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Jun. 7th, 2005 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Halfway through Crowley's The Translator, at a section where there's lots of Russian words and phrases dropped, and the language is flooding back into my memory from shelves and forest shadows. What I'm finding is that all the words I can't remember are replaced by French, which I've dabbled with since. Seriously, they're written right over the Russian words, and not just for cognates. What a strange phenomenon, like my mind has a single English to Foreign dictionary. With a lot of blind spots, I'm basically thinking trilingually, in an Ada-esque grotesquerie. Thankfully Latin is long gone.
Great book by the way. Very Crowley, but successfully invades what you'd think of as Roth territory, nostalgia and Eastern Europe. Unwrapping all kinds of packets of both inside me as well.
I need to pick up Resurrection again. And The Idiot. And reread Akhmatova.
The volume of Elizabeth Bishop fragments and discards has been pushed to February, looks like. There's a new Joseph and His Brothers translation out. I like Lowe-Porter but the new guy's a clearer and faster read, probably indispensable for a book so long and dense.
I'm officially engaged.
Great book by the way. Very Crowley, but successfully invades what you'd think of as Roth territory, nostalgia and Eastern Europe. Unwrapping all kinds of packets of both inside me as well.
I need to pick up Resurrection again. And The Idiot. And reread Akhmatova.
The volume of Elizabeth Bishop fragments and discards has been pushed to February, looks like. There's a new Joseph and His Brothers translation out. I like Lowe-Porter but the new guy's a clearer and faster read, probably indispensable for a book so long and dense.
I'm officially engaged.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 03:09 pm (UTC)Re-reading Akhmatova is cyclical.
An as it's going often at love's breaking,
The ghost of first days came again to us,
The silver willow through window then stretched in,
The silver beauty of her gentle branches.
The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
To us, who fears to lift looks from the earth,
Who are so lofty, bitter and intense,
About days when we were saved together.
-- 1907
(Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, December, 2000)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 06:14 am (UTC)I adore all things Akhmatova. (Including Anne Carson's insertion of her into the Socrates-Sappho-Tolstoy-Artaud sequence of "TV Men".)
And I've finally found a used bookstore with books by John Crowley, which were almost purchased until I was lured away by a 1928 first-edition (one of 750 copies) of an out-of-print novel by my beloved H.D., her only work of extended prose set in ancient Greece, and for which I've been searching for the last seven years. But I *will* be buying Little, Big on the next visit . . .
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Date: 2005-06-09 04:15 pm (UTC)I'm reading Carson too, the earlier pieces. The opacities are maddening but she's so much the real thing that you wonder whether anyone else is.
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Date: 2005-06-09 10:12 pm (UTC)