Category: Uncategorized (Page 404 of 1102)

 

‘The first news any of us had of Artavazd Pelechian was through an article that the French critic, Serge Daney, published in Liberation in 1983, following a trip to Soviet Armenia. I say “any of us” because Daney´s text was in a way an announcement to the City and the World, urbi et orbi, like the proclamations of the Roman Emperors: “In Armenia”, he said, “I have discovered a missing link from the true history of cinema.” That it was in Armenia added an archeological pedigree to the find. At the foot of Mount Ararat, where other European expeditionaries said that they had found the remains of Noah´s Ark; there on the Black Sea where the cultures of the Caucasus were the “very book from which the first men took their lessons” (Nadesha Mandelstam); there where Sergei Paradjanov tried to find refuge from the Soviet Big Brother; that is where Daney discovered Pelechian.

‘Pelechian´s films began to be seen outside the orbit of soviet influence from 1988. This was the year of the joint retrospective of his work and that of Sergei Paradjanov, which was held during the Amsterdam Festival. The following year they arrived at the Nyon Festival and the Panorama Section of the Berlin Festival. One cold Spring night the director of the Nyon Festival showed for Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville the somewhat clandestine copies, “in the soviet manner”, that had been produced of his films. As a result of that session, Godard fixed for posterity the idea that the cinema of Pelechian was “a language from the time before Babel”, which was to say that in order to describe the Armenian film-maker the only worthwhile ideas were those of geological eras and of myth and not those of humanity´s ordinary rhythms nor, of course, those of cinema´s own history. His films bring to our notice something tremendously distant (something emotional, a feeling), something difficult to capture, and so difficult to make clear. In the September 1990 edition of Cahiers du Cinema, dedicated to soviet film, the name of Pelechian now appeared with those of Klimov, Shepitko, Tarkovski, Paradjanov, Sokurov or Muratova in the pantheon of the great soviet film-makers of modernity. The following year the USSR disappeared.

. . .

‘The most beautiful words that have been written about the work of Artavazd Pelechian seem like the sayings of archeologists or astronomers, or even of prophets, but not of critics or cineasts.

‘The “missing link” to which Daney referred had a first historical-critical interpretation connected to the fortunes of the Soviet Russian vanguard following the official establishment of Socialist Realism at the beginning of the thirties. It was especially striking that before Pelachian became known, whilst in the West the cinematographic vanguard of the sixties, especially in the United States, had rehabilitated the great heterodox, Dziga Vertov, (the inventor of the Cine-Eye, of the perception of matter, of the interval, of the film-maker´s own body), in the USSR itself Vertov´s influence seemed to have disappeared without trace. It was not an easy problem to unravel, taking into account the obscurity of the long Stalinist period.

‘Pelechian burst onto the soviet scene at the end of the seventies, with a “as we were saying yesterday. . . . .” that restored the great imaginative figures of the school of soviet montage, especially Vertov, but drawing inspiration from a landascape of films that went back directly to Dovzhenko and ultimately to Eisenstein. The fruit of that effort is his text Distance Montage or Theory of Distance, that was published in 1973. By these contributions to theory, Pelechian also helped to connect up the secondary and alternative networks of Russian cinema, whose pathways seemed to have been untrodden for the last forty years.

‘In any case, the significance of his work rests not only on his reconstruction of the dynamited bridges of Soviet Russian cinema, but also on the mysterious and fascinating place he holds amongst his non-soviet contemporaries. Pelechian joins, without being aware of it, the community of unknown equals that reflect on the physicality of cinema, on its realism in the present, on its rhythmic and synaesthetic values. Pelechian maintains an ironic distance with respect to the supposed true documentary, he suggests a second reading of the materials in the archive, he considers the possibility of its repetition and inversion in the structuralist manner, he reflects on the poetry of science and the antiutopia of progres, he regenerates the way we look at landscape. . . . From all these strategies spring unsuspected links with film-makers apparently as far apart as Michael Snow, Bruce Conner, Peter Kubelka or Chris Marker. Paul Virilio placed Pelechian’s medium length work Nas vek/ Mer dare (Our Century) in the center of the exhibition Ce qui arrive…, at the Cartier Foundation hosted in 2002 and in this film the philosopher sets out his theory of catastrophe. In that context Our Century was converted into a powerful black sun, like a new Black Square from Malevich that projected a blinding light, critical and disenchanted, over the century of progress.

. . .

‘The theory of Distance Montage is the art of fugue. It is this in its evocative way of connecting the technological aspects of the film with the film´s musical language. The films of Pelechian grow from conductive motifs; from a theme and its variations, making use of repetition and involution; from the combination of melodic voices as they are exposed step by step; and from the effect of counterpoint (think, for example, of the wrench of the Offertorio from Verdi´s Requiem that sounds repeatedly in Vychod/Zin/Life).

