Weather, library, reading
“Cold and wet as a dog’s nose,” is how the forecast started in Monday’s edition of the Daily Fishwrapper. “Brief cameo appearance by the sun possible towards the end of the week,” it concluded. Someone there has been taking creative writing classes.
It’s a mighty big dog too. The cold and wet permeates everything. Even here, little more than arm’s reach from the radiator, it pokes its nose in on uncovered skin. Outside today, well I’m sure four layers (raincoat, fleece warm-up, sweatshirt, business shirt) helped, but at the time, it felt like I might as well be naked.
And, oh, by the way, the “S” word also crept into the forecast. Mainly for south of the city in the higher elevations, but still, few here are welcoming it.
In strange goings-on at the library, yesterday the adult librarian rearranged a display of biographies. I noticed this only because the ones removed from the display were stacked on the large-print shelves. “Can you pick up on the new theme?” she asked brightly as I wheeled over a cart to pick up the detritus.
I looked at both sides, considered for a minute and answered, “No.”
“You’re thinking too hard,” she said. “Look again, but don’t think about it.”
Right. I’ve spent the last five years thinking deeply about everything from the meaning of life to toenail clippings and I’m supposed to turn it off to find the theme in a display of biographies?
“Nope. Sorry,” I said after a while of trying. “I just can’t see it.”
“Just look at the covers,” she suggested. Realizing I was hopelessly lost, she filled me in. “On this side they’re red, and on the other side they’re blue.”
Oh good heavens. I’d been looking for subject theme, not a decorating theme. I’m thinking we need an author to die so she won’t have to channel her energies away from the recently deceased authors display, which has been vacant for weeks now.
On the other hand, the shelves are just bulging with books and all the librarians have spent a lot of time weeding their collections. And I’m apparently the only one who got a charge out of the recursion of seeing a book titled “Weeding Library Collections” on the book sale table after having been weeded-out. Sure, everyone got the irony, but for me, well, the recursion is what did me in.
Book of the week is “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” by Mary Roach which picks up where her previous book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” left off. Like “Stiff”, it’s informative and pee-your-pants funny. Be assured that for the rest of my days, one word—ectoplasm—will bring me to uncontrollable fits of laughter.
For its 400th birthday, there’s new translation by Edith Grossman of “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes. Grossman makes a living at translating contemporary novels, and that experience makes this version eminently more readable.
Whereas other translations come off as dry and professorial, this one, while it doesn’t exactly sparkle, the wit and humor shine through. And where it doesn’t—Cervantes used a lot of word play—Grossman explains it in footnotes used as a gloss. She also explains references to other literature of the time—Cervantes took great glee in lambasting and lampooning his contemporaries—and defines some words that either defy or shouldn’t be translated.
For instance, Don Quixote’s sidekick’s name, Sancho Panza, shouldn’t be translated, but apparently “panza” means “belly.” Now that I can think of him as Sancho Belly, well, it makes me laugh.
Still, at nearly 1,000 pages, it’s been taking time to get through this book and there are lots of others waiting for me. So I’ve taken a break partway through, at the scene where Don Quixote decides it’s a good idea to spend three days by a stream, naked and banging his head on a rock, and plan to return to it soon to see if it knocks any sense into him.
A much slimmer volume that’s taking a long time to get through is “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality” by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Barely over 200 pages, this one take time because it makes me think.
This could be a whole ‘nother entry and it’s late. So I’ll come back to it as well.
October 27th, 2005 at 2:49 pm EDT
The reading group that I belong to had Don Quixote as its October assignment. We all agreed that Grossman’s translation is easily the best. It certainly is a lo-o-o-ong book, but worth persevering with. I thought that Part Two was more rewarding than Part One.