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It’s been a while since I’ve posted on any books from the Cahiers Series (a joint venture between Sylph Editions and the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris), but a couple of weeks back, I received two more in the post, another couple of delightful examples of intriguing essays (with a healthy dollop of art thrown in). Interestingly, though, the focus of the pair is very different. You see, while one takes to the air, the other is very much about the ground, even if both skilfully blend the personal with a slightly more abstract take.
*****
Michael Finke’s Flight is a book that combines light aircraft and Russian literature (which I bet is a sentence you never thought you’d read…). Academic and translator by day, Finke is a frustrated pilot in his spare time, and Flight brings together both his interests, and very well it does it, too.
His love of flight has been an obsession since childhood, and as well as being told of his early aerial experiences, we later join him in sneaking off to small airfields for lessons. Now the owner of a small plane (an old thing I wouldn’t be caught dead in…), his adventures continue:
Now the Pacer, its fabric sheenless, drips oil like the beater Ford Falcon I drove at sixteen, though it lacks the Falcon’s rust-holes in the floorboards and cigar-ash burns spotting the front seat. Two years ago, with the rear seats removed and packed with a tent, sleeping bag, a folding bike, my laptop for working on a translation of Pilnyak’s Russia in Flight, and many spare batteries, the Pacer took me camping in the Ozarks, over the Sandia mountains and Albuquerque, and onto the Zuni Indian Reservation in westernmost New Mexico: my bid at reaching other worlds.
p.13 (Sylph Editions, 2024)
It’s certainly a world away from his desk and lectures…
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Yet there is a connection between his professional and leisure activities, and that’s the book mentioned above, Boris Pilnyak’s Russia in Flight. It’s a 1926 work describing trips taken the previous year, ‘agit-flights’, in which writers visited the provinces, places where air travel was a mere pipe-dream. The main aim was to spread the revolutionary word, but Pilnyak enjoyed the experience just as much for the opportunities of flight it brought.
The two stories, of the lifelong love of air travel and of the Soviet writer, are skilfully interwoven. Finke waxes lyrical about flying, but acknowledges that it’s not without its dangers, and there are several examples of modern-day Icaruses, fliers getting too close to the sun. Alas, Pilnyak’s fate was very different, but just as tragic – let’s just say that in Russia, writing could be even more dangerous than flying…
*****
While I hadn’t heard of Finke before, the second Cahier was by a rather better-known writer. Here we have Jhumpa Lahiri, author and translator, exploring the second of these roles in Bone Into Stone. In her collection of essays, Translating Myself and Others, she provided insights into her work on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and here we get a more extended look at this work, and a focus on a certain idea.
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We begin with a particular passage in the book, the goddess Themis’ command to Pyrrha and Deucalion to ‘throw the Great Mother’s bones behind your backs!‘. After a spot of confusion, the pair gradually realise that there’s a metaphorical sense to the decree, and that what they should be throwing behind them are stones…
What follows is an extended look at tricky translation issues, with a heavy focus on etymology in several languages, particularly with regard to ‘stones’. There are stories of people being petrified (and the origins of that expression), musing on what it really means to get blood from a stone, and some more intriguing puzzles:
Not only does the word scoglio describe crucial elements of Mediterranean landscape (or rather, seascape) in the poem, but in Italian it also means a stumbling block, an obstacle. And this scoglio conundrum exemplifies one of the many figurative scogli encountered in the translation project – inherent to any translation project.
p.25 (Sylph Editions, 2024)
Yes, translators, as Lahiri herself says, must leave no stone unturned in their quest to produce a new text faithful to the original.
As was the case in Flight, Lahiri also supplements her writing work with more personal stories, and it’s little wonder she’s so obsessed with the etymology of stones given that she collects them whenever possible. Greece, Italy, Ireland the US – wherever she goes, she takes a piece of it back home with her. We see her writing with stones on her desk, something that helps her to ‘endure’, which is itself a word connected with stone and the idea of things being ‘hard’…
…but I’ll leave you to read about that for yourselves!
*****
As always, before wrapping up, I must mention the art accompanying the texts. These aren’t always my thing, but I quite liked today’s offerings (see the examples on both covers). In Flight, Rachael Plummer’s Jackson Pollock-esque pieces (with hidden aeroplanes!) are reminiscent in a way of those old The Stone Roses covers. Meanwhile, Bone Into Stone features Jamie Nare’s colourful swirls of paint, simple but compelling. The Cahiers are classic coffee-table books, lovely to read and to look at – the combination of text and art mean they’re well worth checking out, so I hope some of you will take the plunge Image may be NSFW.
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