‘Besides this, his cinema is the art of escape also in a literal way, because Pelechian´s idea of the Distance Montage is not a theory of how to link shots, but about how to let them free to work on their own. Regarding the escape of images the film-maker himself has explained, “The originality of the theory of Distance Montage lies in the following: the difference from the montage of Kuleshov or Eisenstein, who arranged images in order to create meaning by their conjunction, is that I try to maintain two images that individually make sense separate from each other; the Distance Montage produces tension in the relation between them and makes for dialogue across the sequence of shots that separate them”.

‘Pelechian understands that nature is not put together in one smooth continuous sequence, neither is it organised on principles of shock, nor with a definite purpose, nor for narrative effect; nature is a constant goodbye, a permanent farewell in which each shot, each image, each instance, distances itself from the following one until they meet in a certain but indeterminate future. In this way the poetic cosmos of Pelechian, as it was called by François Niney, emerges to interlace the rhythms of nature and of history, the two mythic poles that provide the backbone of his filmography. The first is a cultural projection, stimulated by a certain kind of faith that travels along the ways of linear time towards redemption or utopia (not necessarily political). The second is an ancestral echo that returns to the circularity of time and the constant return to nature, a nature not indifferent to the human being. The “diptych” with which his filmography closes (at least for the time being) responds precisely to this double idea; the line and the circle. Konec/End is the line; Vychod/Zin/Life is the circle: the two rhythms of the world.

. . .

‘That said, let us return to Daney. The mention of the “missing link” was also a way of identifying a sensation of emptiness connected to the education of feeling produced by Pelechian´s films. The work of Pelechian signalled an emotional amputation in the spectators most secret places, something deficient in the way we have learnt to see, to feel, to live the film. Why, before the works of Pelechian, does the spectator experience a certain type of excess of feeling that can not quite be grasped, as if he had not developed the organ with which to absorb the far-off reminiscences that Pelechian´s images carry along with them? It is a feeling of sensory loss, as if his language, effectively, was from the time before Babel, as Godard first said. It is as if the films of Pelechian bring us news of a forgotten language, of the spoken word (or of a cinema) that we knew in some remote time but which now, for reasons which remain obscure, we have forgotten.

‘Were we once Armenian shepherds? Did we once risk our lives daily for a lost sheep? At one time were we completely undifferentiated from nature? The answer is yes. So is it in that we feel some remote ache for the forgotten ache language of the time before Babel? Certainly; such is the cinema of Pelechian. When Osip Mandesltam visited Armenia in 1930 he wrote: “I have developed a sixth sense, Aratian: the sense of being attracted by the mountain. I shall carry it with me wherever my destiny takes me, it comes with me now and it will never abandon me.” Such was the emotional link that Daney also found.’ — Carlos Muguiro

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Artavazd Peleshyan @ Wikipedia
ARTAVAZD PELECHIAN SITE (in French)
The Visionary Cinema of Artavazd Pelechian
The View From Above: Films Of Artavazd Peleshian
Artavazd Peleshyan page @ PARAJANOV-VARTANOV INSTITUTE
Qui est Artavazd Pelechian, le cinéaste qui écrit ses films comme des poèmes ?
Book: ‘Artavazd Pelechian: Une Symphonie du Monde’
Conversation entre Artavazd Pelechian et Jean-Luc Godard. Un langage d’avant Babel
Montage with Images that Don’t Exist: Interview with Artavazd Pelechian
The legendary Artavazd Pelechian unveils a much-anticipated new film
Artavazd Pelechian’s Nature by Nicholas Elliott
Pelechian, Artavazd @ Senses of Cinema

 

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Extras

Artavazd Pelechian sur le tournage des Saisons, 1972 1975

RENCONTRE AVEC ARTAVAZD PELECHIAN

Swans (a tribute to Peleshyan) by Patti Smith

Artavazd Pelechian, Cineaste Et Poete Du Reel : Notre Siecle (Excerpt)

 

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Interview

 

François Niney: The thing that characterizes your films is that they’re composed like music. . .

Artavazd Pelechian: I think that what you see, you must hear. And what you are supposed to hear, you must see. These are two different harmonic processes. The pioneers of silent film, like Griffith or Chaplin, were afraid that the coming of the talkies would destroy the cinema that they had developed. But I believe they were wrong. Those who were not afraid were wrong too, because they used sound badly; they were content with a synchronous cinema, as in life, of sonic illustration. No one noticed that sound could take the place of the image, and that then the latter could merge with the former.

Niney: Your cinema is also a cinema without actors and without words. . . .

Pelechian: I am convinced that cinema can convey certain things that no language in the world can translate. One can speak of things, but there is a threshold beyond which words do not suffice to get to the heart of the matter. The fact that the word appeals to a thought, to an analysis or to psychology contradicts my conception of cinema as intuition or emotion, as grasping what you see. The existence of the word comes from human relations, while our existence as human beings comes from nature. And as for me, I insist on dealing with our natural being.

