Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 15

Redaction Ellipses

Redaction, for Martón Koppány (written while listening to this podcast interview of Martón with Geof Huth where they talk about his work and visual poetry.)

Interview with Peter Carey: A Long Way from Home

A while back I had the great privilege of interviewing Peter Carey at the Toronto Public Library about his amazing recent novel, A Long Way from Home. Really fascinating to hear about how he approached addressing the history of Aboriginal people in Australia.

The Tongue is not in Exile: The Polyglot Polyphony of Heritage Languages used in my novel, Yiddish for Pirates and other English Language Fiction.

Selfie in the Gents at the National Library of Ireland
The Tongue is not in Exile: The Polyglot Polyphony of Heritage Languages used in my novel, Yiddish for Pirates and other English Language Fiction.

Talk for AWPI (Associated Writing Programmes Ireland)Friday, April 26, 2019. University College Dublin. 

A few years ago, I began writing a novel called Yiddish for Pirates.  So nu, you have a better idea? Most nights, I’d walk my dog and think about what the book would be about. My regular route took me past the Shalom Village retirement home, lit-up, large and ship-like against the dark. To me, each window seemed like a porthole into a life and it made me think about how each of us is a book, an encyclopedia, an entire library of memories, emotions, and stories. Sometimes we can’t put it all into words. Sometimes the words begin to disappear, become vague, or are difficult to retrieve. Sometimes, the words the best container or conveyance.

I know this will surprise you, but Yiddish for Pirates turned about to be about…Yiddish-speaking pirates. It’s also true that at a signing, a reader came up to me, quite irate, upset that the book wasn’t an instruction manual for pirates to teach them how to speak Yiddish. 
My Jewish pirates live around the time of Columbus and my protagonist is a Bar Mitzvah boy from Eastern Europe who becomes a pirate after being expelled from Spain at the time of the Inquisition. When I began writing the the book, I thought about who might be a good narrator, who might be there to observe all that piratey stuff. Then I realized. Of course, a parrot would be the perfect narrator. It sits on a pirate’s shoulder and observes everything, like a Go Pro camera. And like a Greek chorus of one, it can comment on the action and make sarcastic asides. As I like to say, there’s a wisecrack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. 
And parrots learn the language of whoever they are with, so this Polly was a polyglot. But, parrots (at least the ones that speak human language) have to use the limited language they know, the limited language they have received—the words, tropes and stories—to express their reality. To mediate between themselves, their thoughts and the world. And to question whether this language is expressing their reality or is constructing it.  This is just like human beings. Or writers.  And then I read about the explorer Humboldt who at the end of the 18th century came across an indigenous village that had been entirely destroyed by war. There was no trace of its people or its language left—it wasn’t a written language. Except, there was one parrot that had flown away from the village and knew about 30 words of their language. The language survived because the parrot was a kind of a dictionary, a book. So Humboldt wrote these words down, and was able to figure out the meaning of many of the words since the parrot used them in context. And then I read about a contemporary artist who had taught modern parrots to speak this language. From parrot to parrot, this language, this way of seeing the world, this world view, was passed down. Like with books. 
I  also read about domestic parrots in Australia that escaped into the rain forest and taught the wild parrots how to swear like suburban Australians, but maybe that’s another thing. Maybe my narrator is the original parrot who sailed with my pirate and Columbus, or maybe that parrot passed his story down to another parrot who passed it down to another one and so on. The parrot is like a book. A dictionary. A language.


Memory is an important concept for Jews, but it’s also a feeling. We feel deeply that we should “never forget” and we do our best to pass on our stories and culture, from great tragedies to kugel recipes to jokes and family stories. But we also pass on that “sense” of Jewishness. 
I wanted my book to be filled with Yiddish because it carries the culture, the humour, the memory of Ashkenazi Jews, Jews from Eastern Europe where my family is from. And so my parrot spoke Yiddish.

