Yesterday Mr. Sandwich returned to Columbia University for the first time since he was kicked out. It was six days before commencement, 1999, and Barnaby reasoned that the diplomas were already printed, but everyone was still on campus, and so it would be the perfect time to mix up a pot of wheat glue and post all over the walls a blistering attack on the undergraduate college in general and his department in particular. Alas, it did not occur to parsimonious Barnaby that the university would be willing to take two dollars worth of printing costs as a dead loss and simply throw his diploma away.
In any case, yesterday he snuck into Faculty House in a tan trench coat and enormous fedora. These were useful as he skulked around Ritu Menon, admiring her from afar. This Indian feminist publisher and essayist had won his devotion not only by her thrillingly passionate and cogent extemporaneous speaking at the panel on “Honor Killings” on Wednesday, but also because of how visibly uncomfortable she had been able to make the moderator, who came from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He asked about head scarves out in foreign places, and she returned to him with a question about new attacks on Roe v. Wade in this country, and let me tell you, the idea that the United States might not be in every last respect a shining beacon of human rights entitled to lecture and look down on other countries stuck in the man’s throat like an enormous clamshell. Ms. Menon also remarked that “patriarchy is the first globalization.” At a different panel on Thursday, Mr. Calasso denied that the term globalization had any use, and said that his only question was whether it had begun in the late neolithic or the early neolithic.
Still in Faculty House at Columbia, Richard Howard explained that he had begun to learn French from the divorced wife of his grandmother’s first cousin, when he was five years old, while driving down to Miami Beach; and that he had been delighted to have occasion once, when asked by the French president how he had come to learn the language, to reply, “Dans une voiture, mon général, entre Cleveland, Ohio, et Miami Beach, Florida.”
Still further in Faculty House, after hopping back and forth between the PEN reception and a Columbia reception in the next room, drinking red wine, and trading a few Japanese remarks with Boris Akunin, Barnaby went back upstairs to the panel “Mixed Media: Writers on Their Languages.” Agi Mishol spoke about the poetic concentration of the Hebrew language, a result not only of thousands of years of layered connotation, but of the language’s syntax; Dubravka Ugresic talked about the political division of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, and maybe soon even Montenegrin; Boris Akunin spoke about the situation of the writer in Russia, where they respect literature; and Yiyun Li read a piece of fiction about being more comfortable expressing emotion in a second language. Barnaby was reminded of a long, painful, earnest conversation in his tiny freshman-year dormitory room, sitting on his bed with a girl, insisting on speaking in French because he was too uncomfortable in English. All that said, the high point was hearing the writers read their work in their respective languages: Mishol a poem in Hebrew; Bernardo Atxaga read poems in Spanish and in Basque, which indeed sounds like nothing else; Raymond Federman read a passage from a novel written in both French and English; and Hwang Sok-Yong read a passage from a novel in brilliant and exciting Korean.
“Here’s what we should do,” Barnaby said, standing on a chair after everyone had left. “Listen! Next year, let’s get together a reading where we try to read in as many languages as possible. Maybe everyone could read a translation of the same passage; or else maybe everyone could read from their national epics or scriptures or famous novels. A Finn from the Kalevala, a Japanese from the Genji, and so on. We could get someone from the Vatican to read the Aeneid in Latin and someone from Columbia to read from the Gilgamesh. It could go on all day, with people coming in and out, and a nice smoked fish platter in the back of the room.” Barnaby began to foam at the mouth a little bit. “It could go on for the whole festival! An endless marathon! There are enough people in New York. How many Polynesian languages could we get? What about co-sponsorship by the United Nations? No! No! I am an idiot! Obviously they have to read the biblical passage about the Tower of Babel! The Tower of Babel in two hundred and forty seven languages! Has the Bible been translated into Sanskrit? Or no—no! Someone will read the part in the Upanisads about the dismemberment of the primal cosmic man! Yes! And in Greek something about the language of Barbarians! And who’ll read in Old English? Beowulf, for the love of Christ! Nursery rhymes! Fairy tales! Proverbs! Holy mother of God, proverbs, proverbs in the world’s thousand languages!” Barnaby shut his eyes, turned red, screamed at the top of his voice his favorite Welsh proverb, and then fainted dead to the floor. Gorau chwedl gwirionedd!
