Review: Haruki Murakami, "Sleep"; Ryunosuke Akutagawa, "Rashomon"

Walking from page to page through Murakami's short stories collection "The Elephant Vanishes", I was gradually descending into gloom. At first, the descent was hardly noticeable, interspersed with bizarre humor, but the story "Sleep" was an express elevator down a menacing chasm. The final words of the story are:
"Locked inside this little box, I can't go anywhere. It's the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They're going to turn it over."
These men are not burglars, but men in general, and life of this Japanese woman - a dark little box with no exit, fully in their control. The story begins almost hopefully: an intelligent woman, destined for housework as the result of choices imposed by society, awakes at night from a shocking vision and realizes what she has been missing. She stops sleeping and devotes the night, when her benumbed husband and son are sleeping, to herself - to reading, to thinking, to being alive. She feels energetic, her thoughts penetrate effortlessly the deepest layers of meaning within the novels, and yet the stealthy, unassertive method of sacrificing sleep in order to gain time away from housework reeks of desperation.
Yes, she reads, she thinks, but, unable to denounce housewifery, she steps acceptingly toward the onset of dementia. It is an unequal fight. The story is written in first person and the reader is free to judge the woman, but nonetheless Murakami has not made her admirable. He has made pitiful her prideful thoughts, her visits to the pool, her delight in husband-forbidden chocolate. And the story ends in gloom, there is no way out, no boat to sail in against the current. This is the way it is, the only way it can be right now. Murakami also suggests through the choices this woman makes in her life, that the plight of women in contemporary Japanese society is their own fault.
Unnerved and reluctant to descend even deeper away from the secure sunshine over NYC, I put Murakami back on the shelf and picked up Ryunosuke Akutogawa instead. Upon read Rashomon, I found myself watching undignified malcontents fight over plucked hair amid corpses piled atop the Kyoto gate in 1100's and decided that I am not prepared to deal with Japanese literature.

Мартышка Судьба

В огромных голубых глазах моей подруги дрожали слезы, когда она рассказывала мне, повторяясь и повторяясь, о своем несчастье, и мне ее безудержно жаль. Но жалость - жудшее лекарство: к нему привыкаешь и не торопишься с выздоровлением. От нее убежала ее спутница трех лет, не объяснив, обругав. Трудно поверить, трудно пережить, но почему-то все, что подруга рассказывала мне, складывается с самого начала в необратимое колесо судьбы, которое могло привести только к этому, хоть она и говорит: «Что, что я делала не так? Я бы все могла изменить.» Часто кажется, что так легко было избежать рока, повернув в прошлом колесо судьбы на пол-градуса вправо, и проходишь в уме раз за разом прожитое и терзаешься тем, что то колесо так мучительно близко, что почти можно дотянуться, но все же недоступно. Отказываешься верить, что когда оно было доступно, мы были другими людьми, и шли без оглядки, обреченные самими сабой на этот маршрут. Так или иначе мы на что-то обречены. Мы обречены иметь только одно прошедшее, и потому многогранность будущего - отчасти только иллюзия. Неужели мы все - слепые капитаны, сами ведущие наши судна на погибель?
Но трагедия трагедии рознь, и почти все можно пережить. Можно пережить измену, смерть, ампутацию, и сохранить любовь к жизни. Я говорю подруге, что бывает и не такое, что люди оправляются, а она отвечает: «только не я.» Пожалуй не оригинально считать свое положение уникальным, но необходимо убеждать себя в обратном. Нужно менять уклад упрямых мыслей, но подруга всегда была неуступчивой, готовой отдать себя на растерзание обстоятельствам и чужому мнению прежде чем что-то поменять в своем отношении к жизни и себе самой. Мне так трудно поверить в то, что она изменится. Может быть, то же самое подумала и убежавшая спутница. Вообще трудно поверить в то, что кто-нибудь из тех, кого я хорошо знаю, действительно изменится. Неужели все наши планы изменить себя - самообман? Но тогда мы действительно живем в фаталистическом мире!
Нет, мне кажется, что силой воли можно себя изменить, и штурвал судьбы можно успеть повернуть, если вовремя прозреть. Только как узнать во что смотришь ты, в лупу или в телескоп?