Niney: Do you see a link between your cinema and modern physics, in which determinism is no longer absolute but relative and probabilistic?

Pelechian: Montage at a distance offers probabilities without end. We know that scientists like Einstein were strongly influenced by music, or by painting, in the discovery of certain things. The lifetime of the cinema is still short and I am quite convinced that if cinematic art evolves in a good direction, it will inspire scientists in the very explanation of the universe and the organization of life.

Niney: These are considerations that were very valuable in the era of Epstein or that of the surrealists for example, but that seem archaic today from the point of view of the almost exclusively distinctive evolution of the cinema.

Pelechian: When I said that music had inspired scientists, I had in mind beautiful music, real music, not supermarket music. It’s the same thing for cinema. It’s become a commercial industry, but there are the jewels of cinema that can and will be able to be sources of inspiration and knowledge. Films that take cinema seriously can inspire serious scientists. But there is also the market of science. . . .

I myself am also dependent on the cinema market, but there will always be people to fight for true cinema. What is required of cinema today?

Niney: Your films incorporate original camerawork as well as archival images, direct sounds as well as music. How do you con- struct your work in concrete terms?

Pelechian: I have an idea for a screenplay and before everything I see the film in its entirety. The music is not necessarily determined in advance, but I hear its rhythms and tonalities. And when I sense that it fits, that it exists, I begin to write the script. But for me the film is already ready, only its technical production remains to be settled in order to convince other people that it can be made. It’s a matter of recreating stage by stage- writing, shooting, montage- the film that I’ve already seen in my head. And there are very few things that can change, some details, but the composition doesn’t change. Now, I’ve already seen the film, but I want others to see it too.

There is an internal, formal necessity in the choice and the arrangement of the different elements. If you break this dish on the ground, with the pieces you can only reconstruct this dish, or else a mosaic, a collage. My goal, when I use archival images, is not to set them out in pieces but to melt them into a primary matter in order to recreate a new form. The camerawork, mine or that of the archives, be present.

Niney: How do you explain the fact that it’s taken so long for your films to be discovered?

Pelechian: One has to believe that some of those in the Soviet Union who had seen my films had not wanted them to be seen elsewhere. Perhaps after seeing my children, the licensed doctors of social realism judged them to be abnormal. So they put them in a drawer. They grew up there. And then there are visitors who came to see these children and they found the children normal, useful to humanity. All I can say is that the pathologist was mistaken.

Niney: Are the pathologists in question still in office?

Pelechian: They change because time has gotten the better of them.

Niney: Your last film, Notre siècle, dates from 1982 in its initial version. Can you talk about your next film, Homo Sapiens, a project dating back to 1987? Will it resemble the others?

Pelechian: It’s still too soon. It will have a cozy air, there will still be no speech, but it will not resemble the others. It’s perhaps because we’ve talked too much about it that it’s not yet made [ laughter ]. I can say one thing: its production requires means other than those available in the former Soviet Union, including co-production and special effects.

 

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10 of Artavazd Peleshian’s 11 films

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‎Mountain Vigil (1964)
‘About the struggle of man’s will and muscles against nature, about the rock-climbers who prevent landslides and eliminate their consequences. Peleshyan’s first film has the least amount of transcendence but sets up his viewpoint perfectly.’ — PARAJANOV-VARTANOV INSTITUTE

the entirety

 

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Zemlya lyudey (1966)
‘Essay praising human life and work, the everlasting beauty and expression of human thought.’ — IMDb

Watch the entirety here

 

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Beginning (1967)
‘Beginning is a cinematographical essay about the October Revolution of 1917. One of the unique visual effects used in this film is achieved by holding snippets of film still on a single frame, then advancing only for a second or two before again pausing on another, resulting in a stuttering visual effect.’ — ArtReview

the entirety

 

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We (1969)
‘The motif of energy conversion infuses the formal structure of Artavazd Peleshian’s film We. Assimilating two basic laws of thermodynamics, movement, pressure, temperature smelt images down to refined, low entropy nuggets of kinetic exhortation. Huge telluric chunks smash into jarring seventh brass chords, each one coded explosion and collision. The Eisenteinian tractor ploughing abstract patterns of revolutionary ardour into the psyche has been nuclearised. A long fuse burns retroactively from Peleshian’s undulating masses into the jagged insurgents that rampage across the editing cuts of Stachka (Strike, 1924) and Oktyabr (October, 1927). The conversion of energy is not just a metaphor that underlies the transformations of a revolutionary body politic, it also manifests the pathos of history, of time, and of memory as a kind of collective heat loss, an infinite sum of the finest gradations of temperature, each one a scintilla of the collective furnace of history hungry for fuel, desperate for ignition. These seeped quanta of barely perceptible warmth are sheathed in image-sound processes, that is oriented images and sounds, temporary associations, an architecture of movement. Cinema can transform this pathos into a glimmering throng of shining moments. The frenetic effort on screen does not dissipate into an entropic pool but rather resonates across a web of taut processes: faces linked with façades linked with shuddering avalanches, hands that wield the steal and coal of heavy industry fused to outstretched arms supporting a coffin, rivulets and currents in an ocean of bodies that resemble the laminar flow of lava cross-hatched across a violently erupting volcanoe. In a central image of the film a bobbing mass of heads on screen flow smoothly forwards then backwards, pivoting on an abrupt inflection. This edit point is a singular point, the core of a primordial gif. That dimensionless point houses…’ — Paul Macovaz

the entirety

 

