It's Getting Hot Out Here! (Desert Island Books, Part Three)
Three more desert island books…
6.) I promised I’d go all erudite on you. And I promise you this is legit. I love James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I have actually read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A few times. Have I understood James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? To a degree. I can find some if hardly all of the references and motifs in a given excerpt. There’s a lot of, you know, recursive…recursiveness. And stuff. Also, a lot of it’s really hilarious and a lot of it’s really beautiful. So, am I taking Finnegans Wake to my desert island? Not quite. I want a twofer. I am taking Finnicius Revém, Donaldo Schüler’s translation into Portuguese of Joyce’s work, published by Ateliê Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil. Schüler, you see, places the translation next to the original, so I get to enjoy Joyce and then enjoy Schüler’s sometimes completely made-up equivalents of Joycean wordplay. (My partner is Brazilian is how this, including me collecting all six volumes of Schüler, got started. To date I have four. They are not easy to find.) Joyce’s multilingual puns are often untranslatable. Reading Schüler we may marvel at what he has managed to recover or transform, or we may regret what is lost. Kind of like life. By the way, have I mentioned that I want this desert island to be off the coast of Brazil?
7.) If I’m going to have Joyce and that Norton Anthology, I should also have a dictionary. But why waste one of my ten choices on a book I’m only going to use for reference? Well, I’m also going to read that dictionary. No, seriously. My dad did that all the time. Try it. It’s kind of addictive. And I want it to be the OED. All twenty volumes, please. Girlfriend is not going to lie around on the hot sand clutching a magnifying glass.
8.) I once again appeal to the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands. I am hoping that, for number eight, His Honor will let me stretch the definition of a book. I want a big ol’ pile of travel magazines. I want page after slick, colorful page of boutique hotels I can’t afford, castles I’d never get to, and hikes and climbs that would tax my plantar fasciitis. I love the luxury of the places and I love the luxury of the language. In travel magazines you never labor to find anything (the way I had to search half an hour for the Rembrandthuis, which my map told me was RIGHT THERE!). You are “whisked” to places. You “hop” between islands. You “swing” and “jump” and “sail,” whether you are sailing or not. Beaches and trails are nearly empty. Bars are just full enough to be cozy. Festivals are never crowded or smelly. You just hop from escape to escape to escape. Actually, I wonder if the Commissioner would get me a bunch of subscriptions, so there will always be something new, and I will never have to come back to where I have been.
Last two desert island books soon!
6.) I promised I’d go all erudite on you. And I promise you this is legit. I love James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I have actually read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A few times. Have I understood James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? To a degree. I can find some if hardly all of the references and motifs in a given excerpt. There’s a lot of, you know, recursive…recursiveness. And stuff. Also, a lot of it’s really hilarious and a lot of it’s really beautiful. So, am I taking Finnegans Wake to my desert island? Not quite. I want a twofer. I am taking Finnicius Revém, Donaldo Schüler’s translation into Portuguese of Joyce’s work, published by Ateliê Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil. Schüler, you see, places the translation next to the original, so I get to enjoy Joyce and then enjoy Schüler’s sometimes completely made-up equivalents of Joycean wordplay. (My partner is Brazilian is how this, including me collecting all six volumes of Schüler, got started. To date I have four. They are not easy to find.) Joyce’s multilingual puns are often untranslatable. Reading Schüler we may marvel at what he has managed to recover or transform, or we may regret what is lost. Kind of like life. By the way, have I mentioned that I want this desert island to be off the coast of Brazil?
7.) If I’m going to have Joyce and that Norton Anthology, I should also have a dictionary. But why waste one of my ten choices on a book I’m only going to use for reference? Well, I’m also going to read that dictionary. No, seriously. My dad did that all the time. Try it. It’s kind of addictive. And I want it to be the OED. All twenty volumes, please. Girlfriend is not going to lie around on the hot sand clutching a magnifying glass.
8.) I once again appeal to the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands. I am hoping that, for number eight, His Honor will let me stretch the definition of a book. I want a big ol’ pile of travel magazines. I want page after slick, colorful page of boutique hotels I can’t afford, castles I’d never get to, and hikes and climbs that would tax my plantar fasciitis. I love the luxury of the places and I love the luxury of the language. In travel magazines you never labor to find anything (the way I had to search half an hour for the Rembrandthuis, which my map told me was RIGHT THERE!). You are “whisked” to places. You “hop” between islands. You “swing” and “jump” and “sail,” whether you are sailing or not. Beaches and trails are nearly empty. Bars are just full enough to be cozy. Festivals are never crowded or smelly. You just hop from escape to escape to escape. Actually, I wonder if the Commissioner would get me a bunch of subscriptions, so there will always be something new, and I will never have to come back to where I have been.
Last two desert island books soon!
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