Мартышка Судьба

Мне темно, но что такое?
Свет кругом, а мне темно.
Может облако чумное
мне ресницы занесло.
Может снег случайно выпал
мне, в морщину меж бровей?
Может голосом забытым
ты шепнул мне из теней
про года, что уж забыты,
про супругов, что зарыты,
и про хрупкие сердца
и про чувства без ограды,
про прощанье у крыльца и
смятенье без отрады.
Может ты шепнул о том,
Как невечно наше время,
Как без передышки
Плетут полотно,
коварные лапки мартышки?

Состарилась рано мартышка-судьба,
Но злобу свою сохранила,
И путает с радостью людям года,
Что не распутают чернила.
Не будь судьба жестока так,
Мы знаем сами нашу кару,
Дойдут и без тебя лета
До неизбежного портала.

Rilke, Blaue Hortensie

Перевела сегодня Rilke's Blaue Hortensie, но к сожалению опять нелады с рифмой - кажется, что либо рифму, либо смысл нужно приносить в жертву.


Голубая Гортензия

Сухие, тусклые, шершавые, как остатки зеленого
В скляночке краски, эти листья
За зонтиками цветов, что голубой не носят
На себе, а лишь издалека отражают.

Они отражают его заплаканно, неясно,
Как будто и вовсе хотят потерять,
В них желтизна, как в голубой бумаге
Старых писем, и серо-фиолетового след;

Полинялость, как в детском переднике,
Давно не ношенном, с которым уж не будет ничего:
Как чувствуется краткость жизни малой.

Но вдруг как будто обноволся голубой
В одном из тех соцветий, и кажется, что
Нежная голубизна зеленому обрадовалась цвету.

Rilke, Blaue Hortensie

So wie das letzte Grün in Farbentiegeln
sind diese Blätter, trocken, stumpf und rauh,
hinter den Blütendolden, die ein Blau
nicht auf sich tragen, nur von ferne spiegeln.

Sie spiegeln es verweint und ungenau,
als wollten sie es wiederum verlieren,
und wie in alten blauen Briefpapieren
ist Gelb in ihnen, Violett und Grau;

Verwaschenes wie an einer Kinderschürze,
Nichtmehrgetragenes, dem nichts mehr geschieht:
wie fühlt man eines kleinen Lebens Kürze.

Doch plötzlich scheint das Blau sich zu verneuen
in einer von den Dolden, und man sieht
ein rührend Blaues sich vor Grünem freuen.

Muteness == true

It is decidedly peculiar, the muteness that overtakes one after days of programming. The sensation is just as disturbing as when one begins to forget his native language while living amid foreigners in a strange land. Just as the strange land begins to feel much more like home than the land of one's origin, so the avid programmer forgets the smooth pathways of verbal interaction and resorts instead to if-else statements (E.g. a phone message: "You haven't picked up, which means that either you are sleeping or busy. If you are sleeping, then Good Night. If you are busy, then call me back before you go to bed. If that will be in the next half hour, I will be in the subway, so leave a message or send me SMS. I hope to hear from you.").

In some cases, muteness of the mind ensues as well. It is a state in which the programmer dreams of primarily two themes, where:
1) he/she is a data structure.
2) he/she is compelled to chop the corpses of his loved ones or hated ones into little pieces and hide them, and after this receives enlightenment from a caterpillar enrobed in divine radiance.
The inability to find even remotely interesting conversation topics is endemic to this condition.

Now, despite the severity of this repetitive stress syndrome of the brain, the cure is surprisingly simple and requires little but the force of will to stop programming for a week and do one or all of the following:
1) Read 3 classic fiction novels.
2) Read a historical account of anarchism.
3) Draw an angry ink blot using cadmium red oil paint.
4) Write 20 blogs about muteness.

My will is faltering. I think I will go program now...

Butterfly in the Sidewalk

There was a wheelcheer moving in front of me in the sunshine, and after it passed through a puddle there was a swallowtail butterfly balancing in its center. Its wings were glued together and it didn't wish to move, so I thought it injured. I lifted it by its wings and took it to the grass, so that no one would tread on it. There the beautiful yellow wings spread and the butterfly limped in air around the puddle, touching the asphalt and limping again in hesitation. Then it lowered itself in the middle of the puddle and put its wings together.

