¿Cuáles son los objetivos de los escritores de literatura? Ah…Una de nuestras autoras, Jamaica Kincaid menciona en varias entrevistas su “insistencia de la verdad”, incluso si, y especialmente si, la verdad es dolorosa. Contar las cosas tal cual, despertar, sacarnos los lentes color de rosa y obligarnos a ver y sentir la realidad. No es poco usual que los escritores insistan en decir que presentan verdades en su ficción. Joseph Conrad por ejemplo; dijo: “Mi tarea… es hacerte escuchar, sentir —es, por encima de todo, hacerte ver con el poder de lo escrito”.
An Introduction to Literature. Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Second Printing. SYLVAN BARNET.Tufts University
Con esa definición, no escribo literatura. Yo escribo ficción. Lo que sea que sucede cuando dejo algo escrito no es una forma de encontrar la verdad. Porque hay una buena porción de mentiras en ello.
Diviértete contando la verdad o inventándola. Pasto kalo.
In Exophony 1 and 2, I blabbed about what exophony is and reviewed a short list of writers who found themselves in a different language. Which means I’m not all lost writing in this terrible language.
Today I’ll only quote a bit of Chantal Wright’s essay «Exophony and literary translation. What it means for the translator when a writer adopts a new language[1]«. Where she rationalizes about OWNING A LANGUAGE.
«When deliberating on the title of this essay, I initially considered calling it ‘On writing in a language which is not one’s own and what this means for the translator’. But to do so would be to uphold two stubborn myths: one, that a language belongs to a certain territory and body of people, which in fact no language does…»
German is spoken in Austria and Switzerland (besides Germany), English… that’s spoken even in my municipality. Yes, native speakers. Morocco, Switzerland and Quebec in Canada do parle le français. Portuguese is carioca too!
It might not be the everyday thing we speak or think; OURS BY CHOICE OR FORCE. Of the 62 native languages in Mexico, I speak none. I’m a child of the conquest[2]…
EXOPHONIC WRITERS THAT MIGHT NOT BE ON THE LIST
The Wikipedia listing is longer than what I initially thought. Don’t stop there. It is an old phenomenon. Authors like Flavius Josephus[3]. He didn’t make the list in spite of starting life as Yosef to end up being Titus when he was taken as an interpreter slave.
Maybe there are authors who were exophonous without anyone realizing! Or because no one knew much about them. Think a Mr. “No one really knows his real name” who wrote <<Una canasta de cuentos mexicanos>>. It is said he came from the States[4] as German or Polish or who knows where from. Spanish wasn’t his native tongue, for sure.
Hereby we are left with an undetermined number of exophonic writers. Interesting eh?
DOES ONE CHANGE LANGUAGE ONLY WITH MIGRATION?
No. It can be a retail strategy. More readers, although more competition.
IT IS POSSIBLE TO FEEL FREER IN A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE.
For Aga Lesiewicz, English was a more honest way to express herself, giving her the confidence and changing her on the way.
I prefer it because I can attain a certain musicality I wouldn’t in Spanish.Besides, it forces me to think as the character. Not what I think or want out of the situation. Why do you think the blog was born in Spanish. Just a bloody journal about what I discover about writing fiction and the noise it buzzes in my head.
To others, it is just a way to disguise themselves. To experiment with their own identity or learn to survive in their new environment. Nabokov went out riding buses to write Lolita in the right colloquial English.
We write in a different language because it makes us happy too. Prejudices or not.
DO WE WRITE WELL?
I’ve only read Gibran and Kundera[5]…in Spanish. Never in the original language. Both are great.
Me? I gotta think I do. Otherwise, I should just give up the blog and life altogether (no job, not published, just doing this cause I care for it more than I care about other stuff[6]).
Would you try? Against any prediction or prejudice?
Have fun writing in your own or whatever language you have chosen/are forced to write in. Pasto kalo.
[1] Wright, Chantal (2010) Exophony and literary translation: what it means for the translator when a writer adopts a new language. Target, 22 (1). pp. 22-39. Quotation found in https://benjamins.com/online/target/articles/target.22.1.03wri ; the original can be read through a 300 euro subscription so, no thanks.
[2] If you are thinking it is thanks to you. No. It is because of you. Not the same. Be conscientious. Just that. Thank you.
[3] Josephus, Flavius /dʒəʊˈsiːfəs/ ( c. 37– c. 100), Jewish historian, general, and Pharisee; born Joseph ben Matthias . His Jewish War gives an eyewitness account of the events leading up to the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66, in which he was a leader.
