Status Updates From The Art of Flight

Pitol almost makes me want to read Galdos immediately. Almost.

Radically different than its follow-up. Consider that a compliment.

In The Art of Flight, Pitol writes, “Translating allows one to enter fully into a work, to know its bones, its structure, its silences.”

... Everything between them would seem to belong to different worlds. But in the world of great literature profound coincidences are often recorded. Those differences that the idle and foolish delight in pointing out are almost always superficial. Art, when it is worthy of receiving that name, is a testament to having reached its ultimate limit, of reaching resolutely the goal that bears the sign of the extreme."

...,sleepwalkers. Mann is the subject of tributes attended by heads of state, crowned heads, hundreds of prestigious guests. Kafka meets with a few close friends in café Arco, a modest locale in Prague. The thought that someone might host a banquet in his honor could only occur to him in a fever-induced dream...

"Mann’s characters embody the greatness of our species: Joseph, Jacob, biblical heroes; Goethe; a medieval pope who becomes a saint; Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who transforms contemporary music. They are all eagles who soar in the highest heaven. Kafka’s, on the other hand, barely have names, some only receive an initial. They move through streets as oppressive as the sewer drains. They move like moles, puppets...

"Reading is a secret game of approximations and distances. It is also a lottery. One arrives at a book by unusual means; one stumbles upon an author by apparent coincidence only to never be able to stop reading him."

"Writing for me has meant—if I may borrow a phrase from Bakhtin—leaving a personal testimony of the world’s constant mutation."

...In our century, this type of novel, whose composition has always been associated with Chinese boxes or Russian matryoshka dolls, and which today theorists call mise en abyme (placed into abyss), has found a legion of fans. Allow me to cite three remarkable titles: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges."

...We find it, of course, in the Quixote, in The Canterbury Tales; it reemerges in the Enlightenment, with amazing energy, in Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, by Diderot; in Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa; and in that wonder of wonders, Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne...

"The origin of this literary tradition dates back to One Thousand and One Nights. In the Far East, this device has been employed frequently and has produced works that we must inevitably call masterpieces: Cao Xuequin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, written in China..., and the short story “Rashomon,” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, written in early twentieth-century Japan. Its Occidental counterpart is easier to trace...

"The exceptional moments in literature occur when the author, no matter what course he follows when starting a work, manages to immerse himself into the deep currents of language in order to, in this way, lose his own identity."

...The novel is the polyphonic genre par excellence; it recognizes only the limits demanded by these two components: word and form, to which we may add another: time, a specifically fictional time. And one more: a proximity to society, its records: the never-ending round: the human comedy: vanity fair, all that."

"Literary genres and their transmigrations emerged from the union between form and language. The novel, by its mere existence, is representative of freedom; everything in it is possible provided the following elements are present: lively language and the intuition of a form...

"The paths to creation are imprecise. They are full of wrinkles, mirages, delays. They require the patience of a saint, a good deal of abandonment, and, at the same time, an iron will in order to not succumb to the traps the unconscious lays to block the writer. It is well known that the struggle between Eros and Thanatos always lies at the root of creation. But the end of the battle is always unforeseeable."

"In any case, I would venture to say that the starting point of the works of Bosch, as well as those of Gogol, lies in wakefulness, not in dreaming: they are the fruits of imagination and fantasy."

"Happy dreams tend to be scarce and difficult to remember. We awake from them with a smile on our lips; ...At no time during the day does it occur to us to repeat or build on the happiness that we experienced.
On the contrary, the others, the distressing dreams—the terrifying ones, the monstrous nightmares—are capable of not leaving us alone, even for several days."

"We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen, the music we have heard and forgotten, the streets we have walked. We are our childhood, our family, some friends, a few loves, more than a few disappointments. A sum reduced by infinite subtractions. We are shaped by different times, hobbies, and creeds."