a Mountain Man

The T was not very full, but you still had to squeeze in next to a stranger in order to sit. A cheery, perfect-looking family stood by a vertical hand rail. The father, lightweight lad with glasses, had a baby back-pack with a 1.5-year-old in it. From the eyes of the boy starved overexcitement stared. The T stopped and a blue-shirted mountain of a man treaded within. He stood across from the family, unshakable and mute as the T surged forward. Suddenly, his heavy gaze found the boy, and he smiled, lifting his lips with heaviness, as if they were, indeed, made of rock. The boy smiled back and hit the edge of the backpack with impatient and awkward hand. At this, the mountain-man felt a rocking impulse to shake of his silence, and his eyes faced the father as he addressed him with a smile and a mumble. Father did not expect the address, and watched incredulously, as words were born from the mumble of a stranger:
- It is like, like he has to smile, you know, - the stranger said.
The wife and mother in law looked at the mountain man cautiously, nodded and looked away. The mountain man felt the discrepancy between his words and that which stirred him to speak. He looked at the smiling boy again and mumbled a little more, as a mountain rumbles, compelled by fire from within.
- He just like, just has to smile, - he said and hesitated, - even the eyes are smiling.
The father nodded and produced a "yeah"-like noise. The family considered the matter concluded, but the mountain still looked at them and at the boy.
- There is a fire in them, - he said finally.
And the mountain stopped rumbling, feeling, perhaps, that it has reached the summit of eloquence. It stepped uneasily from one foot to the other, looked at the boy for one last time and at the unseeing parents and shuffled to the other end of the train.

Zwielicht, Joseph von Eichendorff

Кто бы мог подумать, что немецкая лирика может быть такой чуткой и живой? Тем не менее, это именно так, и по счастливой случайности я писала сочинение о стихотворении «Zwielicht», написанном Eichendorff. Оно показалось мне несколько утрированным, - почти издевательством над романтическими страхами и волнениеями, порождаемыми природой. Однако, по прослушивании Liederkreis (op. 39) у Schumann, понятно, что стихотворение это, пожалуй, даже и не о сумерках, и намного трагичнее, чем кажется с первого взгляда. Вот моя попытка художественного перевода на русский и само стихотворение в орининале.

Сумерки

Расправил крылья полумрак,
Жутко движутся деревья,
Сном тяжелым бредут тучи -
Что означает этот страх?

Коль имеешь лань любимую,
Не пускай ее пастись одну,
В лесу трубя бредут охотники,
Замолкают и дальше бредут.

Коль имеешь друга близкого,
В этот час не верь ему,
За взглядом ласковым и голосом
Готовит войну он в коварной тиши.

Что сегодня усталое клонится
Новорожденным завтра встает,
В ночи многое обронится,
Прячься, бодрствуй и будь готов!

Zwielicht, Joseph von Eichendorff

Dämmrung will die Flügel spreiten,
Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume,
Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume -
Was will dieses Graun bedeuten?

Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern,
Laß es nicht alleine grasen,
Jäger ziehn im Wald und blasen,
Stimmen hin und wider wandern.

Hast du einen Freund hienieden,
Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde,
Freundlich wohl mit Aug und Munde,
Sinnt er Krieg im tückschen Frieden.

Was heut müde gehet unter,
Hebt sich morgen neugeboren.
Manches bleibt in Nacht verloren -
Hüte dich, bleib wach und munter!

On the Prowl

"Surely," I said, "not much wildlife remains in the city." Gees and squirrels don't count in Boston, of course. Nature, indignant, was swift with its rebuff.
At two in the morning that day I fancied a walk around my neighborhood. When I was lost in the contemplation of the ghostly light effects in the foliage and the swaying of an occasional passerby, my companion safeguarded me against running into a fluffy-tailed skunk. Luckily, the beast was concerned with his own affairs. A block or two later we stopped to look for a source of sudden bid-like chattering and with a surprise discovered a pair of raccoon eyes accosting us from the bushes. She walked out, a plump svelte body pivoted on delicate pale feet, and impassively walked away down the street. Yet, the sound did not seize, and we noticed a little creature in distress pacing the balustrade of the nearest house. "Rak-tak-tak-tak-tak. Mommy, Mommy," - he called more and more desperately, as he scrambled along back and forth and made an occasionally pass to come down.
Though the mother seemed determined to instill some independence into the youngster, tonight was not the night. His courage was not up to par, and she was forced to return and stop the undignified racket. Out of nowhere, a slick shadow appeared on the roof and slid down a drain pipe onto the balustrade: it was her with a stern and condescending look of a woman with arms akimbo. To her dismay, she found the youngster stuck in the railing, and fumbled him for some 5 minutes. We came as close and looked from below at the face of the creature, wild but unabashed, as it met, as we all do, the annoyances of its daily routine.

Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Where are the braids of my great-grandmother, the bread loaves shaped by my great-great-grandfather's hands in his backery 150 years ago, where do I find the string, on which the generations are strung like beads? Perhaps the beads have turned to dust with the decades of wear, as the smiles of my great aunts circled like fall leaves in the streets of the post-war years and disappeared under the tires of soviet automobiles and the many identical soles of soviet citizens, unidelized back into reality by the length of the milk lines. Or maybe somewhere, under the trunk of my subconscious, the dainty dust bunnies of faded generations are hiding still, holding their grudge against the moderns and their computers.
But they are almost as good as forgotten, as we, schoolchildren, learn to write the same mistakes in grammar school, and decide for the same reasons and out of the same greed to wage different wars, where the prison camps will have toilets as bad as in 1945 (see Guenter Eich, "Latrine"). But the murmuring denizens of the reality called the Past will keep haunting us just a little bit, even through the din of the city and the plastic shells of ear-phones. And reality it is, this Past, by the virtue of having existed sometime. Yes, there is still Soviet Russia, there is still Ghengis Khan and the Beligan colonization of the Congo. And the people who have given rise to us almost anawares, exist somewhere as a part of the Everything that is known. Only we, who are fortuitously living in the present, forget to remember them.

This is what "100 Years of Solitude" speaks and murmurs about in one's ear. The history repeats and mirrors itself with a mocking smile in different decades on different faces, and the past, no matter how forgotten, is a part of the long chain with only one link in the present. As the names repeat, so personalities repeat, with subtle variations, with hereditary memory and hereditary forgetfulness. It is not only the tale about the cycle of time and history doomed to forgetfulness. It is a tale of real people with real bones existing almost independently from the history that bore them and suffering their own passions and tragedies as people do. To all of this add flying carpets, insomnia plagues and levitating priests, fueled by hot chocolate, and the light of truth will reveal itself before your eyes. Wonderful book to read, and reread when turning older and less foolish.

Review: Достоевский, Игрок

Это произведение безусловно не сравнится по сложности с шедеврами Достоевского, но здесь тоже присутствует несколько блестящих моментов. Особенно иронично было личное появление бойкой и жизнерадостной богатой бабушки вместо телеграммы о ее смерти, с часа на час ожидаемой жадным до денег семейством наследников, и ее сумашедший проигрыш всего состояния у них на глазах. Блестяще было показано сумасшествие азарта, и затмение, находящее на человека, заболевшего им: как будто все в мире помимо игры теряет для него интерес. Выбраться же из этого состояния очень нелегко, и даже если человек сам понимает, что летит в пропасть, продолжает свое падение путем самообмана. Этим заблуждением повесть и заканчивается: «О, у меня предчувствие, и это не может быть иначе! У меня теперь пятнадцать луидоров, а я начинал и с пятнадцатью гульденами! Если начать осторожно... - и неужели, неужели уж я такой малый ребенок! Неужели я не понимаю, что я сам погибший человек. Но - почему же я не могу воскреснуть. Да! стоит только хоть раз в жизни быть расчетливым и терпеливым и - вот и все! Стоит только хоть раз выдержать характер, и я в один час могу всю судьбу изменить!»

Review: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

This is a very wonderful collection of memories, perhaps tainted by the biased lens through which Hemingway - and really anyone for that matter - learns to see the past, rendering people and himself differently than many supposedly impartial online articles. One could argue that it is a deceptive tale, not really an autobiography that paints the self with the elementary colors of Truth, aimed at self-deprecation. Frankly, I would rather be deceived by a narrator with charm, who has reconciled himself with the past and thereby attained a new truth that is almost truer than the truth he has lived. After all, if there is Truth in itself, it is unattainable by any human observer, so the next best truth is the subjective and partial one we all hold in the jewel cases of our thoughts.

What Hemingway writes is this second truth about his young days in Paris, truth seen through his memories and not taken from some universal cosmic log that keeps track of every event and thought on our foolish earth. His language, though deliberately aimed for impartial simplicity, betrays nostalgia and resignation that caught up with him only later in life. When I read this, I want to knock on wood too:

"Poor everybody," Hadley said. "Rich feathercats with no money."

"We are awfully lucky."

"We`ll have to be good and hold it."