There’s an old Yiddish saying that I quote in the novel, The tongue is not in exile. It means that even if you have to leave everything behind, even if you are expelled, like the Jews of  Spain in the Inquisition, even if you bring nothing but the clothes on your back, you always bring your language with you. Your words, your sayings, your stories, your jokes, your sounds, your culture and world view. Even the ways you move when you speak. When I think about Yiddish, I move my shoulders in a certain way. The world has a certain texture, a certain philosophy, a certain physics, and it’s carried in the language. And like many Jews, though my knowledge is limited, I have a great love of Yiddish—it’s in my bones.
Yiddish in its vitality and its humour, has an ability to sum up the richness of experience and Jewish being-in-the-world. Wherever Jews went, with or without possessions, they also brought their language. And for me, Yiddish expresses a quintessentially Jewish irony and a fatalistic yet celebratory humour. They tried to kill us but instead we lived and celebrate with good food and family. Life is hard but still, we’re around and can tell jokes about it. We’re often a pessimistically optimistic people. Is the glass half full or half empty? Full-shmull. As long as we have a glass.
Yiddish is a library of our experiences and it has travelled with us through time and space. Somehow, even if you don’t know much Yiddish, you can still get a sense of its way of engaging with the world. In my novel, I engineered a way to have my main characters speak Yiddish even though much of the story takes place in Inquisition Spain where the Jews spoke Ladino, a Hebrew-Spanish hybrid.
By the way, did you know that Columbus brought a translator who spoke Aramaic and Hebrew with him, in case they ran into one of the lost tribes of Israel?  “So, how have you been, this last 2000 years?”  “And what did you have for breakfast? Was it eggs?”
There is a particular music when words from another language are included in a text. It has a je ne sais quoi about it. A pinch of spice which colours the whole thing. There is a particular energy between the words of the main language of the text and the words from the other language. An electric charge of sound, colour, sense and history leaps back and forth between them.

A few years ago, I read Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It contains a lot of Spanish from the Dominican Republic and its America diaspora.  The Spanish adds a distinct new characteristic to the English. Like adding a clarinet to a string quartet. Or bagpipes. It’s apparent how rich and vital the language is, from the sound alone. I don’t know what any of it meant, but it makes it clear to me that I’m listening to people speaking from a culture that I am outside of. It isn’t meant for me, but at the same time, it allows me to listen in a bit. I also know that Dominican Americans would understand everything. Diaz is making a deliberate delineation between being inside and being outside the culture. It’s both an aesthetic and a political choice.

I’d add that the notion of using a non-English or a heritage language can be extended to dialects or regional variations.  I say all of this aware that I’m here speaking in Ireland and that many authors have integrated Irish and Anglo-Irish dialects into their writing. In Canada, this technique is increasingly used by Indigenous authors. And it is occuring for the same reason. A remembering, an articulation against erasure, of being spoken for, a reclaiming of culture, land, place, sense of being in the world, of concepts indivisibly connected to language and tradition. After all, the Canadian government banned these languages, explicitly trying to extinguish them and their speakers. This is sadly a familiar story and one that I’m sure you recognize.

I also think of Holocaust survivor Paul Celan and his awareness that he was writing poetry in German, the language of the regime of the oppressor. 

As writers, as storytellers, as people who live in language, it is our job to claim the language for our own, to interogate its assumptions. To speak the language and not have the language speak us.  Language gives us access to the collective memory, the grammatical and semantic technology embedded in its structures. Language gives us access to a word horde, a grammatical repository, a choreography of meaning. But we need it to be a trampoline and not a trapdoor. We need to be able to have ownership of this inheritance, to forge it into the tool that we need to shape and express our world. Perhaps this means expanding it, reforming it. Perhaps this means we need to communicate using other languages with which we have a different relationship, a language which relates differently to the world, the dominant power structures, the prevailing traditions, cultures or economic or social structures.

Which reminds me. There was this sailor, Yankeleh. He leaves a pair of pants to be repaired baym shnayder—at the tailor. After seven years, now covered in scars and tattoos, he returns to pick up his pants. They weren’t ready.  “Gevalt!” Yankeleh exclaims. “It only took Adonai himself six days to make the world. You’ve had six years!”  “What is there to say, now that the world is done?” the tailor replies. “So, nu, your pants are a tragedy . . . but at least we can talk about them.”

New novel announcement!

I'm really delighted to announce that my new novel "Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted" will be coming out in Spring 2021--just gotta finish the rest of it!

I'm grateful for all the conversations, links, news and bad jokes from friends -- they help me write this thing.

A book that detonates and plucks

Very happy to have my first review of the French edition of Yiddish for Pirates, Le Yiddish a l'usage des pirates in Le Devoir. 

I ran the first line through Google translate just for fun and it said, "“A book that detonates and plucks.” I'd like that as a blurb on all subsequent editions!

My great-grandfather, dancing in Lithuania, before the war.

