Eliot Weinberger Books

A must read. A great selection of non-fiction material. If you know and like Borges you know you'll be pleased, if this is your first time reading Borges I guarantee that it won't be your last, you'll keep buying all his work. Borges wasn't a man, he was a library, a portal to knowledge and wisdom.

Enjoy

To read Borges, you become Borges. You see yourself in his mirrors, you regard the books you read as the books he reads. You appreciate what he appreciates, loving the literature he has absorbed, finding your way through the complex interweaving of his passions: Romantic English Poetry, Shakespeare, H.G. Well, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante, Icelandic Sagas, German Idealism, the Kabbala, Schopenhauer, Bergson, English Empiricism, Sufism, etc... All literary roads lead to Borges.

He lived a long, rich life. He is the Librarian you might meet in heaven. If only he were still alive to guide the reading public. If only he lived today and had a website, to think of all the books he might recommend. And wouldn't it be wonderful, to learn about his opinions on modern writers.

With the Collected Fictions, this book is a testament to the literary critic/philosphical wanderer in us all. Each essay is a delicate delicacy. This book is for you if you're a gourmand of good writing, great thinking and the pleasure of exploring the vast expanding world of literature. This book is rich, complex and wondrous. His writings on Dante and Shakespeare, his reviews, his philosophical essays... just read the book and become Borges becoming you.

Eliot Weinberger has done a real service to the world of literature by selecting, and translating these pieces. They show the range of interest, the incredible ability to make inventive creative cross- connections of one of Modern Literature's true masters, Borges.
Borges covers worlds in his writing, worlds of Literature , worlds of the Argentinean society he and some of his ancestors grew up in, worlds given in a universal encycopediac reading, which seems to cover all continents and all cultures.
Borges greatest work is considered to be his ' Ficciones'. But his signature is present in all , in a single page of a book- review or a philosphical meditation.
For him worlds mingle and combine, and are retranslated in such a way as to reappear as Literature.
He also in this work reveals himself to be a decent and courageous opponent of Fascism.
He confounds and surprises us at times with these strange mixings of things, but the poetic and parable- like element is so strong in this work that it engages us, and forces us to question our own small pictures of reality.
What a great and interesting writer. What a pleasure to have this work to enrich our minds with.

Because Borges lived and worked in Argentina, few have heard of him in the English-speaking world. Those that have are probably most familiar with his fiction stories. This book of non-fiction essays shows the vast knowledge and wide variation of interests of Borges. Therefore, this collection really does have something for everyone. Unfortunately, there are also many essays that are unreadable, some annoying repititions, and some essays are just plain dull.

So, what does Borges write about? He covers some metaphysical ground on the nature of time and infinity. He defines heaven as an infinite library, and then goes into the nature of infinity. On the more mundane end, he reviews movies and gives capsule biographies of authors - King Kong, Citizen Kane, and more obscure (and not necessarily Hollywood) films. He writes on contemporary (at the time) politics - Nazi Germany, the curators of the national library, etc. He gets intensely personal - there is one essay on the progression of his blindness. But if there is a main theme that permeates these pieces, it's his love of literature in all languages - Spanish, English (old and modern), German. He has an abiding love of the Greek classics (Homer, Virgil) and great admiration for Joyce, Poe, and Chesterton.

Unfortunately, those of us with a less classical education cannot keep up to everything that Borges says - I, for one, will never have the time to learn ancient Greek! - which makes certain essays difficult. There are other essays (especially early on) that are simply unintellegible (this may be the fault of the translators, especially since there are times when two or three essays cover the same ground with increasing degrees of murkiness). But it always happened that a real gem would appear just when I was getting frustrated with a series of uninteresting essays.

On the balance, about a third of the essays are not interesting (or badly translated, or repetitions), a third are interesting if not spectacular, and the final third have at least one moment of sheer brilliance. It's well worth buying, but it's unlikely you'll read it from cover to cover without taking a break - I took many breaks to read other things, and it took me over 1.5 years to complete the whole book. But you know what? - on the balance, I like his non-fiction better than his fiction

Borges claims in one of these articles that he was "more proud of the books he has read than the books he has written." I imagine I would feel the same way, had I written any books! And I think this statement captures the unifying theme of this compendium. Herein Borges will astonish and charm you with the breadth, variety, and whimsy of his literary taste.

