Translation

So I burned my brains the last week. I was working on a Sanskrit translation for one of my graduate classes. I studied Sanskrit in India, and though I had the best grade in my class, it has been six years since I even read a letter of the alphabet (Devanagiri [meaning city/home of the gods]). Language skills seriously erode if you don't keep up with them. The poem I translated was "Meghadutam" The Cloud Messenger, by Kalidasa. It would be madness to translate the whole thing. Indian literature has a fascination with all things epic. The translation was only a few lines, but my God! that took so much time. We take for granted the amount of work translators do for us. We also take for granted the level of understanding most translators have of the language from which they work. After I did my own translation, I found seven English translations. The variety between them was ridiculous. I was hoping to check my work using the translations of others. Fat chance. Some of the translations added so many words and phrases that simply weren't in Kalidasa's verses, and none of them matched up. It's amazing the liberties people take. Now, of course this is a poem, and it can be difficult to achieve the same level of artistic excellence by pure metaphrase, but just think, people do this with holy books...

But I've been thinking about a translation project I started a year ago. I'm interested in translating modern English into modern English. This may sound crazy, but it's probably not as crazy as taking an Intro to Islam class at University of Iowa where you don't read the Koran (Yes, that happened. I had to get a copy from a Muslim friend of mine and have her talk to me about it.) I digress. Part of translating English into English is essentially revision. But also there is this element to it of textual destruction. I like finding water-logged books on the side of the road, and then picking phrases out of them. In this same way, I love poetry by Sappho (possibly the oldest poet from whom we have poems,) because her poetry comes to us in many fragments, pieces of texts, things half-eaten by time. There is something lovely, something so wonderful about those half-sentences, something so alluring in the suggestiveness of her remaining work.

Yōsuke Yamashita, Burning Piano

So, I figured I hit a decent number of sentences for this week. I wanted to provide an example, obviously not my best work, but something that you guys could look at to help guide your blogging. There are so many possibilities here. Remember, this is an on-going assignment. By tomorrow, I expect to see four paragraphs on everyone's blog. If you haven't been placed on my blog list, please e-mail me, so I can add you. Since I feel comfortable with the amount I posted here already, I figured I would put up a video. Obviously this is not my video, or my art. This is a clip uploaded onto youtube by KusLab of jazz artist, composer and essayist Yōsuke Yamashita and his work, "Burning Piano 2008."

March 8, 2008
at Noto Resort Area Masuhogaura, Shika-machi, Ishikawa, Japan
Related Event of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Third Anniversary Exhibition, Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu Exhibition

Looking Back

A year ago today I was in Korea. It is strange for me to think about it. Friends have told me they just had the coldest day in Korea in fifty-five years. This makes me think of my grandfather, the cold Korean winter. He was shipped off to Korea to serve in the war just before the cease-fire. When I hear him talk about Korea, the place he describes is entirely alien to me. I think about those army tents with their wood burning stoves. I think about the Koreans coming home from the traditional markets, taking their wet shoes off in the doorways of a chibi, a Korean traditional home. I think about the soldiers standing in the cold, young men smoking cigarettes, staring out at the mountains, staring with a mutual bewilderment into the eyes of the locals, wondering about their wives and their family on the other side of the planet, wondering about the lives and families so inaccessible, bustling about the army base. My grandfather talks about the young Korean boys who would do anything for a dollar. Now, two dollar bills are something banks give out for free. Businesses display them in frames by the front door, the American currency acting as some strange marker of beginnings, somehow now ubiquitous. Sixty years ago, the future was so uncertain. Outside of their vast arsenal, Koreans were living life as they had for hundreds of years. Very little Western influence touched the country, until the Americans came and brought hotdogs and cola, phones and computers, movies and English books. Even the lines that divided their country, the political lines, were imposed on them by the outside world. Now, Seoul seems to stretch down the whole peninsula. Everything seems plastic. The whole country is constantly renewed, faster, brighter, bigger, higher. People call dwarfing, cookie-cutter arrangements of highrises "the country," as if in Korea there were only tall buildings and wilderness, and anything but a street inundated with people was a farm. Even the farming takes place in between twenty-story buildings. The woman on the edge of my block farmed an empty lot in my first spring. She grew sweet potatoes, peppers, garlic. She raked the piles of garbage deposited over the winter into a pile, separated the plastic and the electronics from the things she could burn and set a fire before the thaw.

Osiris and Isis

I have an intense interest in the myth of Osiris. Osiris is an Egyptian god. Depending on the source or the era, the story of Osiris can vary. My take on the myth, for those who don't know, begins with a dispute over the throne between Osiris and his brother Set. Set tricks Osiris into climbing inside a box, locks him in, and chucks him in the Nile. Osiris drowns, and over time the box is incorporated into a tree. Isis, the wife of Osiris, searches a very long time for him. Eventually, she discovers a king has made a pillar from the tree containing her husband's body. She manages to get the box and the body from the pillar, and uses magic to bring her beloved back to life. Somehow, probably by magic, Set discovers Osiris has been revived. In the few moments before Set arrives, Isis and Osiris make love. This is the conception of Horus. Horus never meets his father in life, because Set comes and rips Osiris to pieces, scattering the parts across the earth. However, because of the intense love Isis had for Osiris, the other gods install the soul (ka) of Osiris as Lord King of the Underworld. The reason I find this myth so fascinating is partially connected to a personal trauma. I also find this myth fascinating because it seems to crop up again and again in other forms. I recently watched a wonderful documentary by Chris Marker, Sans Soleil. In the film, with its obsession over the eye and the camera, censorship and preservation, I felt a heavy string of Egyptian, mythological undertones.

Empire and Filesharing

This is a link to a Reuters article about a young man in the UK being charged for breaking US law, even though he was in the UK when he committed the "crime."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/us-filesharing-extradition-idUSTRE80C15C20120113

There is something disturbing about the fact that the United States is able to enforce US law in other countries. I did not realize Britain was a US territory. Were I a British citizen, I would be terrified by this possibility: regardless of the laws in my own country, my native sovereignty could be superseded by the rule of a foreign power. Maybe the sun has finally set on the British Empire. God save the Queen. 

Welcome to the Blog

Okay bloggers,
Here's the low down:
We're blogging a paragraph (3-5 sentences) four to five times a week.
I will check to make sure you've done your required blogging on Fridays.
To start, I would like you guys to write about topics that you are passionate about.
What are you already thinking about in your free time?
Though you may be highly obsessed with a facet of your personal life, please try to keep personal drama etc. out of the blogs. Obviously I am willing to consider exceptions, but I am unlikely to allow them.
As we ease ourselves into this, we will refine our posts, discuss blog posts in class, and focus what we're doing.
To start off, I suggest you just post something. Don't worry so much about it being "right." What's important at this moment is that we start blogging. We will hone our blogging as we go along.