In Search of Another Edinburgh

I have been living in Edinburgh for six months now. Six months is long enough to know there is more to this city than Old Town vs New Town. Long enough to get a bit spoilt by the oldness of everything. To forget to lean out the window and spy the castle on a sunny day. To pull the curtains, without blinking, on “the best example of Neo-classical Georgian architecture in Edinburgh” (I’m quoting a guidebook I read in Matalan the other day while waiting for Marisa to finish browsing), aka West Register House.

I still believe I will never arrive in another city and think, "This is more amazing than the time I walked up the steps from the Waverley Train Station for the first time." But sometimes I like to see things that won’t be mentioned in guidebooks, grace postcards, or appear on your bog standard travel blog.

There is another Edinburgh out there, smushed between the castles and kirkyards, you just have to go looking.

So that’s what Marisa and I set out to do today.

But first we had to drop some books off at the library, which meant walking through the daffodil-overloaded Princes Street Gardens and up the Mound to the George IV bridge. It’s hard to think of a more iconic twenty minute walk in Edinburgh. Anywho, we then struck out for new ground, and found a mosque and a decaying office building on the edges of the university.

This is more like it, I thought.

We powered on past St. Leonards (Rebus’ Police Station… ur… ) and into Newington. We passed the Scottish Widows offices, which Marisa said reminded her of Christchurch. I agreed and took a photo.

But then we found ourselves so close to Salisbury Crags and Holyrood Park, and decided, since we hadn’t walked around Queens Drive this way, we might as well. Who knows what sort of Edinburgh we’d find.

It was a lovely walk (I sound like a nana when I say that, don’t I?), passing Duddingston Loch and the village (a village, ooh!) of, ah, Duddington, and then we found ourselves half a mile from Craigmillar Castle. We decided to have a nosy, see what the admission price was, etc. When we got to the carpark, there was a Scottish Heritage person telling everyone it was free to look around the castle today (usually it’s £4.20 or something).

So we set out looking for the un-Edinburgh, and ended up at a castle! This says a lot about Edinburgh, but also that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’re still tourists after six months.

Translation - April Experiment #1

As I alluded to in my wrap up of my March Experiment, I was thinking of doing something with translation next.

What brought this on was a short story I wrote with a Spanish main character. I showed it to some writer friends and a few questioned the language. They wanted the English of the 3rd person narrator simplified, so there was less of a gulf between narrator and main character. I didn’t really agree with their reasoning, but figured it was worth trying the story with a Beginner’s English narration.

To do this, I tried the expedient of translation the first paragraph into Spanish using an online translator, then translating the Spanish back to English. The result was clunky, as expected. Lots of extra bits—the, of, he, in, at—appeared, but surprisingly, the internet could manage “stalk” (cazar al acecho) and “so-and-so” (fulano).

Anyway, I gave up on the idea of translating my whole story into Spanish and back, since it would mostly add a lot of articles and prepositions, and I’d end up going back to my original word choices. But I could see some utility in this technique.

The key, I think, is to start with someone else’s words.

Today I heard Jorge Calderón’s version of Keep Me In Your Heart (written by Warren Zevon and Jorge Calderón; originally performed by Zevon on The Wind) as I walked home from work. This was the final track on Zevon’s final album. You can press play and listen while you read the rest of this post if you'd like to:

This line really got to me:

Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile

When I got home (after checking my email, reading some blogs, and setting my fantasy basketball lineups), I read over the lyrics, and cut and paste the lines above, and two more couplets into my online translator. These other lines were:

If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for awhile

There's a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for awhile

I then translated these six lines into Spanish then back to English then into French then into English then into German then into English then into Italian then into English then into Dutch then into English then into Portuguese then into English then into Russian then into English. I would have gone further if my online translator had more languages.

The final version was a bit of a garble:

When I it negligence, that I they, that want, do not wish to tell for end outside, that me tratterrebbe in their one heart

From time during the correct moment then they simple things where also probably it has made houses, tornou-se-me and its smile hung up

It leads to a train which it has told good-bye rather nocha which I have, I am appointed, when all have told and become - directly in its heart small me deteve

It was a bit strange that some words could be translated into Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but not back into English, but that's machines for you.

The tone was really set by the first translation (French), so I tried starting with Russian and it went somewhere slightly different...