The book is a compilation of critical essays, social commentary, reviews of the fledgling film art, and other oddities published in various media from throughout Borges's literary life. Each offers you new horizens for literary pursuit and further reading, and all are executed with Borges's renowned concision.

What I like most of all is that Borges is more interested the kinds of books people really enjoy reading, such as Bradbury, HG Wells, Lord Dunsany, and Kipling, rather than the fossilized academic "classics." One of my favorite features are the several recommended reading lists, in which Borges passes on his own most pleasurable reading experiences. There is also a refreshing eclecticism in Borges's taste--for example, this book lead me to Mathematics and the Imagination, a fun popular math book. Another personal highlight is the essay on Edward Fitzgerald.

This volume is not something one would read from cover to cover in several sittings, but rather a treasure trove to be mined from time to time, like the famous cave discovered by Ali Baba in that book so dear to Borges's heart!

This is an excellent edition of the collected poems of Octavio Paz, with English translations facing the Spanish originals. I purchased this as a gift for my Spanish teacher and she was delighted! My favorites are his poems written when he served as a Mexican diplomat in India and Japan. His sensitive mind absorbed the nuances of place and religion, which are recreated for us in the poems. His efforts at haiku en espagnol are enlightening, pun intended.

I bought this book after reading an excerpt of one of Paz's poems at a camp. I didn't know what poem it was from, so I bought the book and scoured it until I found the poem. It was Brotherhood. The poetry is beautiful and moving. It is the type of poetry you can read and enjoy no matter if you understand what it is saying, the writing is that beautiful

Octavio Paz has since passed through this world leaving behind a beautiful web of words with the tapestry of things seen and unseen. Paz does an ambidextrous job of mixing in elements of surrealism with the bone of natural objects and that which is very real. His, and the translator Eliot Weinberger ... along with the help of other poet translators to include Bishop, Levertov, Tomlinson--all of their words come alive with beautiful language. The translation seems true to the intent.

What is essential about this book is that each poem comes with the bilingual translation in English and accompanied by the original works in Spanish. Two years of high school Spanish, as well as two years in college, has rendered me with a woefully inadequate ineptitude of all words and understanding of that language. But I don't think that the translation can ever capture the sound, the alliteration, the true tongue/la lingua and fluid language that Paz meant in his original Spanish. Even if I don't understand a lick of what's on the left side of the page in Spanish at least it can be read for it's beautiful sound. Listen to this, "Through the conduits of bone I night I water I forest that moves forward I tongue I body I sun-bone Through the conduits of night" and then on the even-numbered page, "Por el arcaduz de hueso yo noche yo agua yo bosque que avanza yo lengua yo cuerpo yo hueso de sol Por el arcaduz de noche."

What are you doing still sitting here reading my crappy writing when you could be reading Ocatavio Paz? Go get the book...you'll see.

Example 1: "Un cuerpo, un cuerpo solo, sólo un cuerpo,/un cuerpo como día derramado/y noche devorada". Example 2: "Lates entre la sombra/blanca y desnuda: río." Octavio Paz is one of the first voices of the xxth century mexican poetry. He is the most important blend between clasicism and the modern trends in poetical expresion. He lived in France and thus, he experienced surrealism and mingled with the likes of Breton, Éluard, et al. In México he estimulated the literary critic and reviews to new standars of excelence. Read O. Paz.

Paz' poetry is sublime, and elegant. The words and ideas simply slip off the page. Its like taking a bath in chocolate.

Paz consistently suprises the reader with new ideas, form, language. Paz creates an atmosphere that is soothing, and enchanting. I would highly recommend this work.

Karmic Traces is a fascinating collection of essays featuring twenty-four of Eliot Weinbergers writings taking the reader along his personal travels ranging from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong. Here are also to be found imagined voyages among strange religious cultures and even stranger animals. The capping work is "The Falls", wherein Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence. Karmic Traces is a highly recommended body of writing that is as vivid as poetry, as entertaining as fiction, and as informative as any travelogue of mind and body.