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Inhabitants (1970)
‘About Inhabitants, Peleshian said: “Many people were offended or insulted by We. After that experience, I was mad at mankind and decided to make a film about animals. Animals don’t get upset, but at the same time, by focusing on them, I could say the same things as I was saying about people”.’ — Letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Seasons of the Year (1972)
‘Artavazd Peleshyan’s Seasons of the Year (1975), a film-essay about the contradiction and the harmony between man and nature, was the the 2nd and the last collaboration with Mikhail Vartanov, who had directed Autumn Pastoral (1971) from Peleshian’s screenplay. In the Seasons of the Year (1975), for the first time, Artavazd Pelechian did not use any archival footage thanks to Vartanov’s exquisite cinematography and his wizardry in the lab. The film was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), the Venice International Film Festival La Biennale, TIFF and the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam IDFA.

‘Peleshian’s Seasons of the Year (1975) is one of the 3 most important documentary films made in Armenia, along with Sergei Parajanov‘s Hakop Hovnatanian (1967) and Vartanov‘s Paradjanov: The Last Spring (1992). Seasons of the Year (1975) was voted by BFI British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound among the Greatest Films of All Time as well as the separate poll of the Greatest Documentaries of All Time.’ — PARAJANOV-VARTANOV INSTITUTE

the entirety

 

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Our Century (1982)
‘In no other Pelechian film has the ecstasy over human achievement mingled with the agony of existence in such an intricate fashion. The point is not the establishment of a simple irony, but of an exploration of what makes humanity go on, against all odds. “Our Century is a film about us, about me. It’s about what I’m striving for, what we’re all striving for- every person, humanity. But the wishes and desires of the people to ascend, to transcend, are literally carried out by the cosmonauts” – Artavazd Pelechian.’ — play-doc

the entirety

 

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End (1992)
‘During a train trip from Moscow to Yerevan, Artavazd Pelechian films the passengers, men and women of different ages and origins. This collective journey, steadily unspooling against an uncertain horizon, can be seen as a metaphor for life, a certain notion of destiny.’ — Fondation Cartier

the entirety

 

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Life (1993)
‘A poetic essay on the beginning of life and its symbolic meaning. The director works with the images as if they were a musical score. His films are odes symphony that speak of humanity, nature and the cosmos.’ — rise-kult

the entirety

 

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Nature (2020)
‘More than 25 years after Artavazd Pelechian’s previous film, the now 82-year-old director has surprised the world with a new work. The simple title masks a film of great complexity about the magnificence and destructive power of nature. The film is made up of found footage sequences that cast humankind as a puny match for the great forces of nature, such as volcanic eruptions, roiling floods, hurricanes and tornados.

‘Although much of the footage was plucked from the internet, Pelechian shapes them in such a way that they merge seamlessly with his own utterly unique style, one that he has been steadily refining throughout his career. In short, the images are black-and-white, free of dialogue, and tend to have a monumental quality. They gain meaning when subjected to Pelechian’s celebrated “distance montage” technique, with repetition and subtle variation generating the work’s poetic intensity.

‘Using this highly individual but nonetheless timeless film idiom, in La Nature Pelechian presents us with an utterly contemporary and urgent film that shakes us from the illusion that humanity can control nature.’ — IDFA

