Tolstoy's Undergarments

I suck at languages.

More specifically, I suck at learning new languages. Maybe I'm stuck in what I've always heard spoken as truth, that it's much harder to learn a second (or third, or whatever) language when you're older. I can only speculate that there is some truth to that, as I seem to never have any trouble recalling the first ten numbers in Spanish, which I learned in kindergarten. But the Spanish I learned in college? Eh, that's less reliable.

For all I know, maybe it's a greater difficulty with memory and age. I certainly can fairly easily rattle off some old nursery rhymes I read or a lullaby my mother would sing me from my early childhood, but I have more difficulty reciting Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" monologue - and I've seen the latter more times and more recently. It's hard to make sense of any of that, especially considering that I've spent lots of focused time on remembering what Hamlet says.

The problem might be less general and more specific to my own memory, and how my brain keeps shoddy storage of memory. I don't know.

The lack of deftness when it comes to learning non-English languages is not just vexing for the practical reason (that being to talk to people in that language). It's more bothersome to me as a reader, and what that limits to me in terms of literature. I like reading. It's less an activity for me at this point and more a way of life. I cannot imagine a meaningful life without reading. There are times in my life where I am positive that my capability to escape inside of a book has saved me from hurting or killing myself.

Aside from the buoy that reading has provided me in my life, I also do it because I like learning. I like changing, and I like being more aware of the world, whether it's fictional or real (or as objectively real as a book can present this reality). Being only proficient in one language, I'm immediately disadvantaged in terms of what material I can read in this world. Sure, there are translations, but I have difficulty in trusting the translator's authenticity to the original text.

When talking about the translations of various books from the 19th century Russian literary canon, Nabokov said that the only way to truly grasp the majesty of something like War & Peace was to read it in Russian.

Uh. No shit. Not all of us have the luxury of being natural polyglots. But thanks.

That he said that about 19th century Russian texts is more personal to me, though, because as an epoch of literature, it is my favorite literary enclave. Well, I suppose it is my favorite - I enjoy all that I've read, but how can I be so sure that what I'm reading is truly how Dostoyevsky, for example, intended to convey his story? I don't. So I have to rely on the translator's caprice.

As prickly as he may be on the subject, I do wish that Nabokov were still alive to assess the quality of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. Apparently the duo have recently wrapped up translating all of Tolstoy's major works, which was cause for me to revisit why I don't like their translations. Their two-step process of making a literal translation, and then brushing that up with a more ornate eloquence is suspect to me.

Translation methodology aside, the Pevear and Volokohnsky translations have always bothered me for a less linguistic reason. While most of the criticism of their translations has been directed at their alleged failure to preserve the authorial voice of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or even have neglected to retain the dark wit of the authors, my concern with their translations has always been about the preservation of cultural markers within the texts.

I was first alarmed of this when I was reading Anna Karenina for a Russian Lit class in college. I unintentionally read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, while the rest of my class read the Constance Garnett translation. There was a passage I remember being discussed, something going on with Anna and her children in St. Petersburg. My classmates were going back and forth about a part of the text. Someone happened to mention the detail of that Anna's children were eating pudding while something more important was going on. The mention of them eating pudding was only relevant in the classroom discussion because it was a marker for which part of the book we were talking about, like "But when they were eating the pudding, Anna was doing xyz..." That was it.

Everybody seemed to be on the same page, so to speak, except for me. I couldn't find where in the book the event was happening while the kids gobbled up their pudding. Then it occurred to me: my text didn't say "pudding." It said "cake."

This has always bothered me about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations, because it seems like a strange license to take with their translation, and one that may be disingenuous to the culture of 19th century Russian aristocracy. Who knows, maybe "cake" is the more accurate translation of Tolsty's original text. But in a class of people where several of the students were reading or had read Anna Karenina in Russian, I would expect that at least my instructor would have pointed out that it was indeed cake they children were eating, and not pudding.

Although I'm hung up on the very real difference between cake and pudding here, in the greater scope of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation, such a detail might be trivia. Yet, it still feels worrisome to me in that it's altering the societal or class habits of certain people - details that are important for accurately constructing what life was like for certain types of people (such as rich kids in Saint Petersburg, for example). Let's suppose I write a book, and in my book someone is eating a hamburger. My book gets translated into Russian, and then the translator comes to my hamburger-eating passage and decides to translate "hamburger" as "hot dog." Not a terrible different, really, but my decision to say "hamburger" may very well have had intentional purposes meant to comport certain between-the-line details about my character. Hot dogs are associated with specific things in America, and they're not always evenly interchangeable with hamburgers. Hot dogs are cheaper, often eaten at specific places (ball parks, carnivals) or at certain times of year (like summer, when people are more likely to grill out).

It might not even be so embedded with meaning. Maybe that's simply how I saw the character: a hamburger man, not a hot dog man.