This is my great-grandfather standing beside some ornate ironwork he made in front of his house in Krekenova, Lithuania, before WWII. And below a passage from my novel-in-progress, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted which folds in what I know about him into this little scene:


Motl lying in the dark, listening to the twitching around him, sleepers, rodents, restlessness. Outside, the defeated exhalation of the wind. What could it do? If it lifted the killers up, it’d have to put them down somewhere. Even the frontier was just the edge of someone else’s land. 
A creak, likely a branch rubbing against another. The sound, vivid as scent, twitched in his mind. The scrape of a violin. A memory.
He was a small boy and someone—was it Hershel, the neighbour?—had brought a fiddle into the kitchen. Its husky voice like his grandmother’s, raspy and indomitable. But it rocked and swayed, whereas once she sat down, old Faigel’s jowls were the only thing that moved unless she were cheekpinching or sighing the pains of her ancient bones.They’d moved the chairs aside, the shabbos table with its white cloth and braided loaves. The silverbright candlesticks burning low. 
His father began to croak his own song. Ay yi yi.
“You can be led to water, but if you’re this hoarse, you were made by drink,” he laughed. Oy yoi yoi, he sang and rocked back and forth like a baby pram with the over-enthusiastic suspension of a new colt.  He was short and squat, with thick blacksmith arms and a white trimmed beard below his round spectacles which glinted in candlelight. He had cleaned the soot and ash and grime of the forge from his hands and arms and face and wore a fresh new apron as if he would spend his day of rest ostentatiously demonstrating his worklessness.Lili lili lili li, he sang with the fiddler who sawed a roiling nigun, a wordless song, or rather one to be sung with only lilting syllables, each sound meaningless individually but taken together, able to carry whatever burden of joy or buoyant sorrow the singer wished. 
Then his father reached out his foreshortened arms for his mother, sitting stolidly at the table beside her mother. “Gitl,” he said. “It’s shabbos. We must dance.”
“I look like a girl? A maideleh with a figure like a sapling, maybe?”“You do to me. At least when there’s music.” Ay yi yi yi. And he took her hand in his and pulled her toward him. Nijinsky and Pavlova they were not. More like Wild Bill Hickok and Oliver Hardy, or Stan Laurel and Calamity Jane.
They torqued around the kitchen and for one moment, Motl saw what might be a smile wrestling his mother’s pursed lips. 
Then—oy yoi yoi—his father reached for him and he was dancing between his parents as if between trees in a forest or between two bears. He was giggling and his father kissed the crown of his head and his mother said, “One day you’ll have a family of your own.”
And Faigel, his grandmother, sighed. And the fiddler began another tune. Lili lili li, his father sang and Motl joined in, almost inaudibly, his thin voice cracking, a small bird being born from an egg. 

My novel is read by someone who is 100

Here's an article about a woman in Teaneck, New Jersey, who turned 100 and who recently listened to my Yiddish for Pirates. She gives a précis of the book in the article.

What an incredible thrill and honour that my book has reached such people.

Yiddish for Pirates in French!

I'm very excited because my novel, Yiddish for Pirates is now available in French with Les Éditions du Boréal as Le Yiddish à l'usage des pirates. 

And I'm especially thrilled because it was translated by the celebrated translation team of Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné. It is a difficult book to translate  because it is filled with Yiddish and intricate (AKA terrible) wordplay and jokes, sometimes in two languages.

The cover is very captivating. It's fascinating to see how the French book design aesthetic is so different than the English one.

A preview of the first dozen and half pages or so is available on line at the Boréal site (as well as ordering info.)

If I had a tentacle

if I had a tentacleit would be made of lightthe world would be my eye






.

Celan Translaboration

I've been making "translations" by a process of running poems through Google translate (and sometimes using an N+7-like process) then tidying up or editing the results. It's a bit I Ching-like or like Cage's writing through acrostics.

 In these translation poems, I'm using the "translate" technique to create for me a resonant pile of phrases and images (a "heap of broken images"?) which I can then shape by exploring this open field of associations which didn't derive from me. Of course (like Cage choice he sources and techniques) I made choices about what to translate and which languages to use and how long to keep translating. Then there is an awareness of the initial poem informing my decisions as well as, of course, the range of my aesthetics--what I consider "working" even if it is beyond my logical understanding.

For me, it's a way of simulating collaboration without collaborating (not that I don't collaborate a lot too.) Maybe it's "translaborating."

Here's one from Celan's poem "Flower" (I don't know who did the original translation into to English. I got the poem of PoemHunter.com.)



it’s the wind where I'm going

eyes, like night, are stones

everything black: 

we see the word

flower—a word for darkness

your eyes upon me

like summer

your heart on a wall of hearts

another word like a name for disease

the government of dawn renews