狂った!

I’ve moved the blog to WordPress, and it can now be found here.

Abé Mark Normes, ‘For an Abusive Subtitling,’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), pp. 17-34

article on jstor (restricted access)

I’ve thought a lot about translation and about subtitling in particular. I haven’t read much, though, and this article probably wasn’t the best place to start. It struck me as fairly pretentious, and it’s certainly infused in literary theory to a degree that doesn’t really interest me. It does, however, provide some interesting historical tidbits about the development of subtitling. Notably missing are any discussion of the matter of subtitling opera and the general non-existence of subtitling for live play performances, two related phenomena that help flesh out how our English-speaking society in general tackles translation, subtitling (or supertitling), and differing ideas of purism. I aim to revisit this topic, but I’ll probably do so next time I post an article I’ve read on subtitling.

Cesare Zavattini, ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema,’ Sight and Sound 23:3 (October-December 1953), pp. 64-9. Edited from a recorded interview published in La revista del cinema italiano 2 (December 1952). Translated by Pier Luigi Lanza

online version at gOnZomatic - online version at Google Books

I’ve been meaning to look into some of the writings by the neorealists for some time now. As with the new wave, the Italian neorealist movement began as criticism and only coalesced as film later (starting with Ossessione, which got a limited release in 1943, and coming into full swing with Roma, città aperta in 1946). The first piece I’ve encountered, however, is this article by Zavattini at the tail end of what is generally considered to be the neorealist period (from Ossessione to Umberto D) before it broke apart and transformed into other things (the new wave, the very individual careers of Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, et al).

Reading this article helped me pull together various ideas I’ve had about film, as well as various impressions I’ve had about others’ ideas about film. I hope to revisit this post and try to put down some of those ideas. It really is amazing how optimistic Zavattini is in 1953, though I guess it’s too early to see the demise of neorealism and late enough to see some of the impact that neorealism had begun to have around the world.

I’ve been trying to play with as many new rails apps as I can, to get a better sense of what other people are doing with the technologies. Among other things, I’ve created an account at 37Signal’s Backpack to list all the books and movies I need to see and read or think about seeing and reading: http://jundai.backpackit.com/pub/637518. Feel free to send me recommendations.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York: The Heritage Press, 1935

wikipedia - gutenberg - Masaru Uchida’s HTML version

Began: 27 June, 2006. currently reading

• (10 July) I’ve never read a book that meandered so much. So far, the first however many pages are dealing with the various characters that have to do with the main character’s birth. I wasn’t really expecting this much meandering; I was, in fact, expecting the story to be a series of stories within stories à la the film The Saragossa Manuscript (I presume the novel is the same way, but I haven’t read it). Also, Sterne’s use of parenthetical comments is quite over the top. At times I have to read a sentence three times just to understand its structure (that he uses dashes instead of parentheses doesn’t always help, since it flattens out the structure—when you see a dash, you can’t be sure if you’re coming to the end of a parenthetical statement or starting a new one inside of it), and the end result is a fairly fragmented understanding of the story (which is, presumably, what Sterne intended).

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996

081661251X - wikipedia on Eagleton

Began: ? March/April, 2006. Finished: 27 June, 2006

This book was very poorly titled. It is not a comprehensive survey of literary theory. Nor is it an exploration of all of the theories it does cover. Instead, the book is essentially an argument for the overhaul or replacement of literary theory.

The book essentially goes through a list of major literary theories (giving short shrift to a number of them, as some Amazon reviewers have pointed out, most notably feminism and post-colonialism), presenting each with a description of where it comes from (i.e., why it happened), what its major positions are, how it relates to other theories, who its major players are, and what has happened to it. Then, Eagleton goes on to trash it, pointing out what he sees as its major flaws and inadequacies and what matters he feels that it willfully overlooks. The book begins by arguing that literature does not exist, and it concludes by arguing that literary theory does not exist (which is a relatively easy argument if one of your premises is that literature does not exist).

Eagleton’s perspectives seem pretty much in line with my own on most matters he relates, which is probably a result of my own position in history and my being the son of a Marxist scholar, so it’s hard to avoid reading the book as a guide to how I would probably feel about all of these movements in literary theory if I were smarter, more articulate, more well-read, etc., etc. Basically he uses a lot of familiar arguments to take apart positions that I didn’t even know existed.

In one sense the book has been particularly useful. I no longer feel the need to learn more about structuralism or New Criticism, since they seem mostly uninteresting and irrelevant. Previously, I always heard these terms and wondered what they were about. In fact, thanks to Eagleton, I’m mostly persuaded that literary theory as a whole is uninteresting and irrelevant, with exceptions for feminism, post-colonialism, and some parts of psychoanalysis, which are mostly interesting because they are parts of much larger, highly interesting topics.

Similarly, I agree with Eagleton that there’s nothing valuable in literary theory that can’t be applied to any other form of discourse. Which raises the question: what’s the point of a literature department, and why do they tend to exclude or marginalize science fiction, journalism, advertising copy, political speeches, and traffic signs, which are arguably more relevant than most of what they do teach? There’s a question that the book taught me to ask that I had never really thought about so clearly before reading it.

(more to come?)

Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma. Edited by Roger Pearson. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

0192839578 - wikipedia - Gutenberg edition (French)

Began: ? April, 2006; Finished: 23 June, 2006