Glass Soup, Part One
On translation, _Adaptation_, and the perceived wisdom of big green trucks in German
Glass Soup, by Jonathan Carroll.
Book 1.
I don’t remember when I bought this book, but I remember why I did. The author, Jonathan Carroll, also wrote a book called The Wooden Sea, which I read in Madrid. This was back during the peak of my Spanish-reading powers, so I read it in Spanish. There the title was Mar de Madera, and I’m pretty sure I bought it for the cover, which is pretty cool:
Later, after I moved to LA, I used to love going under the Santa Monica Pier, and took a lot of pictures there. I’m just now realizing that I probably associated those images with this cover:
Around that same time, I started working on a big idea for a story that ends with a scene of a single tall tree standing alone in an underground sea, reaching up to a small circle of sky, the only hole in the roof of an enormous cave. (That story is called And We Shall Have No End, and I would still like to write it someday.) I remember knowing that this image was inspired by the pillars of the Santa Monica Pier, but until now I never connected those to the cover of The Wooden Sea.
I guess the lesson here is “Sure, maybe don’t judge books by their covers, but do buy books by them.”
I don’t remember much about The Wooden Sea, except for that I liked it a lot and that it involved a protagonist who was a small-town sheriff (or something?) and that he finds a dog who is important to the plot. In the Spanish version, the dog’s name was “Vertuoso”, and I remember looking this up in my trusty Larousse Concise Spanish-English Dictionary (definitely one of the books I’ve touched the most, if not the reverse), and coming up empty. Later, I found out that, in the English version, the dog’s name was “Old Vertue”, with an “e”, which would explain the made up Spanish name. I like that some English to Spanish translator got to spitball different names in Spanish that would change the almost-but-not-quite-English dog name into it’s almost-but-not-quite-Spanish equivalent.
A book that I did read (unlike Glass Soup, which I promise we will get to in a moment) and also really liked is Umberto Eco’s Mouse or Rat?: Translation as Negotation. I think of that subtitle a lot, both in thinking about literal language-to-language translation and in thinking about adaptations. I like the idea that there is a central tension in translation: translation is to some degree always a betrayal. Knowing that makes the process a lot more exciting, and forgiving.
Thinking about translation actually does bring us to Glass Soup, because a worry that I have in starting this book is that maybe part of what I liked so much about reading Mar de Madera is that I was reading it in Spanish. Partly there’s the thrill of (at least partial) understanding, and partly I think it’s that everything sounds smarter in a language that isn’t yours from birth. My dad once had what he described as “his most meaningful conversation in German” with a toddler he met at a dinner party in Göttingen (presumably the toddler’s parents were hosting and he wasn’t invited to the party separately, but I don’t know for sure), which went like this:
My dad (pointing at the toddler’s toy truck): Das ist ein Lastwagen.
German toddler (nodding soberly): Ja. Es ist ein grüner Lastwagen.
My dad (nodding like “I see your point”): Ja. Es ist ein großer grüner
Lastwagen.
German toddler: Ja.
I think what else I liked about Mar de Madera is the way that it married the quotidian and the fantastic. As a kid, I read a lot of what gets called “high fantasy”, but I’d never read any magical realism and didn’t know too much about it when I got to this book. Carroll’s name doesn’t end in a vowel, so I don’t think he ever got lumped in with magical realists. Later, I think the name “slipstream” started being used and maybe he would get included there, though I once read an essay that argued that “slipstream” was just a way of keeping respectable “literary fiction” authors out of the dreaded “sci-fi & fantasy” ghetto: you can have your Lethem and read him, too.
Anyway, probably part of what I liked about Mar de Madera is that it is one of the first examples I experienced of this fantastic/realistic approach to storytelling, whatever we are calling it. There’s always the danger that return trips to any well will prove less than satisfying.
An example: I recently bought The Monster at the End of This Book for a toddler and the meta-thing still hellaworks for four-year-olds and Grover, but by the time I got to Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation in college, I was like “using a deus ex machina to resolve your plot is still hacky even if you wink at it, plus now the winking makes it dishonest and superior, like hipsters who talk about ‘how’ ‘much’ ‘they’ ‘totally’ ‘LOVE’ ‘professional’ ‘wrestling’. Holding something you find both attractive and embarrassing at arm’s length doesn’t innoculate you from contagion, it just signposts your own inadequacies, you accurately insecure fuck.”
So anyway, a worry here is that reading this Jonathan Carroll book a) in English, and b) after having more experience with the general storytelling approach may be a one-two set-up for diminishing returns. We shall see.
Overall, I’m excited about getting started (thanks for coming along with me, if you do!) And if I hate it, I can always try to track down a Spanish version of Mar de Madera. I don’t remember much about it, anyway.
