Two possibly interrelated extempore notes. Reading in The London Review of Books just now. A review of The House on Via Gamito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky (Europa: March 2024). Reviewer Thomas Jones writes,
…Starnone is married to the writer and translator Anita Raja; they have both, jointly and severally, been fingered as the authors of [Elena] Ferrante's novels. When Jhumpa Lahiri translated Starnone's novel Lacci as Ties in 2017, the New York Times reviewer described it as 'in some ways a sequel' to Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, 'in other ways an interlocking puzzle piece' – though what other kind of puzzle piece is there? – 'or another voice in a larger conversation'. But novels don't have to have been written by the same person, or by people who are married to each other, to be in conversation with one another. That happens anyway, in readers' heads.
This right away put me in mind of something from Roland Barthes' S/Z as quoted in M/W by Matt Longabucco. (Longabucco's book is subtitled An Essay on Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain.) Here's the quote from Barthes (not the full passage as quoted by Longabucco):
The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the 'concrete': the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances…
Longabucco:
Typing out the passage, I feel his pleasure, the permission he gives himself, in extending this single sentence, a sentence that itself describes the vast, singular, interconnected texts we find when we turn to literature and in which we confront everywhere the intractability of difference…
I note this here as further evidence of the serendipity that persistently/insistently addresses the writer, eyes/heart open.
Following on that, another related/unrelated note: reading Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), I came across the following standalone poem (quoted in part):
…Mesopotamian sculptures float in the water, they suddenly rise and begin to walk toward land, lips sometimes smile in deep sleep, the body is slack yet the face possesses thousands of nerves wanting to speak to it all.
I've been reading these poems, translated from Swedish to English, cross-checking the original to mark the continuities/adjacencies of these related/interrelated languages. Here's the quoted portion in the original Swedish:
…mesopotamiska skulpturer flytter i vattnet, de reser sig plötsligt och börjar gä mot land, läparna ler stundtals i den djupa sömnen, kroppen är slapp men anskitet besitter tusentals nerver som vill tala till alltet.
I've written on this blog about the stone figure I found on the beach at Barnegat Light many years ago and later rendered into the 'Eupalinos' thread, after the invented Socratic dialog concocted by Paul Valéry. It may have been as if/that the stone figure arose from the sea and walked toward land, as the poem says, waiting for someone to nestle it. I've imagined/understood that the stone figure was ancient; erratic; remotely surfaced. Either way, the figure is strange and wants reckoning. Anything that comes to hand would help:
mayhap
this poem