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s really good. Give your doggie a behind-the-ears ‘you’re welcome’ scratch for me, or, wait, for Love, very different. Now that’s a question for the ages. Love surely has it within his powers to find the original person who looked at that admittedly quite beautifully shaped creamy white object extruding from a chicken’s posterior and thought, ‘Hm, I wonder …’. I wonder if people back then subsequently became very curious and started nibbling at everything that came out of non-humans’ butts. I wonder if it was like the scat equivalent of the gold rush. Hm. Love using that same power to find the first person who picked his or her or their nose and ate it, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you! ** Misanthrope, Do, it’s his best in my opinion, as I guess I already said. Do you have some kind of inside information that Nadal is going to win Wimbledon then? ‘Cos it sure sounds like it. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s really good, dude. I’ve never heard of ‘Slow Horses’. Hm, maybe I can find a bootleg. ** Bill, Was Kyle Muntz a d.l. here? Hm, I don’t recall. I do like his work, so his being a DC’s vet would be cool. I’ll get that new one. ** ANGUSRAZE (prrrrp), I’m fine, thanks. And thanks about ‘Frisk’. Chuffed hat you feel connected to it. Obviously, share the promo shoot if you do it. Ace! Uh, the film … we’re scrambling to get the last funding. We’re interviewing potential crew members. The film is about a family who turns their home into a haunted house attraction, to give you the simplest explanation. Lots of things happen within that. Max out that free time, and I know you will. Victory is within your grasp! ** Jeff J, Cool, it’s really, really good. I loved it. Mm, I think DCTV is either on hiatus at the moment or in the past, I’m not really sure. I’ll ask him. Obviously all the luck breaking the novel’s logjam. Hm, I don’t think I have one particular method of getting through the stuck parts other than putting it aside and just thinking about it rather than labouring over it. And inputting as much exciting prose and film or art or music or whatever as possible until the inevitable breakthrough. I guess it’s really just getting past the psychological stuff and reenergising. Pretty basic? I still don’t know precisely what Michael’s health problem is, but I have been told he’s on the mend, which is great. I don’t know about Bookworm’s restarting plans. I’m aiming to find out more, of course. ** Steve Erickson, They are? It’s true that it’s been ages since anything they put out was of seeming interest to me. MRI, that’s serious. I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Wait, I must’ve. The term MRI does have a costly vibe about it, but maybe not? Yes, we are stuck with the difficult one for the foreseeable future. I’ll look for the Jace Clayton book, interesting. Thanks! ** Okay. Artavazd Peleshian’s films were/are much beloved by the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, by Godard especially, and yet they’re not widely known. A bit more in France where’s there been recent resurgence of interest in him of late. Very beautiful work. Very worth experiencing and knowing. And that’s the blog’s suggestion to you for today. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Meet Vanessa Salomon, a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family. Her twin sister is a famous movie star, which Vanessa resents deeply and daily. The only man Vanessa ever loved recently killed himself by jumping off the roof of her building. It’s a full life.

‘Vanessa has just started working on an English translation of a titillating, experimental thriller by a dead author when she’s offered a more prominent gig: translating the latest book by an Extremely Famous French Writer who is not in any way based on Michel Houellebecq. As soon as she agrees to meet this writer, however, her other, more obscure project begins to fight back – leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself.

‘Peppered with ‘sponsored content’ providing cocktail recipes utilizing a brand of liquor imported by the film director Steven Soderbergh, and with a cameo from the actress Juno Temple, Bad Eminence is at once a sexy, old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov, as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity.’ — And Other Stories

Buy it

 

Trailer

 

Praise

‘James Greer has always been a novelist I would hock my skills set to measure up against, but even matched against his prior coups, Bad Eminence is unspeakably exciting. Its grace and hilarity and brains and foolproof read on Frenchness and I don’t even know what else made my hands shake.’ — Dennis Cooper

‘I take exception to the characterisation of my hair as “difficult”, as my hair is in fact perfect, which I can prove in a court of law. Everything else James wrote is exactly as it happened, to the best of my memory.’ — Juno Temple

‘With eye and ear and tongue – and oh brother, what a tongue! – James Greer is the leading Renaissance Man for our current and possibly terminal Dark Ages.’ — Joshua Cohen

‘A Nabokovian thriller, light-hearted and caustic, which is also a subtle reflection on all forms of manipulation, be they criminal, corporate, amorous or . . . novelistic.’ — Éric Chevillard, Le Monde

‘Greer’s lyrical erudition is both serious work and seriously fun . . . proof that there remain new places to go, both on paper and in the known universe.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Bad Eminence is, at one and the same time, a diatribe against narrative; a fiendishly engaging mystery; a learned disputation on the arts of translation; a masterful addition to the literature of sisters and twins; a roman à clef (I’ll never tell); a catalogue raisonné of the French nouveau roman; and the most literate advert for Bolivian firewater you’ll ever encounter. By turns wildly maddening, laugh-out-loud funny, heartrendingly poignant, Bad Eminence pulls you into its world like no other. You will not regret a moment spent romping in its lexical playfields.’ — Howard A. Rodman

‘Greer has done it again: a big-city, techno-jargon-filled thrill-ride with slick medium-brow drop references to our (once-shared) mythological hometown. What could be more poignant?’ — Robert Pollard

‘Artificial Light skates on the purity of confession. It’s a brutal reveal; an Abyss Narrative with hooks. Read it in a rush of abomination and rise above, rise above.’ — Stephen Malkmus

 