[4] I remember some museum exhibition that featured the guy as a part of the display (don’t ask what was the title or the artist on display since I don’t remember that, nor the museum) in which it was implied he came to Mexico after passing through the States where he changed his name to Bruno Traven —maybe I’m just adding more gossip to it for my memory is not photographic— from Red Marut and even before Red Marut; there seemed to have been other changes, The point is, NO ONE KNOWS WHERE HE IS FROM, THUS NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HE ORIGINALLY SPOKE.
[5] Read The unbearable lightness of being, originally written in Czech (his mother tongue), a language I wouldn’t even dare to mess with.
[6] Hence, I’m a nobody. I’m useless to you if you send me your baby manuscript for me to read and promote. It’s me who needs you. Sorry.
Does perfection exist? We’re not machines and nowadays there’s GPT chat and others to write haikus, tv scripts and Phyton code. Are we going to stop writing just because of that?
The better stories and jokes, the simple ones told around a camp fire… I correct myself from this idea for the sole reason I read Sapiens after this entry.
The best stories, the ones we happen to come upon just by entering the world, are the ones of religion, History, law and in all cases, humanity. The stories about what we are, how we are and what we should do.
Stories that have had centuries to be passed around, discussed and even persecuted. It doesn’t matter how many loose ends they have, their narrative resources exceed the life time’s length.
They’ve got silences and onomatopoeias and clichés. Clichés we admire, despise or overlook but we never ignore. The handsome some god’s child, the impossibly double bound virgin Mary (seductive because she is a virgin and seductive because we know she isn’t a virgin), the merchant who listened to a god’s voice turned into prophet, the idea of a country we need to belong to, the idea that progress always goes forward and it’s always better, the notion of being better than… any other thing that isn’t human.
IS PERFECTION WORTH IT?
Between us and the programme? I guess the programme is to win. The AI can write faster than I and I write really slowly. And not as many words as others. The programme needs a shorter amount of time to go and polish the story to the extent that all those other perfectionned stories have had the time to be polished by centuries.
A mortal person has to sit down and dream. Whether or not with a layout. In occasion, waste time talking to people. Living. Thinking hard how this and that character would react so the plot won’t feel like the “Cincinnati Kid[1]” girl who would take a pair of scissors and cut out the puzzle pieces for them to fit into the puzzle.
We have to round our pebbles as fast as we can; with glass shards in such a long beach others have left their own pebbles. Some bigger and prettier than others. I think we writers want to leave behind, at least one of those. A shiny rounded pebble.
Thus perfection is worth it. Pasto kalo.
[1] A movie I couldn’t finish watching for reasons I can’t remember but had nothing to do with it being boring.
There is one called metonymy. The one in which the reader does the closure job and is very similar to “the part for the whole” or vice versa. Metonymy’s something akin to this:
«Les dijeron que fueran a hablar con la Iglesia».
They were told to go and talk to the Church”
Churches are buildings. They don’t speak. Until we think the people managing them does. But it is not usual to say: “They were told to go and speak to the bishops and cardinals representing the catholic religion”. No, we make it short and use the building or the institute’s image as subs.
In such way, we’re able to make the duplicity of literature to exist. Closure, as understood in gestalt, is something that happens both in poetry as in comics through symbolic relationships. Just think in the bat…chap and you will get it.
WHAT’S ITS RELATION TO COMICS?
Alfredo Ballesteros names a book in his discerning about why comics and poems are alike. Let’s take a peek at what the author [Scot McCloud] has to say [heavily edited for reasons regarding copyright and my own convenience1. Afterwards, I’ll explain things he couldn’t have guessed just because he doesn’t write poetry. NOTE: BEFORE I TRANSLATED THIS ENTRY, I HADN’T READ THE BOOK. THUS, IF YOU FIND I HAVE BEEN EXPLAINING THINGS QUITE WELL IT IS ONLY BECAUSE I’M VERY GOOD AT FIGURING THINGS.
UNDERSTANDING COMICS CHAPTER 3 [EDITED]
What do you think happened there? There is a guy with an axe…. Closure! Closure happened. You imagined then, it happened. The gutter is the use of closure in a comic.
Poetry is a rather personal thing. However, as I’ve said somewhere else; once out of your hands, it is the reader’s mind that will come up with whatever it is they want to come up. Specially when dealing with metaphors and metonimies. Let’s see this one:
Where did you meet him,
the thief who took it all from me?
This is part of a song composed because the author’s daughter’s wedding. If you know the fact, you understand it as a show off of paternal love. Yet, ignore that fact and…who stole your love from you? Right? You made up the story. Closure!
McCloud has admitted to this point that written word is the one media that gives more intimacy through closure. What he doesn’t know is that poetry makes that flying jump without the next panel. Poetry can be something as short as a haiku. Haikus have but a single panel. And that’s enough to fly. Rimbaud hits us with two panels… and it is enough to fly. Gustavo Adolfo Becquer hits us with four panels and that’s enough.