In any case, yesterday he snuck into Faculty House in a tan trench coat and enormous fedora. These were useful as he skulked around Ritu Menon, admiring her from afar. This Indian feminist publisher and essayist had won his devotion not only by her thrillingly passionate and cogent extemporaneous speaking at the panel on “Honor Killings” on Wednesday, but also because of how visibly uncomfortable she had been able to make the moderator, who came from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He asked about head scarves out in foreign places, and she returned to him with a question about new attacks on Roe v. Wade in this country, and let me tell you, the idea that the United States might not be in every last respect a shining beacon of human rights entitled to lecture and look down on other countries stuck in the man’s throat like an enormous clamshell. Ms. Menon also remarked that “patriarchy is the first globalization.” At a different panel on Thursday, Mr. Calasso denied that the term globalization had any use, and said that his only question was whether it had begun in the late neolithic or the early neolithic.
Still in Faculty House at Columbia, Richard Howard explained that he had begun to learn French from the divorced wife of his grandmother’s first cousin, when he was five years old, while driving down to Miami Beach; and that he had been delighted to have occasion once, when asked by the French president how he had come to learn the language, to reply, “Dans une voiture, mon général, entre Cleveland, Ohio, et Miami Beach, Florida.”
Still further in Faculty House, after hopping back and forth between the PEN reception and a Columbia reception in the next room, drinking red wine, and trading a few Japanese remarks with Boris Akunin, Barnaby went back upstairs to the panel “Mixed Media: Writers on Their Languages.” Agi Mishol spoke about the poetic concentration of the Hebrew language, a result not only of thousands of years of layered connotation, but of the language’s syntax; Dubravka Ugresic talked about the political division of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, and maybe soon even Montenegrin; Boris Akunin spoke about the situation of the writer in Russia, where they respect literature; and Yiyun Li read a piece of fiction about being more comfortable expressing emotion in a second language. Barnaby was reminded of a long, painful, earnest conversation in his tiny freshman-year dormitory room, sitting on his bed with a girl, insisting on speaking in French because he was too uncomfortable in English. All that said, the high point was hearing the writers read their work in their respective languages: Mishol a poem in Hebrew; Bernardo Atxaga read poems in Spanish and in Basque, which indeed sounds like nothing else; Raymond Federman read a passage from a novel written in both French and English; and Hwang Sok-Yong read a passage from a novel in brilliant and exciting Korean.
“Here’s what we should do,” Barnaby said, standing on a chair after everyone had left. “Listen! Next year, let’s get together a reading where we try to read in as many languages as possible. Maybe everyone could read a translation of the same passage; or else maybe everyone could read from their national epics or scriptures or famous novels. A Finn from the Kalevala, a Japanese from the Genji, and so on. We could get someone from the Vatican to read the Aeneid in Latin and someone from Columbia to read from the Gilgamesh. It could go on all day, with people coming in and out, and a nice smoked fish platter in the back of the room.” Barnaby began to foam at the mouth a little bit. “It could go on for the whole festival! An endless marathon! There are enough people in New York. How many Polynesian languages could we get? What about co-sponsorship by the United Nations? No! No! I am an idiot! Obviously they have to read the biblical passage about the Tower of Babel! The Tower of Babel in two hundred and forty seven languages! Has the Bible been translated into Sanskrit? Or no—no! Someone will read the part in the Upanisads about the dismemberment of the primal cosmic man! Yes! And in Greek something about the language of Barbarians! And who’ll read in Old English? Beowulf, for the love of Christ! Nursery rhymes! Fairy tales! Proverbs! Holy mother of God, proverbs, proverbs in the world’s thousand languages!” Barnaby shut his eyes, turned red, screamed at the top of his voice his favorite Welsh proverb, and then fainted dead to the floor. Gorau chwedl gwirionedd!
posted by Will Heinrich | 3:00 AM
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