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The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay

August 1, 2010 in Challenge, art, book review, translation by Kim | 2 comments

The Birth of Impressionism is the catalogue for the show of the same name on view at the de Young Museum until September 6th.  Exhibit catalogues can be an iffy proposition.  Some are just expensive picture books, others have pedantic essays, but this one strikes the right balance–interesting essays interspersed with the relevant pictures.  Even without visiting the exhibit, this book is a worthwhile exploration of the roots of modern art.

It can be difficult for some to understand what was truly revolutionary about Impressionism.  Looking back from Pop Art to Abstract Expressionism to Surrealism, by the time our eyes land on Impressionism, what’s the big deal?  The Birth of Impressionism grounds the reader in the 1860s art world describing the Salon monopoly and the popular art of the time.  The first section includes four essays on the accepted art of the time: realism, soft porn nudity sold as classicism, grand history painting, and Orientalism.

The catalogue and the show set up Manet as the turning point from the conservative art to modern art.  The essay entitled “Manet:  Innovation and Innovation” nails his pivotal role as an artist who wanted to succeed in the Salon world but opened the door to displaying modern life in a manner that loosened the restrictions of formal painting.  The catalogue doesn’t limit itself to the paintings in the exhibition.  Especially with Manet, it is important to show his development with such works as “Luncheon in the Grass,” “Olympia,” and “The Dead Toreador” none of which are in the show but the book discusses in the context of his career.  The third section of the catalogue, entitled Impressionism and the New Painting shows how Read the rest of this entry »

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Michael Cunningham Writes about Translation

June 21, 2010 in essay, translation by Kim | No comments

I have one final book group tomorrow night before the summer break.  I’m ready for the break, for the opportunity to read whatever I want for the next two months without thinking about what needs to be read for the next group discussion.  (To be perfectly honest, I’ve been known to go to discussion before I finished the book, however that never stops me from having an opinion.)  Tomorrow night we’re discussing Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and I’m on page 10 of 142, not an insurmountable hurdle to complete in 21 hours.  Surprisingly, I’ve already fallen in love with the book.

The flirting stage began with the introduction.  I like reading introductions, Julie Robinson, my book discussion guru. warns against them.  Julie thinks it could steer the reader away from what he or she would otherwise feel about the book.  Maybe, but I’m fairly opinionated and not too easily steered.  When I have the time, I like easing into a book with an introduction.  Michael Cunningham‘s essay on reading and translation is, by far, the best introduction I recall.

Claire and I have spent several lunches and many blog posts discussing translated literature.  Claire consistently feels that reading in translation keeps her at a distance.  I know what she’s feeling, but I wonder if it is because much of the translated literature we have read is from Europe and we’re experiencing a cultural difference.  Cunningham argues that all literature is a work of translation from the ideas in a writer’s head to the printed word.  To a certain extent, he agrees with Claire, but his argument is that the act of writing is a process of translation:

My own translators, the best ones, seem always to battle a sense of failure–the conviction that while they’ve come close they’ve missed something in the original, some completeness, some aliveness, that refuses to quite come through in French or Italian or Japanese.  This, too, is familiar to me.  I always feel the same when a novel has finally exhausted me, and I feel compelled to admit that, although it doesn’t, seem finished, it is as close to completion as I’m capable to getting it.  Some wholeness isn’t quite there.  While I wrote, I felt it hovering around me.  I could taste it, I could almost smell it–the mystery itself.  And even if that published novel has turned out fairly well, there is always that sense of having missed the mark.

Fiction is, than, at least to me, an ongoing process of translation (and mistranslation), beginning with the writer’s earliest impulses and continuing through its rendering into Icelandic or Korean or Catalan.  Writers and translators are engaged in the same effort, at different stages along the line.

I’m reading the 2004 translation by Michael Henry Heim, not the first for Death in Venice which was originally published in 1912.  Cunningham’s introduction was written before all of the Read the rest of this entry »

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Garrison & Garrison Books – San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

May 23, 2010 in book review, bookstore, essay, international, translation, travel, used books by Kim | 4 comments

San Miguel de  Allende is the Mexico of dreams.  Old world charm without the glitz of the beach resorts or the overwhelming problems of the border towns.  It’s an ex-pat haven, approximately 10% of the population are foreigners, mostly Northern Americans, but the ex-pats seem to adopt the Mexican culture rather than attempt to change it.  It’s a city of culture:  music, art, religious ceremonies, great food, and, of course, literature.  The library serves as place to lend books and a community center.   The week we visited there was a classical guitar concert, a literary lecture and a Tennessee Williams play.

San Miguel is a town to meander around.  The colonial buildings open into court yards containing stores, restaurants and galleries.  And if the door is closed?  So much the better because the doors of San Miguel are beautiful, so much so there is a book, aptly named The Doors of San Miguel de Allende, by Robert De Gast, documenting them.