At best, the decision of Pevear and Volokhonsky to use "cake" instead of "pudding" may have been a topical error. At worst, though, I worry that the decision was more deliberate, possibly in an attempt to make the setting something that it wasn't. To the middle and upper middle classes of America, cake is thought of as more opulent than pudding. I mean, that's why we have such a gastro-fetish with all these reality shows about ultra-ornate cakes and bakers, and not so many shows on "America's Pudding Boss."

With this in mind, I worry that Pevear and Volokhonsky may have intentionally swapped certain words in order to make the text more Americanized. Doing so would make it easier for American readers to appreciate the wealth of Anna's family, but it fails to preserve the cultural difference between what it is to be rich in America and what it is to be rich in Russia (in the 19th century, no less).

It's ironic, too, that some of the criticism of the Garnett translations is that her translation not only makes every Russian author sound the same, but that they sound Edwardian. That's probably a fair criticism, but at the same time, it's odd that I haven't seen similar critiques of the culture represented in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations.

The thing is, though, is I have no idea what's more accurate. Short of taking up the onus of studying the habits of 19th century Russian and become fluent in Russian - with a focus on the verbage of that specific era - I'm left to the whims of those who have the resources to translate things like Anna Karenina. It's frustrating to read discussion forums of people debating the quality of the translation, but only after adding the caveat that they don't speak Russian. Useless.

As much as I want to blame Oprah, I don't think it's her fault. However, she did call Anna Karenina the "harlequin romance of their time." So maybe it is her fault.

I wish I could resolve this problem on my own. I wish I could become fluent enough in Russian that I could read something like Anna Karenina in its native tongue, and then simply make my own conclusions. Really, I don't want to read Pevear/Volokhonsky, and I don't want to read Garnet. I want to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol, and not be troubled with the potential inaccuracies of their scripts as retold by an intermediary.

But I suck at languages, and short of undergoing a lengthy language immersion program in Moscow, I'm likely just going to be at the mercy of translators.

Accepting that this is simply how it's going to be makes me uncomfortable because I become very uncomfortable by any situation that makes me feel helpless. And the limit and inaccessibility to other languages makes me very helpless.

Something given, something submitted.

When I was a boy, I remember hearing “Walk Like a Man,” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, on the regular rotation of my parents' radio. I wasn't alive when the song debuted in 1963, but it's the music my parents listened to when I was young so, by proxy, I grew up listening to the same music they enjoyed growing up. I thought it was a fun, goofy song in spite of the irony I'd come to later recognize in how the singer claims he's going to “walk like a man” although he espouses his determination in a catchy falsetto.

On Friday night, a friend of mine was mad at me and in an attempt to coax me into speaking with him, he told me to “talk to him like a man.”

49 years separate the release of that Frankie Valli song and my friend's brash challenge, yet why does this masculine demand of doing something “like a man” persist? My copy of How to ____ Like a Man seems to have been lost in the mail so if there is a positive implication that accompanies this phrase, it's lost on me. All I hear in that phrase are the rabid growls of embattled masculinity.

While I'm still unclear on how a man walks or talks it out, I do know that the connotation of such a phrase is that if you're not doing something like a man, then you are something else. Something less, an Other. Like a woman? A ladyman? A pussy? To whichever of those less-than-man assignments the phrase points, the application of being something not-man is meant as a pejorative as well as an attempt to admonish that behavior based on the biologically defined role of masculinity (spuriously assuming such a thing even exists). Simply, if I'm not acting like a man, I must be acting like a woman and that is construed as a bad thing.

Beyond what this corrosive definition of masculinity is teaching men and boys about women, one man accusing another man of not doing something “like a man” perpetuates the notion that there's only one way to be a man. If you're not behaving according to this ur-masculine philosophy, then you're doing it like a not-man/woman and if you're doing it like a not-man/woman, then you're doing it wrong.

The specter of not living up to masculine designations pervades every aspect of our culture from grade school recess to national security. That men will try to use masculinity as a way to control other men is not constructive nor is it valid to defend this notion with questionable support from a Darwinist vantage. An argument that relies on such a paradoxically primitive notion to support masculinity doesn't do much in the way of convincing anyone how humans are supposedly more evolved than orangutans and mockingbirds. However, if we're truly that unevolved, I imagine it will be acceptable in the near future for guys to start tongue-bathing their genitals in public (I do not look forward to the subreddit cataloging these occasions).

Recommending that a man do something “like a man” is anachronistic if it was ever really useful in the first place yet you don't have to look far to see it still used, and in public forums no less. Living a life beholden to what is or isn't masculine as prescribed by society begets a life of anxiety and anger. It will make you vulnerable, insecure, and easily provoked. If you allow yourself to play into this role, whether you are the accuser or the accused, there will always be someone else out there who is “more masculine” than you and the path to being genuinely comfortable in your own skin will only grow longer with each step.

The militarized image of what a man is supposed to do or say is so rigid that it obscures the primary qualities of what we should all be striving toward: being an emotionally intelligent human being. If the singer of “Walk Like a Man” wants to cry because a woman has rejected him, that's okay. Heartbreak is hard. Being human is hard. But all of us, whether you are a single grown man or a father charged with raising boys that will one day be men, are subjects to compassion and depression and pride and loneliness so don't let threats to your masculinity deter you from those sensations.

