27, 2016
https://sd-stewart.com/2016/10/27/a-profile-of-the-translator-known-as-red-pine/
excerpt from alejandra pizarnik’s diary
Empty happiness. I spent the day reading poems. Trying to learn the technique, in a miserly and premeditated manner. Sometimes it makes me nostalgic to think of children, for whom every action is play. For me, to read poems is work, a great effort. To manage to focus my attention on other people’s words and feelings is a battle against myself. I made two poems. And yesterday another two. I think I won’t ever be able to make a novel, because I’ve nothing to tell in many pages, and even if I had something to tell, but no, I’ve nothing to tell.
Read more at Music & Literature (found via The Blog of Disquiet)
See also: Extracting the Stone of Madness, Pizarnik’s first full-length collection of poetry in English, which was just published this week by New Directions.
Posted by sean on May 20, 2016
https://sd-stewart.com/2016/05/20/excerpt-from-alejandra-pizarniks-diary/
when, if not now?
Dear sister, Christa T. wrote, in summer 1953. When, if not now?
You know how it is: the time passes quickly, but it passes us by. This breathlessness, or this inability to draw a deep breath. As if whole areas of the lungs have been out of action for an eternity. When that is so, can one go on living?
What presumption: to think one could haul oneself up out of the swamp by one’s own bootstraps. Believe me, one doesn’t change; one remains everlastingly out of it, unfit for life. Intelligent, yes. Too soft; all the fruitless ponderings; a scrupulous petite bourgeoise . . .
You’ll certainly remember what we used to say when one of us was feeling forlorn: When, if not now? When should one live, if not in the time that’s given to one? It always helped. But now—if only I could tell you how it is . . . The whole world like a wall facing me. I fumble over the stones: no gaps. Why should I go on deluding myself: there’s no gaps for me to live in. It’s my own fault. It’s me, I’m simply not determined enough. Yet how simple and natural everything seemed when I first read about it in the books.
I don’t know what I’m living for. Can you see what that means? I know what’s wrong with me, but it’s still me, and I can’t wrench it out of myself! Yet I can: I know one way to be rid of the whole business once and for all . . . I can’t stop thinking about it.
Coldness in everything. It comes from a long way off; it gets into everything. One must get out of the way before it reaches the core. If it does that, one won’t feel even the coldness any more. Do you see what I mean?
People, yes. I’m not a recluse. You know me. But I won’t let anything force me; there has got to be something that makes me want to be with them. And then I also have to be alone, or I’m miserable. I want to work. You know—with others, for others. But as far as I can see my only possible kind of activity is in writing; it’s not direct. I have to be able to grapple with things quietly, contemplating them . . . All of which makes no difference; the contradiction can’t be resolved—none of this makes any difference to my deep sense of concurring with these times of ours and of belonging to them.
But then the next blow—if only you knew how little it takes for anything to be a blow to me!—might fling me up on the beach. Then I won’t be able to find my way back on my own. I wouldn’t want to live among a lot of other stranded people; that’s the one thing I do know with any certainty. The other way is more honorable and more honest. And it shows more strength.
Anything rather than be a burden to the others, who’ll carry on, who are right, because they’re stronger, who can’t look back, because they haven’t got the time.
—Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.
Posted by sean on May 5, 2016
https://sd-stewart.com/2016/05/05/when-if-not-now/
acedia
From The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams:
[Alice, Corvus, and Annabel are discussing their upcoming wilderness ‘retreat’ while sitting in Annabel’s living room with her father Carter, when he suddenly jumps up and runs outside to meet the gardener Donald who’s just driven up to the house.]
‘Is he still the gardener?’ Alice asked.
‘Of course he’s still the gardener. What do you mean?’ Annabel was looking at the hiking boots she’d just bought for this expedition. Never in her life had she encountered anything so totally without charm.
‘Well, there doesn’t seem much left to do around here. It all looks pretty nice.’
‘Some people get very involved in gardening, Alice. It can become a lifelong obsession. Sometimes they just move rocks around together. Donald is a big believer in fighting ass … acid—God, what is that word?’
‘Acedia,’ Corvus said.
‘That’s right! You are so good, Corvus. You could go on Jeopardy or something. It means sloth, right?’
‘It means more like experiencing the moment as an oppressive weight. It means listlessness of spirit.’ Corvus pushed a fallen wing of black hair behind her ear.
Annabel didn’t know what else to do, so she smiled generously. ‘Well, he’s got Daddy moving those rocks, all right.’
Further reading on acedia from The Hermitary: Acedia, Bane of Solitaries
Is not acedia the original perception of alienation and revolt against complacency and the burdens of culture? Is it the angst of Kierkegaard, the ‘nausea’ of Sartre, the alienation and revolt of existentialists from Camus to Marcel? Acedia is never without a sense of guilt or complicity, not as sin but as complicity in the horrors of contemporary life. To the modern mind, acedia remains real and relevant. It is a personal statement against the contrivances of culture, the hypocrisy of public morality, alienation from the natural patterns of nature and simplicity.
[…]
Acedia can have a strong spiritual component in the life of the one who experiences it, and that very component makes acedia the sign of great potential for insight and wisdom. The solitary need not fear acedia. Acedia, at a minimum, signifies no complacency or superficial contentment with the contemporary cultural order. Acedia can be a tacit expectation that life can be better, or at least better understood.