We both touched wood on the cafe table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this cafe table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

He suggests that only luck keeps happiness for us, and without it, many chances to one, we shall perish, led by momentary infatuation, by stepping off a cliff . One cannot have everything, and in the desire to gain the world, loses all. Here I bow to the rule of reason, but perhaps once in a while it gets overthrown by bands of ragged impulses: "When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully..." And one can feel, how fatally irreversible life is. But one tends to value more that, which is fragile, and so we do.
Hemingway writes: "But I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself." And this applies to happiness as well, except noone can find anything better to fill the space with.

There are also many interesting thoughts about creation and writing and a few anecdotal recollections of notable people. He speaks of hunger as a good discipline, from which one learns, and perhaps he is right. I learn from it too, from different forms of hunger. He speaks of them too. Physical hunger, hunger for recognition, hunger to work, hunger for that which one cannot have. Hadley, Hemingway's first wife, says in the novel that "Memory is hunger." A Moveable Feast is perhaps an attempt to appease that kind of hunger.

The memoir describes Scott Fitzgerald's life with some melancholy details that make me wish it were a bit more stable and left us with another Great Gasby. Though, if he were not a dreamer with days submerged with champaigne, there would probably be no Great Gasby. By some accounts, Fitzgerald stole some writing from his wife, but Hemingway describes her as a selfish woman, jealous of her husband's work.

I wonder, does one have to have problems to be a great writer, or does one acquire them in the process?

Review: Camus, The Stranger

Stylistically, the book is excellent. Impassive, strikingly short statements of the first-person narrator reveal Mersault’s understanding of the world and the world itself better than any omniscient narrator could (e.g. what could describe a person better than: “Over his bed he has a pink-and-white plaster angel, some pictures of famous athletes, and two or three photographs of naked women.” ?)

Through Mersault, Camus autopsies a candid case of the paralysis of emotion, that far more people experience than are prepared to admit: “It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing has changed.(p.24) … I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or anther all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead. Here the lawyer interrupted me and he seemed very upset.(p.65)” The horror of onlookers at Mersault’s trial, therefore, appears exceedingly hypocritical. Mersault is an exaggeration of the choiceless existence that many lead unawares, the existence of wood chips swaying in the waves of circumstances. Thus, in retrospect, the phrase: “It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot” is one of the novel’s messages, a much less obvious one than it seems. Following the verdict, Mersault’s musings about the nature of capital punishment and the lack of even infinitesimal hope is, in content, nearly identical to the passage in the opening pages of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”, but completely opposed to it in feeling.

“The Stranger” is not a pessimistic statement about the state of the world, but rather a reminder to preserve the tenderness of heart and the precision of perspective, that would allow us to distinguish what really is so important in life to make one desperate to retain it.

Review: Bradbury, Martian Cronicles

As a collection of sketches for all the works an artist will create in his lifetime, this is both great and mildly disappointing: there is almost too much of Bradbury revealed in this book. It is as though somebody wrote one of these "Very Short Introductions" to Brudbury in a brilliant fiction format. The ideas to note and cherish are:
- Humans (especially Americans) tend to overlegislate and over-politically-correct to the point of ridiculous: dread the book burning (also Farenheit 451).
- When we cannot have the truth, the dream is the next best thing and many will deliberately turn their faces to make dream seemreal (i.e. pretend a hypnotist martian is your resurrected son).
- Our approach to God (say, a Christian one) is inevitably short-sighted in the context of larger universe (for what is Jesus for Martians? what is sin for someone without flesh?).
- Emigrant's feeling for his motherland would be a thousand times multiplied in an earth-man come to Mars. If the war started, we would all go home.
- There's little one would not do out of loneliness (hypnotic Martian putting on different identities).
- How good we are at destroying the precious castles of history built on foreign lands (e.g. Martian castles, Baghdad castles)!
- AI may have just as much right for life, as we, supposedly non-AI beings, but does it have a reason to be? Is its laughter meaningless, if we planted it there? Who knows if a soul is really anithing to pay attention to.
- Technology that attempts to replace the basic essence of our existence is short-sighted, because a) it will appear ridiculous when we vanish (no people around, but cook breakfast nonetheless), b) we will appear ridiculous if it vanishes (what happened to the self-cooked breakfast?), c) it may create unforeseen disasters - psychological, physical, it may upturn the meaning of being human that each of us kindles in his heart. (also, The Veldt, in Illustrated Man).

Altogether wonderful with lush imagination and seed-like thruths that may soon sprout. Whatever shall we do then?