Aestheticians have, I think, long wrestled with the question of whether art's value lies in its spontaneity or its control. The spontaneous, like a volcano, will cover more intellectual ground, whereas the controlled, a sort of rose in the irion filings, gives us the precision of high aesthetic achievement. Here in Weinberger's book of essays, as much art as about art (or politics, culture, history, Iceland, and more), we experience the breadth & expanse of imaginative knowledge plus the exact control of fine writing & a clear mind; with Weinberger the volcano IS the rose in the iron filings. Nothing like essays anyone has ever written for school, nor like much of nonfiction available anywhere, these essays are moving in all senses of the word: they move from topic to topic, moving us as well. Weinberger, whose sense of language has come from years of translating Spanish and, recently, Chinese, is one of today's few intellectuals not affiliated with any university. He is thus as rare as an intellectual in medieval Europe unconnected to the Church; Karmic Traces, colossal & microscopic at once, is likewise as unique a find.

The rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature kickstarted the Renaissance in Europe. In a similar way, though on a somewhat smaller scale, the conveniently Imagist makeover of Chinese poetry by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell undoubtedly had a seismic and far-reaching effect on later 20th century American poetry. In his learned Introduction to this outstanding and indispensable Anthology, Weinberger traces the many subsequent debts owed by a galaxy of fine American poets to that seminal work of re-invention. Such impressively talented scholar-translators as Burton Watson, J. P Seaton, Jonathan Chaves and several others receive an honourable mention, though their work is well anthologised elsewhere, and Weinberger's brief seems to have been only to include full-time poets: with the possible exception of Hinton, that is. (However, Sam Hamill's, Arthur Sze's and David Young's names have inexplicably been left out: all three of them marvellous contemporary re-interpreters of the classical Chinese tradition, and all three fine poets in their own right.)

Weinberger concentrates in particular on five exemplary writers: Ezra Pound himself, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and David Hinton. They are certainly all major figures, and it's useful to have them grouped together in this way (particular since the last of them diverges in such interesting ways from the Imagist 'Less is More'tradition: though he certainly 'makes it new' in accordance with that central dictum, which is even quoted in the original Chinese characters both on the cover and on the titlepage).

I thought I already knew quite a lot about American translators from classical Chinese---a whole shelf of mine already groans under their weight---but the William Carlos Williams renderings were entirely new to me, and so were some of the later Pound translations.

For this reader it's hard to contain his excitement at such a beautifully produced edition (only spoiled by a spine-label that's somehow been glued on upside down), and I recommend anyone interested in either recent American poetry or in the classical Chinese tradition to go out and buy it straight away. It will admirably complement Minford and Lau's recent historical anthology of all translations (both European and American, and both scholarly and 'creative'), which of course covers a much broader range, but which is similarly ground-breaking and enthralling to read.

This is a superb anthology several times over. First and foremost, it brings together in one book several centuries of the finest classical poetry from China, starting at the beginning with selections from "The Book of Odes" and drawing a finish line at the end of the Sung Dynasty in 1279. Pretty much all the major poets from the T'ang and Sung are represented here along with earlier masters like T'ao Ch'ien and many interesting lesser-known figures throughout. And in line with New Directions' general attitude that poems should sound like poems, the translations here all flow musically and ring harmoniously in the mind's ear.

Still, there are many other excellent anthologies of Chinese poetry as well. What really distinguishes this one is that all five of the translators are accomplished American poets in their own right. Here we find the eccentric, wildly inaccurate and yet sometimes intuitively ingenious renderings by Ezra Pound, the tersely colloquial if likewise linguistically careless versions by William Carlos Williams, the sensitive and quietly subtle though pretty much reliable verses by Kenneth Rexroth, the deeply spiritual explorations of nature with a counter-cultural edge by Gary Snyder, and finally the translations of David Hinton which alchemically combine poetic sensibility and academic acumen in a proper balance. All in one anthology.