Excerpt

On December 11, 1942, a child was born to the Breunn family of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England. His name was T. Edward Breunn – and that’s all we know. As most authors and publishers would prefer of their translators, Mr Bruenn managed to make himself so invisible as to have left nearly no evidence of his passage through this world. What little has been recorded is due only to the diligence of some librarian back in the age of paper. He or she made note of the above details, and no others, on the original, analogue, card-catalogue entries for his little-known English version of Kafka’s The Trial (1981). Later, presumably, these entries were transcribed with neither comment nor correction and entered into the great digital record in the sky.
—-I can find no record of his death. We’ll just have to assume the best.
—-But, the thing is, I’m working on my own translation of Robbe-Grillet’s Souvenirs du triangle d’or, and Breunn is responsible for the only extant edition in English. And Breunn’s isn’t bad, credit where it’s due, but I’m not so sure he could actually speak French. I think I can do better. I was born in a trilingual household, you see – French, English and money – so I’m as comfortable in each as in my own skin.
—-Which is to say, mostly. Better, being able to speak money fluently means there aren’t many other languages that won’t yield to you with just a whisper in the tongue of tongues. I’m also conversant with Latin, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic . . . Take my word for it.
—-How, you may ask, can I say that Breunn’s Souvenirs isn’t bad when he didn’t know the language? Well, funny story. There are a fuck ton of competing theories out there about translating, from Walter Benjamin to Hilaire Belloc to Paul Ricoeur to Susan Sontag to Hannah Arendt to R. Pevear to AS Wohl to L. Davis to J. Malcolm to every person who’s ever read a book. But let me sum up: nobody can agree what makes a good translation; nobody can agree what makes a bad translation; everybody agrees that it would be ideal if every- one could read the original work in the original language; everybody knows this is impossible.
—-Beyond or alongside these widely acknowledged (by trans- lators) competitive dogmas, the history of translation is fraught with eccentrics, frauds and prodigiously talented amateurs, without which much of the world’s literature would remain inaccessible to most of the world’s readers. Lin Shu couldn’t read a word of any foreign language, but in the early twentieth century translated something like two hundred works of Western literature – Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens and so on – into classical Chinese, on the basis of a plot paraphrase from a polyglot friend. Simon Leys claimed that Lin Shu somehow managed, through a superior command of style in his native tongue, to improve in many cases on the originals. He’s an outlier, I think we can agree. Also that’s not translation so much as, you know, writing.
—-The Torah’s third-century BcE translation into Greek famously took seventy (or seventy-two, depending on who’s counting, though even this has been challenged, notably in 1684 by Humphry Hody, a name I did not make up) Alexandria-based scholars to render from the original Hebrew, despite which or possibly because of which they still got a lot of stuff wrong, with repercussions that reverberate still among the religiously disposed. The Vulgate or Latin translation of the Bible, produced mostly by St Jerome in the late fourth century cE and later revised in 1592 by a troupe of performing angels, introduced – right at the top, I might add – a mistake that has slandered the entirely innocent apple (is any fruit entirely innocent, though?) down through the centuries. It was a fig, people. If you don’t believe me, consult Northrop Frye’s The Great Code. And don’t even get me started on the King James Version, another translation by committee that proves . . . I don’t know what it proves, exactly. Because for every grievous error perpetrated by that Jacobean assemblage, any number of foundational turns of phrase – without which cliché-mongers would be bereft of such succulents as ‘a drop in the bucket’, ‘a fly in the ointment’ and ‘a labour of love’ – would have gone missing forever from the collective minds of anglophone civilisation.
—-Sometimes a really outstanding author whose book might otherwise be considered untranslatable (though, as noted above, there’s a sense in which all books are untranslatable) is fluent in several languages and can oversee a given trans- lation him or herself, as was the case in, e.g., Ulysses’ French rendering, though ‘oversee’ is maybe an unfortunately ableist term considering Joyce was mostly blind at that point. But that’s as rare as Joyce himself was rare. His interest in all languages or in surpassing language itself (using language), particularly in Finnegans Wake, while possibly a doomed undertaking, incorporates translation into the writing, which is sort of the opposite of what Lin Shu did.
—-On the antipodal pole, may I present Constance Garnett, whose Englished versions of Russian classics you likely grew up reading, assuming you read Russian classics growing up, and which are objectively terrible as translations, but are responsible in large part for popularising those authors (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in particular) with the English- speaking public. So while it’s true that if you read her version of Anna Karenina you are reading Constance Garnett as much as – if not more than – you are reading Tolstoy, at least you are palpating Tolstoy’s bones, and there now exist much better, or at least more accurate, translations of his work for your edification, or whatever you read books for.
—-Xavier Hadley, a much lesser-known light than Ms Garnett, possibly because he chose only to translate into Scottish Gaelic (his best known work is Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh, a version of John Knox’s Book of Common Order), had the curious habit of sketching his first drafts on dried peas with a tiny brush made from the plucked hairs of a common housefly, without the use of a microscope. It will perhaps tell you something about the special nature of the community of professional translators (we have our own magazine!) that Hadley is con- sidered by some a bit of a show-off, but on the whole sound in his approach.
—-It boils down to this: you try to get down as best you can what the writer has written while also reproducing the way the writer wrote it – but in another language. With all its different rhythms, idioms, vocabularies. You try to make the reader reading in the target language believe they’re reading what the original writer wrote, had the original writer written in the reader’s language: a magic trick seldom executed with apodictic success. Howlers are as ineluctable as the modal- ity of the visible; but one can on occasion by careful and patient application of the intellect, if that’s the word I want, find elegant solutions to problems of inelegance. That’s the shit I live for.
—-There’s no money in it, so it’s good I don’t need money. The crucial aspect, from my tendentious POV, is that you love the writer you’re translating. The ones I love are precisely the ones who call themselves, or get themselves called, untranslatable. The stylists, the weirdos, the outsiders and innova- tors. Which makes and has made them extremely difficult. But when it’s an ardorous task, it’s never arduous. Hold your applause, please.
—-If I’ve done my job right, I will have made myself vanish as entirely as Mr Breunn’s prénom. The writer is, and ought to be, the star of the show. The translator ought to be, in the best sense of the word, invisible. Does that bother me, you ask? Let’s say it doesn’t bother me anymore. It may even be that I’ve come to enjoy that part of the job most.
—-Shit. There’s the doorbell. Hold on while I . . . oh, it’s my upstairs neighbour. She’s never home. I suppose I’ll have to – socialise.