Instead of being a man, just be you. Be decent and be kind. Be surprised. Be mad sometimes and be wrong sometimes. It's all going to happen whether you like it or not. No action or reaction a man has should not be comported into some superficial expectation of what a man is supposed to do. If you're a man, whether your walking or reading or fucking or praying, you're already doing what a man does. So let us agree that it's time to not only retire but refute the regressive notion that there is only one way to be “like a man” and start moving beyond the constrictions of masculinity.

Dropping Physics

I'm scared to write. Not just to put one word after another and perform some carpal locomotion with a drop or two of fetid brain drippings stirred in, but actually write. For the past seven months, I've written foolishly, meaninglessly in a trajectory that has put me back to the end of November in spite of summer's relentless pursuit these past few weeks.

Ideas aren't lacking. I've got too many ideas, ideas that cycle and reproduce and make new ideas that I still never follow-up on. The ideas are fresh; my writing is sclerotic, wasted.

(There are too many beetles to even focus here.)

(Moved, better.)

My hands even began to shake as I worked open the computer and started a page. A blank page, a mirror that has no reflection unless you force one into it. All I see looking back at me is nothing, fearful nothingness that urges me to retreat to my bed.

Pull the covers over my head, hide from the big, blank monster that still looms between the folded-up innards of my notebook.

Hold a ball, drop it. Physics will take care of everything else. I don't have to be responsible for the ripples in the water, but only for dropping the stone.

While I was organizing words - I still restrain myself from saying that I was writing - my Writing fell off the radar, a scant word here or an occasional attack on a napkin with a ball point, but nothing serious. Now that I'm left with the writing again, the writing seems harder than ever in spite of the ample time I allowed very good ideas to steep.

In the time away from writing, I began to reevaluate my language, the over-voice that hums without end as I amble through the days. That Voice might sound different now, or worse, might not be something I recognize anymore. Maybe it needs to change, to molt, to mutate, to cut something off to spite its tongue. Maybe it will be better, maybe it could be worse. It's one of those things where I'll never know until it's too late to do anything about it.

I've drank enough coffee today to sterilize a whale. Can't tell if that's working for or against me.

I call it your park although it only is so in namesake. Still, it is your park, pregnant with manufactured hauntings that are fitting for someone still aching for another person as I am for you.

I call it your park because it's a cheap gift shop souvenir that reminds me to remember you, to not pull the hook from my lip and set myself free. It's less of what you've done to me and more of what I've done to myself using you as my awl. Facts don't matter when imagination doesn't need them.

The thing I want from you I don't even know anymore. It's no more a want than a sky can want light or air; it simply has them and it is what it is. Mine is the void sky, a canvas that rejects all cyan and canary hues alike, something lacking but impossible to fulfill. Hunger that cannot be fed. Thirst that cannot be doused.

I call it your park because it is your park. I had been here before you, without you, but it ceased to be a place I knew of my own after I knew you. You skipped line, you came first. You who with stake and spade made this park over in your own image and then left me to flit across it with the beetles and the dead leaves.

We met unexpectedly at the corner. Your dress gray like February, your hair black like walnut oil, your shoulder bag as broad as your frame. Standing six feet from each other, the only reason I looked at you was because I was wearing sunglasses. I looked at you but I'm clueless as to what I saw because your own eyes plotted behind a pair of large, bug-eyed sunglasses. No smile, no smirk, no kink in the corner of your mouth. But you were facing me.

I counted cars as they passed. I counted down with the hazy orange numbers of cross-walk sign. I counted on you to say something but then the orange numbers disappeared leaving only the open-palmed orange hand.

"This is about to get somewhat awkward," I said.

You waited, as if I'd spoken to someone behind you, mistakenly to you as someone I thought I knew, to anyone except you before the pause hastily burst and you replied, "What?"

The crosswalk hand reached out. The cars slowed to the traffic light.

"This. We're about to cross the street and now we have to see who's going to take the initiative to walk quickly and who will try to lag behind so neither one of us aren't stuck awkwardly walking next to a stranger as we cross street."

"Oh, that," you started with a smile. "That always is a little weird, isn't it?" You said it with sincerity, as if we'd just been taught a secret handshake no one else in the world knew. It was a welcoming reply.

"Well, if you want, I'll let you get a head start," I offered. Even with the rest of the face easily visible in the afternoon barrage of sunlight, though so much could be divined from every other part of your body, that your eyes remained concealed behind sunglasses left me wholly in the dark about you. My offer hung like a "Marco" that must wait until "Polo" finally arrives.

I will write and re-write stories until I finally have something that doesn't make me want to shove my head in the oven. But I will write no matter what. Eventually, hope I'll carve off the shittier parts.

Quote

"What happens to anybody who gets into any kind of forced/regular writing is that he's bound to make a useless fool of himself now & then ... and it's hard to set a price on that kind of reality." - HST, January 30, 1971