Much more than a mere continuum of accuracy (from less to more) is to be found here, though. Looking only through the somewhat eccentric gaze of these five poet-translators also makes this book something of a history of American literature's long engagement and fascination with the Chinese poetic tradition and, more specifically, of that tradition's influence and impact on modern American poetry itself--a payoff supplemented by the editor's fine introduction discussing this phenomenon in some detail as well as rare, hard-to-find essays by the poets themselves on the subject. Taking this unusual tack also makes this book a study in the undeniably haphazard art of translation itself, for the editor frequently includes different translations of the same poem--seeing how Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder both interpreted and rendered the same original into very different English versions is pretty instructive and enlightening. In one case we are even shown how Kenneth Rexroth translated the same poems quite differently over time, once in 1956 and again in 1970. Personally I found this to be a fascinating highlight really distinctive if not utterly unique to this anthology.

So whether your primary interest is in Classical Chinese poetry or Modernist American poetry, this anthology is a modern classic in and of itself. And if you happen to be intrigued by how these two traditions interacted and entangled themselves in one of the great cultural interactions of human history, this is an indispensable book for your collection.

What if God were the world, the stars, lust, sex, trees, rivers, water, salt, and crystal? What if the world were the poet's fecund Mexican lover? To Octavio Paz, Mexican poet and Nobel laureate, God, the totality, is all of this, and more. To Paz, the reality of daily life is - on the descriptive surface - quite surreal, very vibratory, illusory and refelective. Things sparkle and song is everywhere. To even comment on this vibrational reality is a stop-start, humbling obsession for the poet. This poem is a much needed break for those too bored with European views of reality. This book opens doors to Mexican poetry and to Paz' great career as a poet and essayist. Be prepared to be changed.

Michael James Hawk
http://www.sculpture.org/portfolio/sculptorPage.php?sculptor_id=1001229

Paz ha creado una joya de incalculable valor. Con toda la plasticidad que un genio puede brindarle a un texto, San Octavio recorre en Piedra de Sol todos los grandes temas de la poesía y con ello, del hombre. Es tan natural el desempeño de sus letras que es necesario hacer un esfuerzo para asimilar que nos han llevado de un confín a otro, de la magia a la realidad, de la mujer a la soledad, del río al dolor. Gracias a la serenidad del texto la forma (son 584 endecasílabos) no se percibe en la lectura: así emergen los gigantes.

This bilingual text enhances the experience of reading Paz's poetry. His poetic form can be as spare and suggestive as tanka/haiku or dense with visual imagery as in the poem, A Fable of Joan Miro. The meditative tone of many selections suggests that beyond the accomplishments of art, literature and music, the essential composition is of oneself: "to learn to see so that things will see us and come and go through our seeing." Highly recommended.

Octavio Paz wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose of the 20th century. The collection of poems entitled "A Tree Within" represents one of his most memorable achievements. A remarkable diverse blend of short lyrics and longer, Whitmanesque creations, "A Tree Within" is definitely a collection that bears careful reading and re-reading.

The book is richly studded with multicultural references and allusions--to Epictetus, Buddha, Gilgamesh, Jack the Ripper, the Aztecs, Don Quixote, and many, many, more. But Paz is not merely trying to dazzle us with his knowledge. He is also introspective and revealing. He struggles with deep questions about language, love, and other concerns.

Paz seems to be searching both for an ideal poetic language, and for a form of connectedness that transcends language--a paradoxical quest, yet pure Paz. When he writes "Man's word / is the daughter of death" (in the poem "To Talk"), it strikes me as both a tragically naked confession of inadequacy and a moment of serene liberation. At other times, Paz seems, like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, to be groping towards the creation of a sort of "secular scripture" for the (post)modern age.

In the poem "I Speak of the City," Paz writes, "I speak of our public history, and of our secret history, yours and mine." The histories recorded by this visionary genius are certainly some of the most important literary creations of the 20th century.

Altazor is probably Vicente Huidobro's best poem. Who's Vicente Huidobro you ask? The least known of the top echelon of Latin American avant-garde (or "vanguardista" in Spanish) poets of the 20th century.

