ekleksographia wave two

Yes, All the Errors is very hard going. The Italian is extremely difficult. Manganelli was a true master of his language, and he wrote by exploring its complexity. Problems of translation were very great, and I simply had to accept that there was much that couldn't be literally rendered. He would work, for example, with all the verbs of descent in the Italian language; last night I was reading his last novel, and there's a passage built around all the Italian quasi-synonyms for hatred — from disprezzo, to uggia, to ruggine, and then through several more to irreparable disamore; or he'd explore all the cognates of a word. English sometimes doesn't have quite as many synonyms in quite the same places; or we'll have a few cognates, but not some others. What do you do with a passage that's built around andare, andante, andazzo, andamento and andirivieni? So the delicate problem with All the Errors was to make up for effects that I couldn't reproduce by supplying others that the book seemed to authorize, without actually having employed. If there were moments where the language grew thinner, I had to find others where I could allow it to grow thicker. It was a question of trying to respect or reconstruct an overall tone. I'm happy to be able to say that Manganelli very much liked my work — he was very learned and highly sophisticated as a professor of English literature — and I think that the greater simplicity of the English text reveals qualities that are not quite so clear, or that are kept in a different register, in the Italian. I mean qualities in Manganelli as a writer. The language in the English translation is less stunning, or less of a shield, or keeps you at less of a distance, and Manganelli's genius as a narrator looms a bit more conspicuously into view. There's also the fact that high rhetoric in English almost inevitably lists toward the Biblical, and that was a tone that Manganelli very much appreciated. The one time I met him, he talked about "resonance" as a crucial quality of language — as though the aura of metaphysics contains and reveals a truth that we can no longer find or believe in in metaphysics itself. I hope you'll be seeing more of his work in English — the NEA permitting. I'd like to do the last book that Manganelli wrote, the one I mentioned a few lines back — La palude definitiva.

And yes, I think I understand what you mean about doing a translation — or anything else — simply for The Reader, who may be God or Apollo: "the tutelary silent mind of the world." The feeling of doing something that simply deserves to be done; or the feeling that there is always an ear that hears that tree that falls in the forest. Gurdjieff tells us — and not only Gurdjieff — that everything exists to be eaten by something else, and that the gods feed themselves on our human thoughts.