Posted by sean on February 17, 2016
https://sd-stewart.com/2016/02/17/acedia/
RIP Christopher Middleton, early translator of Robert Walser
Poet and translator Christopher Middleton died last week at the age of 89. Middleton was the first translator to bring Swiss Modernist writer Robert Walser to an English-language reading audience. He translated many other writers, including Georg Trakl, Christa Wolf, and Friedrich Nietzsche. But for me, his translation of Walser’s Jakob von Gunten remains the most important, as it was the first Walser book I read, which lead to a reading love affair of epic proportions. Middleton also translated many of the works in Selected Stories of Robert Walser, a fine collection of Walser’s short fiction. I’ve included two favorite excerpts from that volume below. To read a remembrance of Christopher Middleton, check out this piece by his fellow Walser translator Susan Bernofsky. The Paris Review also posted a tribute with one of his poems.
The walk seemed to be becoming more beautiful, rich, and long. Here at the railway crossing seemed to be the peak, or something like the center, from which again the gentle declivity would begin. Something akin to sorrow’s golden bliss and melancholy’s magic breathed around me like a quiet, lofty god.
—from ‘The Walk’
Often I walked in the neighboring forest of fir and pine, whose beauties, wonderful winter solitudes, seemed to protect me from the onset of despair. Ineffably kind voices spoke down to me from the trees: ‘You must not come to the hard conclusion that everything in the world is hard, false, and wicked. But come often to us; the forest likes you. In its company you will find health and good spirits again, and entertain more lofty and beautiful thoughts.’
—from ‘Frau Wilke’
Posted by sean on December 2, 2015
https://sd-stewart.com/2015/12/02/rip-christopher-middleton-early-translator-of-robert-walser/
the blind owl by sadegh hedayat
It was always my opinion that the best course a man could take in life was to remain silent; that one could not do better than withdraw into solitude like the bittern which spreads its wings beside some lonely lake.
–Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl (translation by D. P. Costello)
Posted by sean on November 24, 2015
https://sd-stewart.com/2015/11/24/the-blind-owl-by-sadegh-hedayat/
150 years of alice’s adventures
Illustration remix by Anna Vignet from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an online annotated edition featuring twelve Lewis Carroll scholars taking one chapter each, plus new artwork and remixes from classic 1865 and 1905 illustrations. A joint project from The Public Domain Review and Medium, on the occasion of the story’s 150th anniversary.
Posted by sean on September 2, 2015
https://sd-stewart.com/2015/09/02/150-years-of-alices-adventures/
from ‘the air we breathe’ (gabriel josipovici)
Then she was quiet and they were walking together, crossing the Luxembourg Gardens the sun was disappearing behind a thin film of grey the air was cold she started to shiver but he didn’t seem to notice it was as if he had come out with the express purpose of finding her and now he was taking her back and perhaps it was like that he had always had that sort of taciturnity, as if speaking was painful and silence too she wanted to take his shoulders stop him turn him round look into his eyes and ask him what he was doing what they were doing where they were why he was so sure she would go with him that she had nothing else to do the day to give up to him no other friends to see or work to do that she too had just come out for the same express purpose of seeing him finding him returning with him she wanted to look into his eyes ask him to explain but what was there to explain that was always what happened always how it was there was the need to explain to understand and then nothing to explain nothing to understand but still the need persisted and it was as if this nothing was what had to be understood how it could be nothing and something both together and at the same time so that it was as if a hand had taken your heart and squeezed it and it slipped up and out of your hand like a fish you had to hold it you had to press it you caught it again and again it jumped you would never catch it and
–Gabriel Josipovici, The Air We Breathe
Posted by sean on August 6, 2015
https://sd-stewart.com/2015/08/06/from-the-air-we-breathe-gabriel-josipovici/
a man of riverbanks
I am a man of riverbanks—excavation and inflammation—since it isn’t always possible to be a man of torrents.
—René Char, Leaves of Hypnos
Posted by sean on July 28, 2015
https://sd-stewart.com/2015/07/28/a-man-of-riverbanks/
the wing of sleep by roger gilbert-lecomte*
The Wing of Sleep
He waded all the way back up life’s stream
And came out the other side
Lost where others wander not yet born
He dreamt he was dreaming
Changing planets
Sleeping only to awake over and over
To the block of blood ticking in his head
Plunging in an ever deeper sleep
Awaking in depths of light unmeasured
Yet closer to that blaze
Plunged in the mortal deep of shadow
His bed a sumptuous cradle whose plumed head
Rocked him
Then froze into the lintel
Of a tomb
His dead eyes the wing of the enchanter sleep
Brushed to glittering life
Then rubbed out
Into so total a revulsion
Their lids
Squinched up like spleen-envenomed lips
He felt himself expand becoming the sky
Making fair weather and foul while dispensing rainbows
As the mills of space crushed
And flattened him like a shadow…
(to be continued)
*tr. David Rattray
Posted by sean on June 17, 2015
https://sd-stewart.com/2015/06/17/the-wing-of-sleep-by-roger-gilbert-lecomte/
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