Yes, only comics do create in the hybrid way they do. In spite of it, they are not the only media that brings up the dance. Poems and fiction do too.
HOW?
Through the invisible and the visible. Written fiction is the most abstract of possible abstraction. McCloud himself notices it when explaining something in chapter 2 of the book. Nonetheless, he doesn’t get himself into the problem of explaining how it works when writing fiction. He draws comics.
I write fiction about writing fiction and sometimes, fiction itself. I also read webtoons. That’s how I know.
Hasn’t your mind danced to this? Poems create by naming things. Its is our minds that do the rest.
THE END
Fiu. I’m done with “copying” the topic. It was so much of a copy that I wrote 7 entries about comics and poems being alike instead of the original 4 features explained by Ballesteros. At the end, I came up with: silence, sequence, symmetry, subdivision in smaller units (but not the same measuring method) and closure or symbolic relationships; plus the highly educated literacy to be able to create them all as shared features between comics and poems.
I hope the journey was as enjoyable as it was insufferable. It is impossible to learn anything without the hard work. It is impossible to enjoy without the suffering along.
Have you spent a great time creating? Like it, comment it, say I’m crazy (nothing new and quite obvious). Do! Or rest. Pasto kalo.
If you feel like reading it all, I’ll recommend buying it. Nonetheless, there’s always the case taxes have become a little pesky thanks to certain presidents or Amazon policies won’t allow you to properly get it because they don’t deliver such merchandise in your country. In such case I won’t be a prude. You can go to THAT library. ↩︎
My free translation of a Gustavo Adolfo Becquer poem. I don’t remember the number. Please comment if you do. I don’t think I’ll remember to check it up. ↩︎
OR AS A SECOND TITLE: A WORD I COULDN’T FIND ANYWHERE SPEAKING ABOUT POETRY AND THE LESS ABOUT COMICS WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS IN SPANISH
However, I’m not that great looking things ups and it has been enough about why poems and comics are alike in this series of copyist entries (since Adolfo Ballesteros was the chap who did it first and I’m only refuting his ideas with little to none authority according to other men1). Nonetheless, that was before I translated this and found out that any Oxford dictionary can have a number of definitions destroying my affirmations regarding not finding the word.
CLOSURE
4. a sense of resolution or conclusion at the end of an artistic work
• he brings modernistic closure to his narrative.
II. verb — [with obj. ]
1. apply the closure to (a debate or speaker) in a legislative assembly.
– origin late Middle English: from Old French, from late Latin clausura , from claus- ‘closed’, from the verb claudere .
GESTALT
So, finding the start of my thread that has gotten entangled with today’s bad mood; closure as I understood it then wasrelated to a learning theory I happened to come upon when I was a graphic communication design student and to be truthful, I don’t have idea what I did instead of reading the books I was supposed to read since my favourite place was the library[2]. There were beautiful books about typography, folk stencils and, of course, novels! Shake the brain and find the thread again Merriam!
This theory or set of theories is called Gestalt and what teacher mentioned it in class I don’t remember. What I remember is that whenever we take a look at an unfinished shape that looks known; our brain will do the rest and complete the relationship.
TO BE CONTINUED
Men who say women can’t write, men who dismiss names as Safo as an exception. I’d like to see their faces if someone were to mention the job of their lives was written by an anonymous. Yes, I’m being vindictive and awfully resentful, something not feminine (or feminine in witch mode?) but do you know what? GO ASK FOR FEMININE SOMEWHERE ELSE. ↩︎
Los hombres y las mujeres de negocios y los abogados modernos son, en realidad, poderosos hechiceros. La principal diferencia entre ellos y los chamanes tribales es que los abogados modernos cuentan relatos mucho más extraños.Nuval Yoah Harari. Sapiens
¿Es la verdad tal y como la entendemos algo que sale de un individuo al que se le llama juez de justicia? ¿Qué pasa si la verdad tiene unos cuántos ceros extra? ¿Quién convence a este juez de cosas tan extrañas como la inocencia y la culpabilidad; las personas buenas haciendo cosas malas que no están tipificadas como delitos y las malas cometiendo delitos que no son exactamente villanías? ¿Quiénes nos venden objetos no comestibles, inútiles y de cualquier modo innecesarios como anillos de compromiso, juegos de realidad virtual, inteligencias artificiales y teléfonos celulares?
Puedo entender sin necesidad de discursos, la utilidad de una zanahoria… Un teléfono requiere realidades imaginadas mucho más extrañas que la realidad de mi estómago…
¿Qué cosa fantástica puedes inventar que tenga tanto poder como una constitución o un producto? Pásala bien inventando universos paralelos. Pasto kalo.
