Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear

The husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky take their roles as translators with the high seriousness of a calling.  No surprise.

They have made acclaimed translations of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. David Remnick  featured them in a New Yorker article here.  The translating team’s Anna Karenina was reviewed in the same magazine here; James Wood discussed the Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace here.

They also have perfected their road act — as they demonstrated last night in Stanford’s History Corner.  He, the bearded, bear-like master of the double-take; she, the chic and understated matron. They promised us an unbuttoned conversation.  “We’ll yell,” said Pevear.  They didn’t.  In fact, their shtick was well-honed and sophisticated.

And a little bit unbuttoned.  They discussed their problems with publishers’ editors.  “They told us our Tolstoy should be reader-friendly,” she said.

“They feed a text into a machine for ‘readability.’  They said it had too many long sentences,” he said.

“That’s right,” Volokhonsky countered.  “Tolstoy has too many long sentences.”  Volokhonsky recalled an eminent editor who “made us miserable for a very long time.  A year.”

“We crushed her,” said Peavear.

“But it took a year,” she qualified. “We mostly have very good editors.  They keep quiet.”

“To sum it up, our loyalty is with the author, not reader,” said Volokhonsky.

On one point I respectfully disagree with Pevear, who defended their choice for free-verse translations of Pasternak’s poems in the forthcoming (October) Doctor Zhivago.  Disagreeing with Alexander Etkind‘s and Joseph Brodsky‘s insistence on repeating rhyme patterns and metrical schemes, Pevear said that he had opted for “song – something that lives poetically.”

“The search for rhyme distorts all the rest,” he said, making too many translations sound like  “third-rate Tennyson.”  To which I can only argue with two words:  Richard Wilbur.  Well, four words:  Anthony Hecht.  Brodsky’s Nativity Poems has a number of gorgeous translations — from Glyn Maxwell, among others.

Any surprises?  I had not expected the silver hair.  I had seen her as a young Russian beauty, him as the glamorous poet-cum-translator.  This is proof, of course, that I cannot add.  Their Brothers Karamazov was published nearly twenty years ago — that alone would prohibit extreme youth.  (Moreover, the New Yorker article had warned me that they were a mature couple in their sixties.)

Here’s another surprise:  I didn’t know, until the Russian team told me, that St. Jerome, who translated the Hebrew into the  Vulgate Bible, is the patron saint of translators. Valery Larbaud (1881-1957) even wrote an invocation to Jerome, begging that the Croatian saint “deliver us from laziness, discouragement, mistranslation, and the pernicious suggestions of bilingual dictionaries.”

Kay Ryan (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Kay Ryan, our current U.S. poet laureate, calls herself the “Sheriff of Emptiness.” I wrote about her today here.

I met Kay years ago, through Dana Gioia, another North Bay poet.  We had an interview at Kay’s Fairfax home in July 2004.  I had described the meeting in my notes this way:

“Ryan is waiting for me, but not idly.  She is re-grouting the colorful Puebla-style tiles, on the risers of her entryway.  She is short and solidly built.   In khaki shorts and a black t-shirt, however, she appears scrappier, more muscular than she might appear more fully dressed at her readings.  Her longtime companion, Carol, is in Mexico, and Kay is alone in her brisk, clean house.  She is alone, except for Wally, a pale-colored, ancient cat who is mostly bones and fur  – so old he has lost most of his senses, but not his sense of friendliness, and is nevertheless currently in disfavor.”  [He had urinated on something, as I recall — ED.]

Wally, alas, died soon after my visit.  But my connection with Kay lasted longer.  I remember her recalling her family’s move to the Mojave: “It was hot, it was empty.  I didn’t have any friends.  And it took me awhile to come to like it.  But now I really do feel I have the desert in my blood.”  Much like her poem “Blandeur,” she said,  “ I like the emptiness, I like the lack of features.  I like its featurelessness.  I like how any event is a big event.”

And I remember this comment about her 30-year teaching stint at the College of Marin:

Back to Marin .. you teaching remedial writing?

I teach very basic English skills.

I think the way you described it when I first met you was, “My Friend, the Comma.”

I introduce them to the concept of indenting.  We learn to capitalize certain words, and not capitalize others.  I go up through the paragraph – writing a paragraph with a topic sentence and primary supports.

Who are your students?

They range from high school students to people in their fifties.  Many second-language students.  Lots of people who got off-course one way or another, through drugs, or through just a variety of difficulties in their life, so they didn’t get basic skills.  I like the people I work with.  I’ve never wanted to teach any advanced courses.  I like the sort of life-and-death teaching.  These are survival courses.  And I don’t like spoiled people.  I don’t like to do for people what they could do for themselves.  These people aren’t spoiled.  They’re not saying, “Entertain me.” They’re here to get what they need to have their gardening business.  Some are going ahead in school.  But for some…to get a job at Long’s.  To be able to write a note at the bank where they work.

I still admire Kay’s respectful and thoroughly practical outlook towards teaching the students who need it most.

Speaking of the desert — here’s the cover of Kay’s new book, out this month:  The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.

Wilcox examines a burned room at an Arizona cliff dwelling

Michael Wilcox, author of UC Press’ new The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact

“I always joke that Indians have been disappearing longer than almost any group in history. The presence of four and a half million Native Americans in the United States is a complete mystery to most people. There is no story that explains what they are still doing here.”

“Indians are depicted as horrified and fascinated by the presence of unfamiliar clothing and light skin and run in horror from their sight shouting, ‘Ooga-booga!’ It’s ridiculous. Native Americans were surrounded by people who were different from themselves. Europeans may have understood Indians as a single entity, but that is not how Native peoples defined themselves.”