 

Interview
from SmokeLong

One time in college I didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, so a friend of mine invited me to her parents’ house. When I got there I found that her entire room was festooned floor to ceiling with elephants. There were elephant posters and stuffed elephants, elephant statues and books about elephants. I’d never known that she was an elephant person and suddenly, there it was. Are you secretly an elephant person? Or is this story an aberration? Or, to put it another way, where on earth did this story come from?

That’s sad that you didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving. I have the opposite problem. My parents always want me to come home for every holiday, and I long ago ran out of good excuses not to go. Now I just say, “I’m too busy.” They’ll accept that because I come from a hard-core Protestant work ethic family. My story about elephants has something to do with watching news coverage of one of the several wars the United States is conducting in desert places. I think I saw a picture of a tank buried up to its turret in sand and it reminded me of an elephant. It’s fair to call it an aberration because it was not something I had planned on writing. I have no special interest in elephants.

You are a very busy man! Cursory googling (nothing too scary I promise) reveals you to be a screenwriter, novelist, musician, and short story writer… possibly other things…. Could you talk a little bit about your approach to different projects? I guess what I mean is, when you set out to do something, do you know ahead of time what form it will take? Do you start out saying “okay, let’s write a song,” for instance, or is it more of a nebulous urge which then finds suitable form? Or is it something else? (Also, do you talk to yourself in plural form, or am I alone in that?)

Usually with movies I’m asked to write a specific thing so there’s little choice involved. But in general I work out the form and structure of what I’m going to write before I write it, in great detail, in my brain. For a novel I write the ending first, then the beginning, then I work on whatever section in between that I want, because I already know where it fits in the book. A story like “Elephants” is little more than an expanded image. Sometimes those will come into my head independent of my intention and I write them down hoping they will lead somewhere. This one didn’t go any further than what I wrote, and that’s fine. I live alone, so I do talk to myself a lot. Usually in the third person, though. “Good job, idiot! Now there’s pickle juice all over the kitchen floor!”

The stories of yours that I have read and heard evince a great interest in history. This sets them apart from most short fiction I’ve read, at least on the internet, where writing seems much more personal, slice-of-life. Did you study history? Do you draw from it purposely, or does it just naturally come out? (I picture you sitting in your house with a pipe, surrounded by vellum and papyrus…)

I’ve never studied history systematically but I’ve always been interested in the subject. The first books I remember reading were biographies of historical figures. When I was maybe six or seven years old my mom would take me to the library and I would check out as many books as I could physically carry (at that age, not many). I went to a public high school that was lucky enough to have one teacher who could teach Latin. He smoked a pipe that smelled like cherry wood. I was his only student, so we were able to cram six years of Latin into two years. Learning Latin is difficult but extremely rewarding. If you know Latin, when you come across a word like “uxorial,” for instance, you know immediately what it means, because “uxor” is the Latin word for “wife.”

What’s France like? I’ve never been there. Actually, I’ve never been anywhere. Except one time to Sydney, Australia, which seems to be mainly populated by fruit bats.