After a few more iterations, I had a stockpile of 1,200 words of translations of the three original couplets. The clunkiness of the translator cursed any couplet from being completely comprehensible, but also blessed me with some interesting phrases which seemed in the spirit of the original text (and song), but unique in their own right. I then copied and pasted every interesting phrase into a new document, culled and crimped, until I ended up with a poem.

A poem? I don’t know what I thought I was doing this whole time, but I didn’t begin with the intention of writing a 44 word poem (small mercy: this swollen blog entry counts towards my word count).

But that’s what happened.

Here it is:

Translation
After Warren Zevon

when all I said becomes a small
heart—
I am named

*

the simple things within the house
that you make of me:

the dependable action in this heart

*

I am appointed

when all have told and become
is hung to a smile

What do you think? I like it. But then I tend to like poems tinged with death (see Tuesday’s post). Good thing I’m not a full-time poet—there might be some slit wrists in the cheap seats.

Best NZ Poems 2007

I’ve been reading two or three poems a day from the best NZ poems 2007, which was released online at the end of last month.

I have now read them all.

One person’s list of 25 poems (2007’s editor was Paula Green) will vary wildly from another person’s list, and anyone sitting down with the express purpose of writing one of 2008’s “best poems” is bound for disappointment. (Although… we know that James Brown will be 2008’s editor, and we can read his list of his ten favourite NZ poetry books here and… no, don’t even go there.)

What I wanted to say was poetry—and writing in general—is very subjective, and anything with “best” in the title needs quotation marks (and footnotes, and apologetic noises in the foreword…), but bringing work together like this provides a great taster of a year in NZ poetry. Sure, some names appear every other year (are they Bedrock or Deadwood? that’s your call), but to an international audience (as the internet permits the anthology to reach) the names are secondary to the poems. Where else these days but the internet can you expect to discover a favourite author/actor/musician/designer through their work first, then backtrack to the biographical (soundbite-worthy) stuff?

I don’t profess to have read every poem published by a NZer in 2007, but my two favourites from Paula Green’s list (in reverse order) were:

‘Sandwiches’ by Elizabeth Smither

“When my father died we ate sandwiches…” the poem begins -- a “You had me at hello” moment, though for me, it was toast. And that final image of the skirt striding ahead, “bolder than my feet,” is a cracker.

‘Chemotherapy’ by Geoff Cochrane

On a first reading I knew this poem would stay with me for a long time. The image of the dying man blowing out an unlit candle. The economy words (the title does a lot of work), and their textures. “The wind-minced sea”, which is a strangely violent phrase to begin with, appears bruised when it reappears in the last line… ah!

You could probably extrapolate a few things about my taste in poetry from the above selections. 1) I prefer shorter poems to longer ones. 2) I am drawn to poems about death.

Um, guilty on both counts, I think.

Status Report: Week Fourteen

Week Fourteen – The Stats

Weekly word count: 19,581

Average: 2,797 words per day (compared to 1,806 last fortnight)

Most productive day: Tuesday 25 March, 3,576 words

Least productive day: Sat 22 and Sun 23 March, 8 words (noted in my journal for 8x31 story… to be completed tomorrow)

Year-to-date: 258,278

For the first time since week Week Eight, my average word count for the week has exceeded the magical 2,732 words per day. Five sub par weeks is precisely why I have a two day deficit to make up somewhere. It’s hard enough keeping pace (I blew out this weekend after nutting out some good numbers during the week), so not that optimistic at the mo.

On the plus side, during the week I got two pieces accepted for publication, one in print, one online. It’s always feast of famine with these things. Nothing for two months, then two in two days. The print publication was the story I mentioned a few weeks ago that I submitted in July 2007 and had given up on. Any news like that bouys the spirits (and the requirement to write bio notes helps the word count).

I’m still waiting for the results of two competitions I entered, one of which was supposed to be announced in March (I’ve Googled my darndest, but I doesn’t look like an announcement has been made).

Anyway.

Status report for Week Fourteen: still going. That’s all I really needed to say.

The Great White Page vs Dark Room

Earlier in the year of a million words (ahem) I wrote this poem:

The Great White Page

Were it another colour
Were it another shape
Maybe words would come

Those 16 words weren’t the biggest help for my word count, but they do capture the feeling I get when I look to the west, I mean, when I open a new word document at the end of an evening, still needing three hundred or eight hundred words to keep apace with my targets.