(Full article is online here.)

A few months after Pearl Harbor, the United States Army, acting under the direction of F.D.R. and Congress, summarily rounded up the entire ethnic Japanese population on the West Coast.  Ultimately, about 120,000 people would be interned, many in makeshift tarpaper shacks that were cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

As Greg Robinson writes, the events remain “oddly obscure in popular American memory: most ordinary people I have spoken to have never even heard of them.”  Yet one distinguished historian urged him to choose another field of study – what more, he asked, could be said about the matter?

Robinson, author of last year’s A Tragedy of Democracy, thinks a lot had yet to be said: Previous studies have been “too limited in time and space” he told a gathering last week in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall.

Too limited in time, he said, because the Japanese-American community was under surveillance years before Pearl Harbor. The government began building concentration camps months before the war.  “It all points to a momentum,” he said, so that by the time the Japanese-American community was rounded up, “radical action seemed not just thinkable, but reasonable.”

Too limited in space, he said, because it was necessary to  “expand the discussion beyond the U.S.”  His study extends to similar actions in Mexico, which organized for the mass removal of its Mexicans months before it entered the war in May 1942, and Canada, where 3,000 or 4,000 out of 20,000 Japanese Americans were deported.

Greg Robinson

In America, rationalizations abounded.  Japanese Americans were told the internment was “for their own good.”  Yet before the implementation of the executive order 9066, there had been no discussion of protective custody.  And, as Robinson pointed out, the guns at the camps were pointed inward, to the Japanese Americans, not outward, towards any potential intruders.

“Almost everybody lost something, and some people lost everything,” said Robinson, also the author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans.

In a question-and-answer period, James Campbell, who had headed Brown University’s committee to consider black reparations, pointed out that so often “institutions of memory are processes of forgetting.” (Think of the late modest reparations offered for Japanese Americans a generation later.)  “Apologies, confrontation, memorialization should be a way to open the books instead of a way to close the books.”

Easy to moralize over the worst civil rights violation of modern U.S. history.  But we live in the post- 9/11 era – in an era of suicide bombers reducing airline passengers to the shoeless shuffle through security, and an army shrink opening fire in Fort Hood.  How to answer those who call for more vigilant security measures — even profiling? “If the community members feel on the spot and see that they are trusted, they will be the first to call the bad guys out.”  Japanese informed on those who might have posed a danger to the U.S., he said.

Since my article on Svetlana Broz, and also on Philip Zimbardo, I have been interested, as they are, on why some people rise to heroism under such circumstances — I told Robinson of my mother-in-law’s father, Col. Kendall Fielder, who resisted the orders for the confinement of Japanese Americans in Hawaii.  But Robinson already knew the story — he’d written about it in both his books.  What makes such people different?  Robinson had only one further comment on the subject:

“You never know who will have a moment of grace, and under what circumstances.”

Glen Worthey and Chris Bourg discuss the topic of the day: books. (Credit: L.A. Cicero)

The Stanford Humanities Center held its annual “book celebration” on Tuesday, toting up the numbers for scholarly output.

The total take for humanities the last year was 114 physical books (and the laminated covers of two books that were unable to join the gathering), 9 binders of sheet music representing one digital publication of the 9 symphonies of Beethoven, 2 music CDs, 1 movie, 1 video weblink, 1 link to the Nine Symphonies of Beethoven (which is the same as the 9 binders of sheet music), 1 folder of playbills, and other material related to over 50 productions of a Mark Twain play (including one play in Romanian, video included), 1 scroll, and 1 box with two birds.
The total weight of all of this material (excluding the birds in the box) was a record 140 pounds. The total number of pages is a whopping 41,345. And this of course doesn’t count the hours of musical and video material – or the scroll and the birds in the box…

Last year’s total was 70 books, weighing  78.25 pounds and including 20,883 pages. So this is nearly an 80 percent increase in weight – and a 98 percent increase in pages. However, if you correct (as the economists say) for Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 29 volume edition of the works of Mark Twain – the numbers adjust to 113 pounds and 29,314 pages — an increase of only 44 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

Stanford President John Hennessy was unpleasantly buoyed by the “incredibly prolific year,” nothing that “the humanities are truly extraordinary”:  “When the income goes down, the output goes up,” he crowed. After a little scholarly coughing around the room (much of it inaudible), German music scholar Stephen Hinton finally offered that “some of the projects may have been started in fatter times.”

In the spirit of university cost-cutting, the variety show style entertainment was “outsourced” to drama students, who had created to two sparky little songs on the perils of a life dedicated to the humanities.

Derek Miller, right, and Mason Flink on piano entertain the crowd with songs lampooning the humanities as subject and profession at the humanities hoedown. Local luminaries were on hand: That's author Marilyn Yalom in the red coat, Aron Rodrigue next to her, Matthew Tiews behind them. John Hennessy is over Aron's shoulder, Stephen Hinton, next to him, looks unamused in a gold-colored shirt. Charles Junkerman listens as he quaffs his chardonnay. Joseph Frank, author of the acclaimed 5-volume Dostoevsky series, sits with his walker; wife Marguerite whispers to him. Dagmar Logie also keeps him company. John Felstiner, author of "Can Poetry Save the Earth?" stands in the doorway. (Credit: L.A. Cicero)

Who puts out the 133 million blogs out there in the blogosphere?  According to this report from intac, 2/3ds are male, 75 percent are college educated, nearly half are Americans, and more than a third are professional journalists.  Three-quarters spend ten hours a week or less on their blogs.

Guilty on several counts … but we can’t recall being asked…