Unhappy!

Three months ago, after reading an essay in The New Yorker about a legal fight to gain personhood for elephants I blogged in support.  To me, it was a no-brainer.

Their brains are highly developed.  "Their huge brains are capable of complex thinking—including imitation, memory, coöperative problem-solving—and such emotions as altruism, compassion, grief, and empathy."

Altruism, compassion, empathy, all emotions lacking in many human beings, and yet they are merely animals while we humans are some superior species! 

If elephants can remember, imitate, work with groups, and show those emotions, don't they qualify to be recognized as persons?  If an abstract corporation can be legally recognized as a person, why not a real elephant?  Do corporations emote?  Do corporations die?  Do corporations give birth?  Elephants do them all, and more.

If fertilized human eggs are celebrated by half the country as having some kind of a personhood with rights,  don't elephants, and chimpanzees, and whales, and more deserve to be recognized as persons?  As non-human persons?

New York's highest court rejected the argument that the elephant, Happy, is a person and, thereby, allowed for the Bronx Zoo to continue to, well, harass and torture this highly intelligent and sentient animal.

The New York court's decision will certainly not be the last word on personhood for highly intelligent animals like elephants and chimpanzees.  The group that fought on behalf of Happy, The Nonhuman Rights Project, has filed a habeas corpus petition in the San Francisco Superior Court to require the Fresno Chaffee Zoo to come before the Court to attempt to justify the continued imprisonment of elephants Nolwazi, Amahle, and Vusmusi.  (The Fresno Chaffee Zoo has been rated as one of The 10 Worst Zoos for Elephants in North America.)

The science writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker that "every year the outlook for nonhuman species grows grimmer." Her essay is about "the burgeoning field of bioacoustics," which, as the portmanteau suggests, is the combination of biology and acoustics.  A field of study that is all about the production, dispersion, and reception of sounds in animals.  Even insects. 

Kolbert quotes a British documentary filmmaker Tom Mustill, who writes: “The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them.”

If science is what we need for a better treatment of animals, yes, bring more science.  But, we don't really need science as much as common sense.  It is foolish and arrogant to think that the cosmos is only about us humans, and that everything else--living and nonliving--are merely for us to use in any which way we deem fit.  Don't elephants have a right to be with other elephants in their own habitats?  Don't whales have a right to live in the deep waters and communicate with other whales?  And, if we are the most intelligent of all the animals, don't we have a responsibility to take care of the whales and elephants and rivers and forests and everything else?

Or, are we going to blindly believe that man rules over nature because "God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" and spread this message all over the world?

Does Happy the elephant deserve to be boxed in an enclosure in a zoo?

Reading Ulysses is an odyssey!

Let's see if this cartoon tickles you ... at least half as much as how funny it was to me:

Source

Maybe the book was James Joyce's Ulysses! ;)

How many people are like me who know about James Joyce's Ulysses but have never read the book in full?  I think I gave it three good attempts, but never progressed beyond the first couple of pages.  I do not exaggerate when I write that it was only a couple of pages that I read.  It is insanely difficult to go past a few pages of that book.  

It is the centenary year of the publication of Ulysses.  The author of this essay that marks the occasion writes that Joyce knew well that people like me will have problems reading the book:

It is a novel to learn from and obsess about, and you can spend a lifetime immersed in its pages. Nevertheless, many uninitiated readers view Joyce’s epic with paralyzing fear, something the author didn’t exactly allay with this admission in the mid-1920s: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” The stance is flippant, though in many ways, Joyce intended for the novel to be intimidating.

I am not sure if intimidating is the word that I would use, but I can live that description.

I am with this writer from a few years ago, who spoke the truth, during his graduate schooling, to his Joyce scholar professor: "If I had to choose between rereading Ulysses or Tarzan of the Apes, I'd go for Tarzan."

Yet, when we list our summer reading lists, even the wish lists, it is not the likes of Tarzan that we think of but the heavy ones like Ulysses.  What's going on?  I like this take:

Of course, we tackle more elaborate books in summer because we have more time on our hands, with the season’s longer days, the time off from work, and the promise of leisure in the air. But there’s also a psychological effect at work. From our childhood days, the coming of summer and the end of the school year meant the end of our “required” reading: no more homework, no more chapter assignments, no more mandatory synopses of The Scarlet Letter or historical summaries of “Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.” Come the solstice, many of us experienced something that will never disappear: the exhilaration of setting our own literary agenda—a private summer syllabus devoid of grades and fueled by love alone.