The fear of the Great White Page (almost as scary as being forced to read another book by Steven Hall, shudder…) has lead to this:

It’s called Dark Room. Free to download.

Simply by changing the colours and removing all the toolbars from sight, this wee program has tricked me several times this week into forgetting about everything but what I’m working on.

It reminds me of my youth, too. Of DOS and those IBM clones that schools could suddenly afford in 1990, and were finally junked in 1996 (me and five others were given the job of disposing of an entire classroom full of these cream-coloured wonders in third form… good times… perhaps there’s a story in this?).

I imagine it’s similar to how people of a (slightly) older generation feel about typewriters, or pen and paper.

Me, I can’t imagine writing fiction on anything that required you to type out everything again when you made any changes. I guess you’d chose your words more wisely in the first place. Labour over them. Not that I don’t labour over mine (the fiction words more than these bloggy words). Just that the labour comes in waves: birth, first examination, alteration, second examination, death, rebirth…

Anyway, just wanted to share my Dark Room discovery.

Footnote:

In looking for a good version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the link above, I found this. Classic.

Punctuation Station

Interesting piece from The Guardian on the death of the semi-colon, or point-virgule if you're French:

Upmarket it may be; it will be hard work to save it. As the great grammarian Jacques Drillon concedes in his seminal Traité de la ponctuation française, it is almost certainly "the fear of using it incorrectly" that is contributing most to the point-virgule's demise. Not even a bold assertion from Alain Rey, perhaps France's most famous language expert and editor of the Robert dictionary, that good punctuation "transcends the political divide" and is "the symbol of a republic that reasons properly" may, in the end, protect the point-virgule from the inexorable march of Anglo-Saxon inelegance.

I fall into the Against category on this one, with, surprise surprise, Kurt Vonnegut:

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

A Disgraceful Non Sequitur

After my problems listening to J.G. Ballard’s Millennium People, I’m now listening to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (I must have been in an acronym-y mood at the library). I studied Foe at university and I remember seeing Disgrace on the shelves with the other "textbooks", which I think is why it’s taken me until now to dive into one of the favourites to take the Booker of Bookers when it is announced later this year.

I haven’t finished the book yet, so I’m not going to comment on its worthiness, but I will say I found the number of qualifiers in title Disgrace already holds: The Greatest Novel Of The Last 25 Years Written In English Outside The United States*** (according to The Observer).

This is all a lead in to another entry in my Words I Did Not Quite Understand Until Today. Except this isn’t quite the case with non sequitur, because I didn’t need to look it up when I heard it as I walked to work this morning. I had to think a bit, but I got the meaning (a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it) spot on. The thing is, I’ve been through this before with non sequitur. A better heading for the list in which non sequitur belongs is: Words Whose Meanings Never Seem To Sink In But Can Be Deduced From The Context.

As with Words I Did Not Quite Understand…, I can’t come up with any more examples off the top of my head, but I know they’re out there. Words (or phrases) which are familiar to the eyes and/or ears, but not the mind. Imagine if every second word was like non sequitur or bespoke—I think you just imagined being dyslexic.

I’m not dyslexic, though based on the number of transposition errors I’ve made at work this past week, my superiors could be forgiven for wondering. Clumsy fingers, that’s the culprit in my case.

All this talk of audiobooks lately is giving a skewed impression of my reading habits. I'm not going to list everything I've read (actually read) in the year of a million words -- partly because I don't want to sound like I'm name-checking, partly because I don't want to admit I didn't read Kafka's Metamorphisis until after I bought the t-shirt in Prague... But I will say Marisa and I have both been devouring the written work of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and there may just be an appreciation appearing on this blog in the coming weeks...

***Coincidentally, #2 on this list was Martin Amis’ Money, which I listened to before Millennium People. What did I think of it? Well, there’s a reason I never reviewed it, let’s just say that. *coughs*

Not For General Consumption

What's wrong with British Television?

It just wants to give me nightmares!

Last night it was an hour devoted to a guy whose face was a mass of bulbous purple growths.

And tonight it's Cooking with Placenta!

The sight of twenty friends and relatives tucking in to afterbirth pâté is now on the top of my sub-conscious' Freak Him The Fuck Out pile.

This is what I get for turning my head towards the television for five minutes a night.

(Maybe I should question Marisa's viewing tastes?)