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October 04, 2010

Comments

Jeff White

I think translation is a very apt metaphor. Writing well is a problem in epistemology, moving information or ideas from point A (the writer) to point B (the reader) through the complex medium of written language, like the telephone game you play as a kid. Translation is that taken to the correlative extreme—you are not only struggling against the normal difficulties of clear communication (difficulties which, if you've been in a relationship, should understand) but also the hindrances of a completely foreign tongue.
The untrained writer plays telephone.
The trained writer translates.
Cunningham speaks of the training writer.

Kathe Koja

And to write "for yourself" means, really, to write for the work, to serve the work: to create according to the needs of the piece of fiction being written, not to please an imaginary reader, editor, marketplace (or real ones!), or to mitigate any external pressures or demands.

Niall

Very valid points about Cunningham's condescension and scattered thinking. But I do agree that the translator evolves the original by translating it. At least, this seems to be the case, as I have had occasion to compare many original Russian works with their English translations, and have often found rather massive differences between the two. And not just linguistic differences, but substantive ones. Which has always baffled me. Milan Kundera had this unhappy experience decades ago when he finally compared the original of his works with their translation into French and English.

The situation is even worse for poetry, where whole stanzas will be placed in a different order, and entirely new lines invented. It's really scandalous, but a hidden one.

Shelley

For myself, thinking about writing for all the future readers (or non-readers) might, as you say, lead to despair.

Thinking about writing for the few, gives us hope.

And those few come from all walks of life.

Lee

Writing only for oneself is just as much a troubling notion, possibly even a naive one (wilful or otherwise). Censoring/controlling/editing self-indulgent impulses, for example, already posits a reader who brings certain standards or expectations to the text, expectations which may then be transformed but exist nevertheless.

TEV

Sorry, Lee but I have no idea what you're trying to say. Every reader - without exception - has standards or expectations, whether acknowledged or not. That sort of seems to state the obvious. But what the expectation of a reader has to do with the choice of a writer is not at all clear. Want to try again?

Kathe Koja

If you write for the self, then the self is a reader. If you write for the work, the (eventual) reader is elsewhere.

Niall

Most good writers I have known, when I asked them who their audience is while they are writing, almost always give the same answer. "I write for my friends." Which strikes me as a perfectly legitimate answer.

The writers I've known who have a more grandiose idea of their audience usually have not been very good writers.

Selah.

James

Cunningham didn't say he started writing cookie-cutter genre stories, right? He just said he started considering the timeless fundamentals of holding a reader's interest.

Even if he really meant 'write trashy thrillers for Helen,' why can't trashy thrillers for Helen be great and lasting works? Shakespeare wrote borrowed-plot genre stuff with an audience in mind, and his writings are still read, not stillborn.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."