Impressive enough in Spanish, with its incredible wordplay and thought-provoking imagery, what's more impressive is Eliot Weinberger's translation. He's the only one who's ever published a translation of the entire thing (everyone else just translates excerpts); this is due to the incredible difficulty of translating some of the complicated linguistic games Huidobro plays with words, which Weinberger actually does a very good job of.

Four star worthy if you can only read the translation; easily five star worthy if you can read both the original and the translation.

This is a wonderful collection of Borges' non-fiction. It is a marvelous book to read and ponder. The only thing I could have wished for is a larger print font. I find I have to read this one with a magnifying glass. I suppose I shouldn't complain because there is SO much material. I will give this 5 stars just for the wealth of good reading it has to offer.

Eliot Weinberger is hands-down the finest American essayist around. Read this book as a primer.

Eliot Weinberger's "19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei" (subtitled "How a Chinese Poem is Translated") presents Wang Wei's famous "Deer Park" poem in 19 versions: Chinese, transliterated Chinese (Pinyin), and a word-by-word rendering, then in 16 (or so) translations with Weinberger's comments. (The translations are primarily into English, although a Spanish version and two French versions are also included.)

From the title, which appears to be inspired by Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," I expected something a little more contemplative. I found Weinberger's comments, on the whole, to be unnecessarily vicious and judgmental. It's as if every section of Stevens's poem ended with the line "But this way of looking at a blackbird is wrong." Weinberger never does offer a translation of his own, although he appears to have some kind of ideal in mind of which every translation he profiles somehow falls short.

This would not in itself be a bad thing--for we must recognize that every translation does, in some way, depart from the original. But Weinberger seems to feel that any change to the poem, especially any expansion, is due to the translator's special hatred for the poet and contempt for his readers' intelligence. In section 8 he states that additions to a translation are "the product of a translator's unspoken contempt for the foreign poet" (p. 17). He goes on to suggest that the translators of the version on which he is commenting were too dense to realize that Wang Wei could have written X (as in the translation) but chose to write Y. While I think his point is well-taken, it could easily have been made without the caustic innuendo. Reading some of the translations, you do wonder what these guys were thinking--but I don't believe that assuming they're stupid oafs at best or malicious tinkerers at worst is really the right way to approach things.

I found the brief essays by Octavio Paz to be more what I expected: commentary on the poem itself, as well as a balanced and interesting exploration of the issues involved in translating it. He explains calmly why he made the choices he did in his Spanish version (also present in the book), and why he made certain (and significant) changes from his original draft.

While it is interesting and perhaps even enlightening to have such a varied collection of translations side-by-side, any real insights into what the comparison says about "How a Chinese Poem is Translated" will have to be deduced by the reader alone, as Weinberger's jeering comments are rarely much help in this direction. The concept is a solid one, but I wish the presentation were a little more balanced.

(Note: for a more recent consideration of the poem, see J.P. Seaton's analysis of the role of written characters in the poem's meaning, "Once More, on the Empty Mountain," in The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, ed. Frank Stewart.)

I checked the book out of the local library a couple of weeks ago and have not stopped reading it since. The library volume is due back, so I just purchased it. My only complaint is that the last poem is Gary Synder's from 1978. I would like to see Mr Weinberger reissue the volume with latter translations such as Arthur Sze or Sam Hamill. And if any one is looking for a most needed project, a translation of all of Wang Wei's Wang River poems.

Any attempt to translate poetry from one language to another is fraught with difficulty, and that is increased many times when the languages and non-comensurate ones like Chinese and American. This little book does not take long to read, but deserves close study in order to tease out how different (western) minds have attempted to put Chinese into American. This book shoud be in the library of anyone interested in poetry in general and Chinese poetry in particular.

Poetry, said Robert Frost, is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry, says Eliot Weinberger in the introduction to this small volume, is that which is worth translating.
Both, of course, are right. That is what I like about poetry. It tolerates different points of view, a multitude of interpretations. A poem, or its translation, is never 'right', it is always the expression of an individual reader's experience at a certain point in his or her life: "As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different - not just another - reading. The same poem cannot be read twice."

"Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated" contains a simple four-line poem, over 1200 years old, written by Wang Wei (c. 700-761 AD), a man of Buddhist belief, known as a painter and calligrapher in his time. The book gives the original text in Chinese characters, a transliteration in the pinyin system, a character-by-character translation, 13 translations in English (written between 1919 and 1978), 2 translations in French, and one particularly beautiful translation in Spanish by Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the Mexican poet who received the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature. Paz has also added a six-page essay on his translation of the poem.

Wang Wei's poems are fascinating in their apparent simplicity, their precision of observation, and their philosophical depth. The poem in question here is no exception. I would translate it as:

Empty mountains
I see no one

but I hear echoes
of someone's words

evening sunlight
shines into the deep forest

and is reflected
on the green mosses above

Compared to the translations of Burton Watson (1971), Octavio Paz (1974), and Gary Snyder (1978), this version has a number of flaws. My most flagrant sin is the use of a poetic first person, the "I", while the original poem merely implies an observer. The translation reflects what I found most intriguing in the original text. First of all, the movement of light and sound, in particular the reflection of light that mirrors the echo of sound earlier in the poem. Secondly, the conspicuous last word of the poem: "shang"; in Chinese it is a simple three-stroke character that today means 'above' (it is the same "shang" as in Shanghai ' the city's name means literally 'above the sea').

This is a very simple poem. The simplicity is deceptive, though. What looks very natural, still wants to make a point. The point is that looking is just one thing, but being open to echoes and reflections is what really yields new and unexpected experiences. Wang Wei applies the "mirror" metaphor in a new way in his poem. This metaphor was very popular in Daoist and Buddhist literature, and says roughly that the mind of a wise person should be like a mirror, simply reflective and untainted by emotion. Wang Wei seems to have this metaphor in mind when he mentions echoes and reflections in his poem. A Buddhist or a Daoist, for that matter, would also recognize the principle of "Wu Wei" (non-action) here: nothing can be forced or kept, everything simply "falls" to you and will be lost again. In this sense, a person cannot "see" (as in the activity of seeing); a person can only be "struck" by the visible (as in being illuminated - the "satori" of Zen Buddhism).

"Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei" is a light, unscholarly book - and I mean this as a compliment. It is a pure pleasure to read the different translations together with Weinberger's lucid comments. Weinberger has a wonderful sense of humor to accompany his analytical mind; and he is allergic to pomposity. He enjoys mocking the pompous. This is what he has to say about one translator's misguided efforts to rhyme Wang Wei's poem: "line 2 ... adds 'cross' for the rhyme scheme he [the translator] has imposed on himself. (Not much rhymes with 'moss'; it's something of an albatross. But he might have attempted an Elizabethan pastoral 'echoing voices toss' or perhaps a half-Augustan, half-Dada 'echoing voices sauce')."

In the translation of Chinese poetry, as in everything, Weinberger notes, nothing is more difficult than simplicity.

Simplicity is particularly difficult for certain academics, it seems. A professor, who had read Weinberger's comments on Wang Wei's poem in a magazine, furiously complained about the "crimes against Chinese poetry" Weinberger had allegedly committed by neglecting "Boodberg's cedule." Weinberger later discovered that this cryptic reference was to a series of essays privately published by professor Peter A. Boodberg in 1954 and 1955 entitled "Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philosophy" ('cedule' is an obscure word for 'scroll, writing, schedule'). "Boodberg ends his 'cedule' with his own version of the poem, which he calls 'a still inadequate, yet philologically correct, rendition ... (with due attention to grapho-syntactic overtones and enjambment)':

The empty mountain: to see no men,
Barely earminded of men talking - countertones,
And antistrophic lights-and-shadows incoming deeper the deep-treed grove
Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses - going up (The empty mountain...)

To me this sounds like Gerard Manly Hopkins on L S D, and I am grateful to the furious professor for sending me in search of this, the strangest of the many Weis."

The multiple translations of Wang Wei's poem are a door into the incredible spectrum of human thinking. This small delicate poem and its translations show how culture, translation and individual thinking change a work of art. I found myself writing a "translation" of the poem to discover yet another prismatic dimension of this jewel of a poem.