For once, it is not about the grades.  We want to read because it is not a required reading. It is love.

But the reality is that I rarely ever run into people anymore who want to talk about the books that they are reading or plan to read.  It is almost as if a vast majority does not read books anymore.  Neither Tarzan of the Apes nor Ulysses.  Neither here nor in the old country.  Maybe there really never was a book-reading culture and it was only a few who read?

The dystopian future that Ray Bradbury described in Fahrenheit 451, in which books were burnt because they triggered discomfort in people, has arrived.

On top of that, Republicans understand that preventing people--especially kids--from reading books that are critical will make it easier for them to govern over unthinking and brainwashed masses.  Don't you already see around you the loss of a thoughtful citizenry, who are incapable of discerning truth from misinformation and good from bad? 

Republicans are passing laws galore to ban books from schools and public libraries.  They are out to prove that Bradbury was correct in saying: “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them”.  Stop young people from reading altogether, or at least from reading the "wrong" books, and, as one of the Republican standard-bearers famously said in a different context, "Mission Accomplished"!

Maybe they should ban Ulysses again (yes, it was banned a long time ago) in order to make Joyce great again ;)

In a couple of days, it will be Bloomsday: The entire novel is set, I am told (keep in mind that I never progress beyond a couple of pages) on the events of one day--June 16th--in the life of its protagonist Leopold Bloom.  I am sure NPR will feature a few writers, academics, and readers, who will talk about the profundity of Ulysses and read their favorite sentences that are longer than paragraphs in most books.  I will listen to the report and chuckle thinking of the cartoon of a man dead on the beach while attempting to read a book that I imagine is Ulysses ;)

Not lost in translation

Daisy Rockwell suggests that we read translated fiction even if we think it might be difficult.  "Expand your mind! The language is alive! Translation brings you the world!"

Translated fiction is not new to me.  Through my formative years in India, I read quite a few Russian works that had been translated into the English language, which itself was a second language to me.  And, of course, I had to translate for myself British and American English to my version of Indian English ;)

I suppose the difficulty arises in translated stories from the fact that they are set in alien lands, with cultural norms and behaviors that are not what we are used to.  And the names too.  I recall the difficulty in keeping track of the Russian names with all the patronymic and the diminutives, and learning new words like samovars.  But, to me, this was also the attraction.  I was able to transport myself into a part of the world that was far away from me, that was very different from what I was used to, and understand and appreciate the complexity and charm of our lives.

Without translators and their translations, would I have been able to read and enjoy Haruki Murakami's short stories?  Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera?

A couple of years ago, reading Tamil works that were translated into English was quite an experience.  To read in the English language and to simultaneously think about the Tamil words that the author might have used in the original was a unique experience.  

After reading Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman, I emailed the translator, Aniruddhan Vasudevan, appreciating his work.  "Your translation works awesomely well. As troubling as the content is--Perumal Murugan's work on the human condition is one of the best in the Indian context--your translation was wonderful."  

Vasudevan replied: "That was my very first translation project, and I am acutely, and perpetually, aware of its shortcomings. So it really means a lot to receive this email from you when I am in the middle of reading through another translation manuscript, feeling both exhilarated and vulnerable!"

Later, it turned out that Vasudevan was collaborating with Archana Venkatesan on a huge project "to produce a complete, scholarly, fully annotated literary English translation of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa of Kampaṉ."  It is a small world in which the degrees of separation are often not that huge as we might think.

Which brings me to the work in translation that is next on my reading list.  Ties by Domenico Starnone.

I had no idea about this Italian author and perhaps would never have known him if not for Jhumpa Lahiri.  After critical and commercial success that rarely comes to authors, including a movie adaptation of her work, Lahiri packed it all up and moved to Italy.  And she started writing only in Italian.  Not in English or Bengali, which was the language spoken at home as she grew up here in the northeast.  She wanted a language of her own, and not something that was thrust on her as a result of the accident of birth.

I found, and continue to find, this mind-boggling.  Here I am struggling to keep up with Tamil and English that I have practically known all my life, and she just adopts a new language and becomes an expert at it?  

Lahiri also became a translator of Italian works.  A few months ago, she wrote in The New Yorker about an Italian author whose works interested her enough for her to translate too, and about the process of translating.

If an author who was unknown to me was good for Jhumpa Lahiri then who am I to think twice about it?  Unfortunately, the book that she talked about was not available in the local library.  So, I am off to reading Domenico Starnone's Ties, which is not translated by Lahiri.

What is your favorite fiction that was translated into English?