The thing I like best about Australia, possibly, is that their “paper” money is made out of plastic. You can’t tear it no matter how hard you try. I was in Sydney once for New Year’s Eve, which you probably know is like their July 4th, because in Australia January is summer and July is winter. Everything is topsy-turvy. I was staying on an upper floor of a tall hotel not five hundred meters from another tall building where at midnight they set off fireworks for twenty minutes or so. That was really beautiful. Coincidentally I am working with a director who lives in Sydney and not long ago we had a meeting via Skype. I’ve never done that before. It was really weird. The whole time, I kept thinking “you’re in Sydney, Australia, it’s 8:30 in the morning tomorrow where you are, and it’s 3:30 in the afternoon yesterday where I am.” The meeting was not productive, because I wasn’t really listening. I was trying to decide whether this qualified as time travel or not. France has really great roads. The highways are smooth, and the back roads are well-maintained. Also, something like 80% of their electricity comes from nuclear power. Paris is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen.

What do you think will happen to this interview? Do you think anyone will read it? Do you think it’ll still be around in ten years, or twenty, or fifty, or a hundred? Do you ever think about the future of the internet? Does all this stuff stay around forever? Will there someday be an Archeology of the Internet? Or will it all just go up in smoke?

When I was writing for Spin in the pre-internet era, I assumed that everything I wrote would be forgotten the minute it was printed, if not sooner. About a year ago a friend of mine told me that every back issue had been scanned and put on Google Books. All my juvenilia on public display. Searchable, even. However: unless someone really conscientious is in charge, every written thing pinging around the internet will eventually decay unless backed up and duplicated (in triplicate) on an ongoing basis. The nature of magnetic media is that it decays. CDs have a much shorter shelf-life than vinyl. MP3s are even shorter-lived than CDs. Hard-drives crash and servers fail. My perfervid hope is that everything on the internet will disappear bit by byte, pressed flat by calamitous gravity, shriveling in the data basement. More likely: when Skynet takes over, it will probably keep everything I’ve ever written as a lesson for whatever humans still survive. “This is how stupid you were! You don’t deserve to live!” For me, impermanence is one of the few charms of mortality.

 

Musician

Steven Soderbergh’s Music Video for James Greer/DCTV’s “Histoire seule”

DTCV “Bourgeois Pop”

DTCV “Conformiste”

Guided by Voices (w/ James Greer) – Pantherz – 2/Sept/94

 

Linkage

James Greer @ Wikipedia
James Greer @ goodreads
James Greer @ IMDb
LAist Interview: James Greer
JG on David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Pale King’
James Greer on Sean Kilpatrick’s ‘Fuckscapes’
JG on John Barth’s ‘Every Third Thought’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today the blog and I, its proprietor, are happy to use our domain to help usher James Greer’s new novel into reality. Greer is one of my favorite contemporary fiction writers, and ‘Bad Eminence’ is his greatest book yet. I had the honor of publishing one his earlier novels, ‘Artificial Light’, through my old imprint Little House on the Bowery. In addition to his fiction skills, he’s justly known for his screenplays (for Steven Soderbergh, among others), his rock criticism, and his music. He doesn’t like this being mentioned so much — sorry, Jim — but he was a member of Guided by Voices during their golden early 90s period, which, obviously, gives him godlike status for me in and of itself. Anyway, I super highly recommend that you forage through the welcome post then get/read ‘Bad Eminence’. It’s amazing. ** David Ehrenstein, Thankfully I don’t think his evil has penetrated the borders of France, as far I know. ** Billy, Yay, that love was the goal and point! I guess amusing generated by the near invisible is enough, right? I haven’t really liked Terence Davies’s films since the early ones, but ‘Benediction’ cut through and got to me for some reason. I’m down with ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, but I find it impossible not to wonder what it would have been if Kubrick had lived long enough to supervise/do the entire edit. There are points where I wonder if he would have agreed with the decision making. Anyway what did you think of it? I’m okay. The fundraising is stressful and consuming, but hopefully that’ll pay off soon. Thanks for asking. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I keep hoping Rosser Shymanski, who was the person inside DeAundra, will revive her, but he seems to be past it. I think the title ‘Rohypnol’ is enough to get me to test it at least, you know? DeAundras for the starring role in every country’s government, I say! Your love of yesterday was so right. Love changing dogs’ biology so they can eat chocolate, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Happy to enlighten you kind folks in the UK! ** Steve Erickson, If I had the money, I think I’d start a 7″ vinyl only record company maybe. Or maybe one of those ‘single of the month club’-type things like Sub Pop used to do. No, I don’t think I knew about that “gay porn” film shot in the Parthenon. Unless I’m spacing. Cool. Everyone, Mr. Erickson has something that might well be of considerable interest to no small number of you: ‘Do you remember the “gay porn” film shot in the Parthenon last year, which became a media scandal? It’s actually a 35-minute short made by a Greek anarchist collective, and it’s up for viewing here‘ ** Misanthrope, Scaredy cat. Oh, right, Wimbledon. Haven’t been paying attention. Might be fun. Well, then I presume his asshole must be sparkling clean, no? ** Okay. Please dig into the evidence of James Greer’s new novel until further notice aka tomorrow at least.