Wandering through the streets, we stumbled upon Garrison & Garrison Books, an English language used bookstore.  It’s fairly tiny store with about 8 bookshelves, a book table and a few tattered but comfy chairs.  The flyers for ex-pat events showed the store was a bit of a community center itself.  The store offers the traveler a variety of literature, mystery or airplane reads.  There is also a selection of local interest books, among them said Doors book.  Before leaving for Mexico, I looked for Life in Mexico by Frances Calderon De La Barca the Scottish wife the Spanish Ambassador from Mexico from 1839-1845, a book of lively letters, but was told that it was out of print.  It was sitting on the table in Garrison & Garrison, I was thrilled until I noticed the size.  It was a doorstop book that I couldn’t imagine carrying around all day and then home in  my luggage.  Every time I was in a taxi that drove by Garrison  & Garrison, I was tempted to ask the driver to pause just for a minute while I ran in to buy a book the weight of a newborn child.

Recommended Reading for San Miguel de Allende

Not willing to endure an aching back from hauling around Life in Mexico, I did read two books that added flavor to my visit.  To make progress on the Essay Challenge, I chose DH Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico.  Traveling in the San Miguel area while reading Lawrence’s essays created a dialogue between what I was seeing and what I was reading.  The essays were written in the 1920s and described a world that is much changed 80 years later, but there was an essence of the place that Lawrence experienced and I sensed.  The courtyard life Lawrence describes in “Corasmin and the Parrots” as he ponders evolution is very Read the rest of this entry »

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Stretching What I Think of as an Essay

May 14, 2010 in book review, essay, translation by Kim | 2 comments

What is an essay?  I heard a few descriptions at a reading of essays from The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by John D’Agata a few weeks ago at REDCAT.

  • An essay is both a verb and a noun because the writer figures out what she thinks as she writes.
  • An essay is a quarrel with the writer’s self or the world.
  • The essay is the reverse of redemption narrative because it doesn’t answer questions, it’s an ongoing argument and asks more questions.
  • It’s a work of art that can change the reader’s perception of self or other people.
  • The essay might not have any function at all.
  • Finally, quoting D’Agata from the book, “I think the essay is a antidote to the stagnancy of writing because the essay tries to replicate the activity of the mind . . . the essay is the equivalent of a mind in rumination, performing as if improvisationally the reception of new ideas, the discovery of unknowns, the encounter with the “other.”

I bought this compilation at Bookshop Santa Cruz last summer as a counter point to the essays in Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay.  The Lost Origins of the Essay is a doorstop compilation of essays from across time and all over the world (other than the United States) that one speaker described as an argument that the essay is a vehicle for art.  The four essays I heard read certainly supported the case for artistic writing:

From 1957 – “Tisanes” by Ana Hatherly are vignettes, some a paragraph, others a sentence.  To date, Hatherly, a Portugal writer, has written 463 Tisanes, approximately a third of them are translated and 15 of those are published.  The provide a flurry of images interwoven with questions and observations that left me contemplative and quiet.

From 1500 B.C.E. – “Dialogue of Pessimism” by Ennatum of Akkad is a conversation between a master and slave wherein the master instructs the slave to an action, the slave instantly agrees in such a Read the rest of this entry »

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Almost Corner Bookstore – Rome, Italy

February 26, 2010 in bookstore, translation by Kim | 5 comments

When I told people I was visiting Rome, several people suggested I stop by the Almost Corner Bookstore.  It sells English books in a cozy shop with wall-to-wall books.  A center table stacks current bestsellers and books with Italy as the subject matter.  Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, due to the release of the film, received the center spot. An observation from a customer who lives in Rome, “clearly Dan Brown didn’t visit Rome before he wrote the book.” For such a small store, they carried an impressive selection of genres, from English fiction and non-fiction to contemporary Chinese literature.  I also noticed several bestsellers in paperback that were still in hardback in the US. [Aside:  This always irritates me.  I finished the third of the Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the  Hornet's Nest, in paperback over the Christmas holidays because a friend bought it overseas.  It won't be out in hardback here until May.]

The atmosphere was fun, when I visited two booksellers were holding court along with a professor from Cal State Los Angeles and an ex-pat who later delivered us to a terrific dinner restaurant.  Their customers are tourists to a certain extent (apparently an Australian Cardinal drops in every time he’s in Rome to buy a novel for the plane ride home), but at least a third are English speaking Rome residents.  Many Italians who read English books because book options are limited in Italian, the publishing world is smaller. The store’s bestsellers are detective and mystery books, even before the likes of Dan Brown, especially if the locale is Italy.  Once Almost Corner buys a book, they keep it until it’s sold.  While the store doesn’t sell used books, some of them may be very old.

Rome was the last stop on our trip to Italy and by the time I reached the Almost Corner Bookstore in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I couldn’t help noticing lots of the small bookstores scattered throughout the country in both large and small cities.  Finding a native English speaker and bookseller, I asked about the prevalence of bookstores everywhere.  The answer, there isn’t competition.  To buy a book is to buy it at the local bookstore.  There are bookstore chains, Read the rest of this entry »

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